Monthly Archives: January 2004

On the new DebuggerDisplay(Name) attributes in Whidbey

dotNET

One of the many cool things that Kit George demo’d at PDC in his What’s new in the Whidbey BCL demo was a deeper control over the debug process. With the DebuggerDisplay attributes, it is possible to control how information is displayed about your objects in the debugger. Apparently they wrote this stuff in order to better control how hash table info was displayed in the debugger and then decided to let us developers leverage the attributes as well. In the bits he used he had [DebuggerDisplay] with params of name and value. I wanted to check out how to use this, but in our bits (PDC) and in any documentation (Longhorn SDK online or Whidbey) what I find is DebuggerNameDisplay, DebuggerValueDisplay and DebuggerTypeDisplay. I can handle this difference no problem except I couldn’t for the life of me get my version of the code to run (C# or VB). I put a question about this in the newsgroups a month ago (microsoft.private.whidbey.clr) and still there has been no response. There are 2 posts in that newsgroup. I asked a few people at MS and was told probably I should skip it for now. I wonder if anyone in the world has used these attributes and knows how they work in Whidbey? I really am curious about them. I don’t think they are going away even if they do change drastically.

I ask because I wanted to talk about them in my talk at EdgeEast. I think I will talk about them, but just not demo using them. Instead I will demo the how they have been used internally and maybe compare a .net 1.1 hashtable in debug vs. a Whidbey hashtable in debug. Or maybe an object that a VB developer would be more familiar with that is leveraging this. :-).

The MVP Leads

Community Cheerleading

I just got an email from my MVP Lead, Rafael Munoz, who has been on leave for 6 weeks to get to know his new baby. Now that I have met Rafael and a number of the leads, it makes me smile to get his emails. These folks are MVP leads for a reason. They are really just the nicest people and they love what they are doing. I know that this sounds really gooey – but I swear it’s true. Being an MVP lead used to be a “side” task to a Microsoft employees regular job. But the program has been modified a great deal and now it is a full time dedicated position.

Go to DevDays 2004 and go home with Whidbey!

dotNET

http://www.microsoft.com/seminar/devdays2004/default.mspx

It will be in 32 cities during the month of March.

Not only do you get a full day of awesome training. Not only is it cheap ($75 before Feb 10th, $99 after). But you will walk away with the “technology preview“ of Whidbey. Ummm- I think that translates as the Alpha Bits.

How cool.

So when you see this little description on the website:

In either track, you’ll see a local expert build a real-world best-practice application, see the application in action, and leave with the code at the end of the day.

you can think of me, because in Boston, MA and Hartford, CT, I’ll be that “local expert”, building the secure ASP.NET app.

SAMS/QUE, DevDays, TechEd and my friend Amy

Just Rambling

Amy Sorokas has been somewhat of a muse for me.

When I started Vermont.NET two years ago, I emailed SAMS to see if I could get some books for the user group. I got an email back from Amy Sorokas saying – “hey, have you heard of INETA?”. I hadn’t. (If you know me, you know that I am extremely involved with INETA to this day.)

When I started learning a thing or two about .NET I sent a few ideas to DotNetJunkies. There was Amy Sorokas again, helping out with the articles and authors who were writing for the site. It took me a while to figure out where I knew the name from and one day I wrote to her and said “Oh, I know – you’re from SAMS!”

I finally met Amy in the flesh this past summer at TechEd in Dallas. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected a cute, hip young woman to have been the same person who had been my muse.

Amy has a weblog now on GeekswithBlogs, even though I dare say, she’s not really very geeky.

Amy does write about what she is doing at SAMS. Over these past two years, I have gotten the impression that this is way more than “just a job” to her. She really loves what she does, she is very proud of her company and even more proud to be involved in a process which enables so many bright folks to publish many of the books that we depend on to learn the tools of our trade. And when SAMS was moving offices this summer, I kept getting these big boxes full of books (and some pens and cups). She was cleaning out her office and VTdotNET was the beneficiary!

Amy just wrote that not only will SAMS be supporting DevDays 2004 , but they will be a Bronze Sponsor of TechEd. This is a big deal for a relatively small company. I think it’s great. Yeah Amy!

That’s my story about Amy Sorokas.

Exception Declaration Convention

dotNET

In a Catch statement I often try to catch specific types of exceptions and then a generic exception.

The generic is

catch ex as Exception

A HTTP

catch hEx as HTTPException

But a SQL

catch exS as SQLException

Isn’t that silly, that I can’t bring myself to follow the convention for SQLExceptions?

Crystal Reports and my phone bill

dotNET

A discussion on the ASPAdvice listserv about Crystal Reports brought back a crusty old memory. First I should say, I use Crystal Reports and have been since Crystal 6.0. I have a love/hate relationship with Crystal. I love the reports I am able to create. I hate when I am forced to delve into any new territory with them. (I have not even considered going to web reporting with Crystal for other reasons.) The worst was the nightmare upgrade to Crystal 8. Granted, I was going from 6 all the way to 8 in one leap. All of my apps were broken. I spent innumerable [unbillable] hours fixing applications and on the phone with [very unhappy yet thankfully, patient] clients trying to get the proper components installed on win95 and win98 machines. The one thing that was the saving grace was the free technical phone support. I didn’t mind as my long distance rate was 5 cents a minute. I got to be a pro at checking the status and wait times on their website before trying to dial in. And everyone was very helpful and very friendly. And then my phone bill came. I was calling Canada at $1.25/minute. I had $550 of phone calls to the free tech support. I could have purchased a one year tech support plan for a lot less than $550. I wrote them a long email tale of woe, explaining also how they lost out on selling a 1 year support contract. I had no expectation of them paying my bill, but I was trying to convince them to find some way of letting people know that this was most likely going to be long distance. When VS.NET was released with CR.NET in there, I saw the same lovely offer of free phone tech support for a certain period. And the same phone number. And no warning.