Daily Archives: January 11, 2004

Drilling into Datasets and Datatables in Debug Mode in Whidbey

dotNET

Working on my vs.net 2003 project, I had a dream that perhaps Whidbey would let me drill into ado.net objects in the more seamless manner I had grown accustomed to in Visual Basic.

But alas. I’m sure there is a reason — a good one. But the problem persists.

You can’t get into a collection.

So if you have a dataset you can basically see the tables.count, but you can’t drill into  a table.

In a datatable, you can see the count of columns, but you can’t see the columns.

It’s a huge PIA when you are debugging and you want to see something about your datastructure or your data. I’m almost starting to wonder if there has been some other functionality in there all along that I have missed and I am just looking for the wrong thing.

Humorous Contradiction in InfoWorld article on msdn.blogs.com

Blogging

So InfoWorld has a nice article (by my pal Joris Evers who did the tablet article that I was interviewed for) interviewing Sara Williams about the new weblogs that are officially now at blogs.msdn.com (thanks to Scott Watermasysk’s .TEXT weblog). Yet at the end of the article it says (and I quote):

“Sara Williams’ Microsoft blog is at: http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/saraw/”

🙂

 

this blog that blog

Blogging

I keep thinking that I will stop cross-posting to my other blog (weblogs.asp.net/jlerman) but then I look at the lack of activity on this blog and think that nobody even knows it exists. I will continue to cross-post until I have a comfort level with the fact that my thoughts (especially those regarding .net) won’t get completely lost.

cold snow and wind

Vermont

The sub-zero temps all week have sucked all the moisture out of the snow (as well as my nostrils every time I got outdoors – don’t you hate that feeling?<g>). When you walk on the snow it squeaks and creaks. Now it has wamred up a bit – a balmy 0 degrees when I walked the dog this morning). But it’s very windy and all of that dry snow is blowing around like great big dustbowls.

Client Scripting: ASP.NET attributes vs. all the rest of the attributes

dotNET

I had a conversation with a friend who is new to web development and is doing an ASP.NET application. She came upon a roadblock that I recall made me nuts two years ago. She wanted to grab an onclick event on a server control in the client side script. If you are coding in the html, this is not presented as an option and  if you choose to bypass that and enter onclick anyway, you get the little squiggly line and a tooltip saying that this attribute doesn’t exist. If you are bold enough to ignore that, you will find that it works anyway. But she got stopped by what the intellisense told her was not possible.

There is a whole world of client side scripting that many people will never realize exists because they depend on the guidance of intellisense. She also spent some time googling and researching and got very frustrated because she felt that she was being led to the conclusion that you can’t interact with server controls in client script. I know there are lots of resources, but this is the experience of someone who is very capable and not lazy about researching information. So if this was what she came up with, I am sure that many others do the same.

I was a windows developer fairly new to web stuff when I started ASP.NET, so I understood completely where she is coming from. I told her that she can ignore that intellisense when working in the client side html of her webforms and  pointed her to one of my favorite resources for when I have to deal with anything on the clientside: DevEdge.Netscape.com. I have pointed this out before. In there you can find this great javascript reference and this morning the key chapter was Chapter 3 on event handlers.