Matt Watson

Silverlight wish list

Matt Watson — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:50:46 GMT

After using Silverlight for a couple months, here is my wish list:

1. SQL Reporting Services viewer in Silverlight.
2. Ability to print from Silverlight. (See #1)
3. 3rd party components that have default styles and/or designers that make it easier to work with the components. Right now you have to figure it all out in xaml...

Matt Watson
Automotive Software

Autotmotive CRM Software in Silverlight

Matt Watson — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:45:56 GMT

Just an update on our experiences with Silverlight...

We have been using Silverlight since SL2 Beta 2 came out and so far it has been great to work with. We have noticed a lot of weird quirky things with Visual Studio, Blend, exception handling, and all sorts of things. But all in all it has been great to work with and our new Silverlight based software is pretty wicked. We look forward to what Silverlight 3 will look like after they have worked out all the kinks. Right now we are paying the price sometimes for being on the bleeding edge.

Automotive CRM Software

.NET 3.5 Framework

Matt Watson — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 04:46:38 GMT

Glad to say we have upgraded all of main software products to .NET 3.5. So far we have been very impressed with LINQ and WCF. We look forward to play with WWF, WPF, and Silverlight in 2008.

VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up Available

gEEk — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 04:33:08 GMT

Just want to make sure everyone saw this from Scott Gu today

One of the things we are trying to do with VS 2008 is to more frequently release public patches that roll-up bug-fixes of commonly reported problems. Today we are shipping a hot-fix roll-up that addresses several issues that we've seen reported with VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 web scenarios.

Hot Fix Details

You can download this hot-fix roll-up for free here (it is a 2.6MB download). Below is a list of the issues it fixes:

HTML Source view performance

Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
“View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.

Design view performance

Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations.

HTML editing

Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page.

JavaScript editing

When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds.
JavaScript IntelliSense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing.
JavaScript IntelliSense does not work when jQuery is used.

Web Site build performance

Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.

Installation Notes

For more information on how to download and install the above patch, please read this blog post here. In particular, if you are using Windows Vista with UAC enabled, make sure to extract the patch to a directory other than "c:\" (otherwise you'll see an access denied error).

To verify that this hot-fix patch successfully installed, launch VS 2008 and select the Help->About menu item. Make sure that there is an entry that says ‘Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU (KB946581)’.

If you ever want to remove the patch, go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and select “Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB946581” under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (or Visual Web Developer Express 2008) and click “Remove".

Summary

Obviously it goes without saying that we would have liked to have shipped without any bugs. Hopefully this hot-fix enables you to quickly solve them if you are encountering them. Thank you to those who helped us identify the causes of these issues, as well as to the group of customers who have helped us verify the above fixes the last few weeks.

Note: If you do encounter issues with VS 2008 features for web development in the future, I recommend always asking for help in the VS 2008 Forum on www.asp.net. The VS Web Tools team actively monitors this forum and can provide help.

Hope this helps,

Scott

ASPNETDB.MDF - Users

gEEk — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 15:03:00 GMT

Ok so I'm trying to use the new and cool users, roles management. Works great on my computer of course. Deploying it was another matter...

The key is installing SQL Server 2005 Express on the server and having the correct file permissions on the App_Code folder for NETWORK SERVICE and ASPNET. Was painful to figure out.

This site has a lot of good info:

http://forums.asp.net/ShowPost.aspx?PageIndex=3&PostID=904462

ASP.NET 2.0

gEEk — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 11:53:00 GMT

I must say.. it pretty damn cool to create a whole little application with just 4 lines of code...

Master pages for consistent page template look and feel

Treeview menu

Breadcrumbs navigation

Sitemap

Data grid view

Details view to edit the record

All SQL connectivity to select, edit, update, delete the records.

....

...

ASP.NET 2.0 ROCKS

ASP.NET Professional 2.0 Book

gEEk — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 19:21:00 GMT

Just picked up the book at the local Borders in Kansas.

I decided to start at page one and literally go straight through it. I'm finding it very useful to pick up on the enhancements to 2.0. The little tweaks here and there.

Finding simple but amazingly cool stuff like the fact you can do:

TextBox.Focus();

Who knows if I would have ever known this without thumbing through the book.

I have been doing ASP.NET development exclusively since it came out and I'm still finding this book to be very useful as a refresher and especially for it's insights to the 2.0 changes. There are a lot of little changes...

So that said I'd recommend this book for children (developers) of all ages (experience).

Thanks to Bill Evjen and all those who worked on the book.

ASP.NET 2.0 Wizard control

gEEk — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 19:13:00 GMT

First off I want to say I love this thing.

Second off I want to say WTF were you thinking Microsoft?

If I'm editing Step 3 in the VS.NET designer and then go run my app.. it starts me on Step 3. WTF?

The designer keys off the ActiveStepIndex which is also what it keys off of at runtime. Need a second property or something so that when your editing it in the designer you don't have to remember to set it back to step 1 every single @#$)(@#)$O@# time.

This will cause migrations issues everywhere... don't say I didn't tell you so.

Active Reports for .NET 1.1 & VS2005

gEEk — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 08:34:00 GMT

After I installed VS2005 the Active Reports designer didn't work anymore. So I had to reinstall it. Now the designer works.

But now when I try to run a .NET 2.0 app that uses a referenced Active Reports 1.1 dll I get some weird stack uneven p/invoke error when trying to export to PDF. I guess they are going to make me throw down $600 or whatever to buy Active Reports for .NET 2.0.

Anyone else seen this?

Podcasting

gEEk — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 09:04:00 GMT

I just saw the best practical use of podcasting...

Students everywhere will now be able to drink and party all night long and not have to worry about missing classes. Then can simply grab the podcast from that day's class.... Congrats... student attendance will be at an all time low.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/chi-0510200213oct20,0,4320824.story?coll=ny-leadnationalnews-headlines

Maybe I can do that with work? Skip out on boring meetings and pretend to listen to the podcast later.

AJAX

gEEk — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 10:38:00 GMT

Web programmers and housewives everywhere use AJAX!

Windows Mobile 5.0 & Activesync

gEEk — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 22:56:00 GMT

I just got a new Dell X51 with Mobile 5.0 on it. Overall not much about the OS is really any different. Slightly different UI style but everything is essentially the same from a user perspective.

Activesync 4.0 is a little different. The PDA actually has a “Local Area Connection” entry in the computer's network settings. So maybe it's Internet connectivity will be more reliable now. It also didn't ask a bunch of stupid questions when I went to install our software on to it.

Random thoughts

gEEk — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 15:04:00 GMT

//I found this somewhere... gotta love it

Person Me = New Person();
while (Me.Alive)
{
try
{
Me.Drink(Alcohol.Any);
}
catch (HeaveException h)
{
Me.PrayToCeramicGod();
Me.Promise("Never again");
}
}
Me.Dispose();

AJAX w/.NET Web services

gEEk — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 15:17:00 GMT

From all my research this is the best tool I have seen for AJAX:

http://www.codeproject.com/soap/JavaScriptProxy_01.asp

Creates a java script proxy object of a .NET web service. It is pretty slick and very easy to implement.

Highly recommended

XML + Mozilla

gEEk — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 14:57:00 GMT

Can some PLEASE tell me how to simply get the value from an xml element? Seems pretty simple but for some reason the Mozilla idiots didn't make it common sense. Stupid stuff like this gives me a headache!

This works in IE:
obj.childNodes[i].text

None of these work in Mozilla browsers when using the DOMParser object:
obj.childNodes[i].text
obj.childNodes[i].value
obj.childNodes[i].innerText
obj.childNodes[i].nodeValue
...

HELP :-)