Visual Studio 2005 beta 2

I was asked to do a prototype of a new UI based on new features from VS 2005. I started with the thinking that it should be relatively simple to upgrade stuff from .Net framework 1.1 up. We actually had a good experience with VS 2002 beta 2. Boy was I wrong this time. Things I encountered include:

- the new partial classes with aspx pages blows up the previous implementations of inherited code behind. See this blog entry.
- custom controls not showing up. Haven't even logged this yet.
- using master pages changes how controls are hooked up under the Page object. I always thought the FindControl method goes iterative into the hierarchy, but I guess I was wrong.
- XML serialization problems with datasets. A patch is needed for framework 1.1 but not available yet.

So my advice to the reader is that check early and don't assume anything.

Mark's blog

Comment from this blog:

"Nor did anyone blog the conversations that took place among the thousands of attendees as they interacted during sessions, labs, meals, etc."

I agree the interactions are useful if you are there, but even attending doesn't guarantee you are to be at the right place to participate or listen in to these conversations. I feeling I got after going to PDC 2001 and 2003 is that it is like drinking water from a firehose. There must be a better way for these interactions to happen.

PDC was good for me in 2001 and 2003, but that doesn't mean I will be going to the one this year.

PDC 2005

track back from Robert Scoble's blog:

Having attended PDC's 2001 and 2003 I can't really find any good reason to justify going. Whidbey? Read quite a bit and I am waiting for beta 2. Unless there are late additions like Indigo into Whidbey I don't think I'm going.

scalability

Comment from Larry Osterman's weblog:

"you can't speed up hard disk copies by throwing more threads or overlapped I/O at the problem, because file copy speed is ultimately limited by the physical speed of the underlying media - and with only one spindle, it can only read or write to the drive one operation at a time."

I thought with RAID, byte striping, SAN and the like you can't really assume what your underlying physical reality is anymore. I once heard this from a technical staff of a high-end RAID provider: "that anything you can throw into the SCSI bus, their RAID box will be able to write". Not really sure if it were true but their disks are really fast.

Compression on IIS 6

Since this blog is closed for comments I have to add mine here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2004/01/12/57916.aspx

I was looking for ways to compress javascripts and google just keep return to the tool that does the metabase editing. Turns out the MSDN library has the description for the metabase entries. The HTML equivalent of what I've read is here:
www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/ iis/6/all/proddocs/en-us/ref_mb_hcfileextensions.mspx

IIS has htm, html and txt turned on for static compression so I've added js and css.

One more thing, turning it on does wonders. I am doing performance testing a test cycle without compression involves around 7000 packets. Turn it on make it drop to about 3500.

VB or C#

A colleague raised this question again. My answer now is that I am bilingual and doesn't really prefer one over the other from a language point of view. However, the VB IDE is more feature rich than C#. e.g. background compilation and warnings, shift f2 (goto definition) works. That's why I prefer VB over C# now. I expect when Whidbey comes out the field is even more level than it is now. Comments?

IDE features (or the lack of)

One of the pains of using Visual Studio 2003 is the lack of multi-monitor support. If you feel the same way go here and give some feedback:
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2004/05/18/134295.aspx?Pending=true
Recently I have been reading code from multiple files and was trying to refactor them. One of my monitors is 21" and the other is 17". So expanding the IDE window to both monitors would not work. It would be really nice to drag a code window onto the second monitor and now you can cut and paste whatever you want. Note that I said CUT and not COPY. I am not a fan of COPYing code!

hello world

I wonder if anybody will read this... if you do please send me a email at mhywan2@yahoo.ca