February 2004 - Posts
http://www.ftponline.com/weblogger/forum.aspx?ID=1&DATE=02/23/2004
Got the article through a great friend. Don't know if he wants his name here so he'll remain nameless. However, it is worth mentioning my friend's argument which is the strongest I've heard. His arguments are:
- “What does that teach children? Go to college and come out with lots of debt and no job?!?!”
- “Where does it stop? Accounts abroad can learn US tax laws and do your federal income taxes....” etc
While I ordinarily set AutoGenerateColumns = false on ASP.NET DataGrids, I finally found a pretty good use for them. I had a result set that was coming back with a variable number of columns all of which need to be display. I thought what a perfect use for the auto-generating columns but low and behold I discovered the documentation says:
Note Explicitly declared columns may be used in conjunction with auto-generated columns. When using both, explicitly declared columns will be rendered first, followed by the auto-generated columns. Auto-generated columns are not added to the Columns collection.
The hell kind of garbage is that?!?! Why aren't Auto-generated columns added to the Columns collection?!?!? Shouldn't they abide by the same rules other columns do? After all, aren't they just BoundColumn's? All I wanted to do was simply set the DataFormatString property on them. What an annoyance! Instead I had to check the number of columns in the IDataReader using the FieldCount property and then programmatically creating each column and set the format. But then what is the point of the AutoGenerateColumns property? Has anyone ever used it in a real world application? Oh well.....
Today was officially my last day working at Bernstein Investment Research and Management, a unit of Alliance Capital Management L.P. Technically I guess I was an Alliance Capital employee but I mainly worked on Bernstein's proprietary applications. I was hired straight out of college to work for them. The work environment was awesome and I learned a lot. My co-workers were extremely helpful and some in particular really helped push my career along and helped motivate me. Probably the most valuable thing I was taught is that you have to read to stay on top of technology. I actually recently read something interesting in The Art of UNIX Programming, available for free here,
“... 50% of what one knows becomes obsolete over every 18 months.”
It's not always easy to keep up with your reading but I've learned that sometimes knowing something exists or is available to you can save you more time than anything else.
Next Tuesday, I start working for Morgan Stanley. I think it's a career decision that will prove to be very rewarding and helpful to my future in general. Plus, I can take public transportation to get there instead of driving across congested bridges. Anyway, hopefully, I can take what I've learned with me and succeed in my new position. Good luck to my old co-workers and company. I know Lew Sanders will do wonders for you.
Today I attended the NYC session of ASP.NET Exposed presented by Rob Howard. While the “sneak preview” of Whidbey was very cool and very interesting (I can't wait to get my hands on it now) the presentation, in general, was introductory. If you are a beginner and would like a taste of what ASP.NET can show you, I highly recommend you go because you can definitely check out some demos and grab a couple of tips. I would not recommend anyone who as any experience with ASP.NET to attend any more than the Whidbey part of the presentation which amounts to about the last half hour. (You can also pick up a copy of Microsoft® ASP.NET Coding Strategies with the Microsoft ASP.NET Team.)
While I'm on this topic I'd like to express a major criticism I have with most presentations that have to do with ADO.NET and VS.NET. Sure it's neat but most, if not all, developers who are attending these presentations are not going to use the drag and drop DataSets, Connections, etc. We build data access layers.
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