Archives
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Atlanta .NET User Group and DataGrid Girl
I made it to last night's Atlanta .NET User Group meeting, as well as having dinner with Marcie (aka DataGrid Girl). I don't get to these things very often -- I think this was my third total and second in the last year or so. I was impressed with the size of the group (96) and the interaction that actually occurred amongst all us geeks. Marcie did a great job -- I learned how to use the datagrid without enabling its viewstate! Steven Heckler also gave a short talk on Regular Expressions which had to be the best explanation I've ever heard or seen. There were also a good number of job announcements, which appeared to interest many attendees. I was also pleasantly surprised at the number of people that knew who I was and wanted to talk to me -- and all I did was sit quietly in the back. Anyhow, if last night was typical, then I would recommend attending if you are in Atlanta, although I still prefer going home to be with my family.
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Are Many ThirdParty WebControls to Heavy?
So what do you think of 3rd party webcontrols, like Infragistics, ComponentOne, Farpoint, etc? We use Infragistics here at PRG, which is certainly a well-written set of controls. The problem is that these things have to be so flexible to appeal to the largest number of customers that they are often way too heavy! I was using their tree-view control (they call it WebNavigator) for a little while to easily display my data with dhtml behavior and it worked fine. All the sudden when I had to add some more dynamic behavior in their client-side javascript I found that it took a couple of seconds or more to update! My solution was to port my own rather simplistic tree-view control that I use on my site and the dynamic behavior is now instantaneous. My code is certainly not as flexible as Infragistics, but it is incredibly fast due to its simplicity. Similarly, while all these web-grids have cool features, they are also just too slow to use in anything but the simplest cases. Their client-side sorting is way too slow for even medium sized resultsets, and once you turn to server-side you have now opened up the whole viewstate issue. Instead, I end up doing custom paging and sorting through a stored procedure that only returns the page of data needed since this performs optimally. But this leaves the grid being just another too-heavy pretty GUI control that really has nothing beyond a simple repeater. So what does everyone else think about these super 3rd party webcontrols that have something for everyone?
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One Month at New Job with PRG-Schultz
I've been at my new job at PRG-Schultz for 5 weeks now, or a day or two past a month if you prefer. Things are going very well, culminating in a very high profile demo yesterday in front of the CIO, VP, and other important folks. This was an ASP.NET web application, with a SQL Server backend, that has a rather significant dynamic user interface. Its also the first application based on a new GUI specification that was put together by a leader in the industry. Of course, everything worked flawlessly -- I can't stand it when presentations are full of bugs so I make sure I do it right! I suppose that's easier said than done, and I don't want to sound cocky, but I really do think that many people just don't think bugs are a big deal. So lets get this straight if you are doing demos or presentations -- bugs are a big deal and you should work hard to avoid them. This may mean you simply don't give into the impulse to add something new at the last minute, but its something that you must keep as a high priority no matter what. OK, end of rant.
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ActiveReports, Crystal, or Other for ASP.NET
We need to make some decisions about reporting tools for .NET, including but not limited to ASP.NET. I know ActiveReports is very popular, and of course Crystal is common since its included with VS.NET. I've personally never been a big Crystal fan, but I haven't used it in a long time either, so maybe its improved. Anyone have any thoughts or experiences with these, or other, reporting tools for .NET. I would be especially interested in developer vs. end-user customizations, and licensing issues.