Daily Archives: July 28, 2004

Justifying new features in Whidbey

ADO.NET 2

I am reading Pablo Castro’s article on doing Asynchronouos processing in ADO.NET 2.0. Pablo is a/the (?) Program Manager on the ADO.NET team. This is the guy who, in his What’s New in ADO.NET Whidbey session at TechEd said that his team fought over a particular feature “because we love the developers“. They do. Dig deeply into into ADO.NET 2.0 and you will believe this. They love us and they want to make our lives easier.

Anyway, the article …. of course, I can’t really STREAM this article through my brain. I have to keep going back and forth until I grok what he is talking about and my head is spinning but I’m getting it and that’s a great feeling. However this, so far, is my favorite quote from his article:

Designing features based on their “cool factor” is too easy and too tempting, so we try to avoid it by making sure that we have a relevant application scenario for each and every new feature that we ship.

Cool!

More on viewing datasets in VS2005 (and VS2003)

dotNET

Ian Griffiths couldn’t understand why I was having a party because I could drill all the way into a dataset in VS2005 without having to retype each item in the quick watch window. eg. if I want to see the metadata for each table in a dataset, I currently have to explicilty enter dataset.tables(mytablename) rather than just starting with dataset and continue to open up the collections.

He sent me a screenshot from VS2003 showing the ability to drill a lot further than I have ever seen. I emailed him back and asked if he was pulling my leg. But in fact, he discovered that the debugger shows different information in C# than it does in VB! (This is in 2003). Ian explains further about this in his weblog.

Even though VS2005 now brings more drill-down functionality to both C# and VB, Ian and I both agree (along with Kathleen Dollard) that this is still not what we want to see when we debug a dataset. There is WAY TOO MUCH information in there. This is where the visualizers will come in. Let me look at the dataset or datatable in a way that I can just see metadata (and values) related to the data itself. SHow me the tables, the table names, the columns, the column names, the rows, the data in the rows (by column name please) and then maybe the state of the rows. Things like that. Or I can choose to see every single property exposed by the object. I know there are more default visualizers coming, so maybe this will be one of them. Otherwise, I’ll just have to write one, won’t I?

I had a good chuckle at Ian’s reference to “the VB.NET lifestyle”!

Microsoft Interns at Gates house for dinner

Community Cheerleading

It sounds like a summer tradition perhaps – many of the summer interns were invited to a dinner at the Gates family home. Jeff Maurone wrote 2 blog posts about this very unique experience. Fun read. Lots of adjectives. First, Second

What I liked the most about it was Jeff’s great appreciatation for what I also enjoy so much about meeting my fellow geeks – getting to see a little of the personal/human side of Bill Gates when his daughter came down to hang out and sat holding his hand chatting with her dad for a bit.

Think in Ink contest extended to Aug 31st

Tablet

Not for lack of submissions, but I think just a little confusion about the actual ending date. So you have another month to dig in to the TabletPC SDK and submit a Tablet App to this $100,000 contest. This is not a utility contest – but a real live app …the more mass appeal, the better.

If you go over to the MSDN site (msdn.microsoft.com/tabletpc) you can start learning quite a lot. They have posted the video of Arin Goldberg’s excellent presentation on using the SDK. There’s a lot more in there (in the SDK) than you can imagine. Just think – you don’ t have to spend the rest of your life writing the same boring old data entry applications!

Stay tuned to that site. There is going to be a lot of new content coming down the pipes from some big names in the .NET, nay, Windows programming world. The TabletPC buzz is just getting louder. I am also going to add an article or two as well.