Category Archives: dotNET

Loading WinForms designer and a new form of dll hell in VS2005

dotNET

I have a VS2005 app that has assemblies with inherited forms and classes and there is something not quite right in my references that makes these particular assemblies very unstable.

This is a project that is being ported from VS2003.

When trying to load the form up in the designer, I frequently get “Could not load file or assembly” with a reference to a class file that has nothing to do with UI. And then I cannot access the design surface.

The referenced assembly is also referenced in the class from which the winform inherits. Sometimes I change the references (in both assemblies) to point to the compiled dll and then it’s working. Then somehow it breaks again. Sometimes, then pointing them both to the project, rather than the dll might fix this but maybe not. And I might battle it for a while then just have to walk away from the computer with my hands up in the air.

It’s very frustrating. Sometimes I can get away without having to have access to the design surface for whatever it is that I am doing. But I sure wish I could figure out what the heck the problem is, why it prevents me from loading up my winform and solve it once and for all.

Update: Today, this particular one was solved finally by referencing the DLL and not the project of the class that the form was inheriting from. If I had the time to try to figure out WHY, I would, but I know have to get back to working on this project.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Attributes with property values in Visual Basic

dotNET

This got me once again. It’s really hard to remember!

When you do declarative programming in Visual Basic and you use attributes that have properties, you need to set the values on those properties. VB does this in a funny way.

Here is a C# attribute for BP (Basic Profile) Conformance in a Web Service:

[WebServicesBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)]

Setting the value of the ConformsTo property is a normal looking equals (=) operator.

But with VB, look at how we set the property

<WebServicesBinding(ConformsTo: = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)>

We put a colon in front of the equals sign.

This is not new to VB2005, but attributes are something I so rarely use (but will be using more and more as I do more WCF programming) that I forget from one year to the next.

I have never been able to find an explanation of why this is and only know it because I get a compiler error when I forget it ("named argument expected") and I have to see another example of it’s use somewhere before I realize it. Intellisense doesn’t give me a helping hand with it (as far as I have seen in vs2003 or vs2005). So, perhaps by writing this blog post, I can commit this to memory finally!

 

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Next Vermont Software Developer Alliance Meeting: Wed Jan 18th

dotNET

Open Membership Discussion

How can VTSDA Move Forward and Benefit the Membership?

VTSDA has been around since late 2004. Since this time we have had many monthly meetings, but what else has VTSDA accomplished? What do we currently have in the works? What else should we be thinking about? Who would like to get more involved to help us move forward?

Come to this meeting to have a voice in the future of VTSDA.

Wed Jan 18th, 12- 2pm, Ethan Allen Club Burlington

Luncheon Meeting: VSTDA Members: $15, Non-Members: $20

More information at www.vtsda.org

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Getting Started with ASP.NET 2.0: Some Resources

dotNET

At the Vermont.NET meeting (our Visual Studio Community Launch) Laura covered some of the most interesting of the UI basics that are new in ASP.NET 2.0. There were a lot of attendees to this meeting that are brand new to ASP.NET 2.0 and want to learn more. A really good starting point is the www.asp.net website. On there you can find a Guided Tour of Visual Web Developer 2005 Express, which is basically the web development only portion of Visual Studio – and therefore a fantastic place to get started with ASP.NET 2.0. Also, the ASP.NET Developer Center is a great launching pad, to find video training, the quickstarts, even a link to getting a free 3 hour training CD from AppDev.

There are amazing resources on the web.

There are also plenty of ASP.NET 2.0 books coming out that are great for beginners.

Bipin Joshi’s Developer’s Guide to ASP.NET 2.0 is aimed at ASP.NET 1.x developers moving to ASP.NET 2.0, but covers everything, not just “what’s new”.

From Wrox: Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 from Dave Sussman and a crew of excellent writers.

The ASP.NET v2 The Beta Version, which we raffled off when Rob Howard was at the group in November and also at Monday’s meeting, is pretty close to being current with the release version.

Professional ASP.NET 2.0 another WROX book by my buddies Bill Evjen, Farhan Muhammed and more!

Pro ASP.NET 2.0 from O’Reilly.

Murach has an ASP.NET 2.0 Upgraders Guide. One for C# and one for VB.

O’Reilly has ASP.NET 2.0 A Developer’s Notebook is another “what’s new in 2.0” book that has  50 hands on projects. They have a few other asp.net 2 books as well.

Laura also posted resources from her session here.

This is just a VERY SHORT list to get you started in case you don’t know where to turn next. There are so many online resources. In addition to the official microsoft ones above, there are many community sites like www.ASPAlliance.com and www.ASPAdvice.com. There are forums galore and of course blogs blogs blogs.

Community Visual Studio Launch at Vermont.NET

dotNET

Wow! We had 41 people at our meeting last night. That’s a lot for our small group. As Dave reports, the room was jam packed.

Laura did a great job with the presentation on ASP.NET 2.0. Boy, it was some styling powerpoint Microsoft gave the community launch team to use!! What was great about her talk was that she didn’t dwell on the slides and went right into gobs of demos. She showed the group master pages, profiling, declarative data binding and the controls that make membership really easy to do. There are a lot of people who this is all brand new to (I would say 80% of the attendees probably hadn’t seen any of this stuff yet). I learned a bunch too as I have focused on the framework stuff and not as much on the “look, ma! No code!” tools.

One thing that makes me extra proud of our little community is the fact that we far exceed the average percentage of women attendees. 25% of our group last night was women.

In addition, I believe from a show of hands (and new faces) that there were 10 people there who had never been to a VTdotNET meeting before. It’s great to have some kind of lure to get them there. Most often, once they attend a meeting and realize how much the group has to offer and what a tight (yet welcoming) community it is, they continue to attend meetings.

We still have to figure out how we are going to burn 200 DVDs to distribute. But since we are doing part 2 of the launch next month as a joint meeting with the VTSQL group,and giving away another 5 VS2005 Pro/SQL Server 2005 licenses, I expect most of those people to return and hopefully we will have it solved.

Lori McKinney from the Huntsville Alabama group spent her christmas vacation burning 700 dvds for her group. I won’t be doing this, that’s for sure. I just don’t have the time. We are trying to find a local company with one of those machines that you can load a stack of dvds into and let it just spit out copies.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

VS Launch Party at Vermont.NET tonight

dotNET

I’m off to Burlington for the January VTdotNET meeting where we are having our INETA Community Launch event. Laura Blood has been working hard on her ASP.NET 2.0 session. I have bags and bags of books and swag and of course we are raffling off 5 licenses to VS2005 Pro/SQL Server 2005 Standard/BizTalk 2006. That’s 5 sets! We have a huge # of RSVPs for our little group – 35 and counting. Thom Robbins, our D.E. has offered to cover the pizza. I’m going to stop at Staples on the way and pick up raffle tickets – I’m sick of trying to deal with  how to raffle off stuff!!

It should be great fun!



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org