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.

Roy Osherove’s THIRD article on MSDN Online

dotNET

Well, now we know what Roy kept himself busy in between his full time employment job and his first big contracting gig up in Norway.

He has had three articles published in the last month! This is so impressive.

1) Creating a Plug-In Framework (Dec ’03)

2) Search Dynamically for Plug-Ins (Dec ’03)

and the just published

3) Turn Your Log Files into Searchable Data Using Regex and the XML Classes

To me what is the best part of all of this is that this is all a result of Roy’s weblog.

Great work Roy and Kent!

My Rolodex

Purely Personal

I rarely clean out my rolodex. Quite often I’ll be flipping through the cards looking for something and come across an old card with the name of a friend who has long since passed away. It makes me very happy to have these unexpected little reminders of my lost friends. It’s almost as though the phone just rang and it’s that person saying “just called to say hi”. Nobody should ever be forgotten.

An updated logo

Blogging

My pal Chris McCracken was fiddling around to get fix up of the non-rasterized (is that the right term) totally unprofessional little logo that I invented for The Data Farm when I overhauled my site last year.

Here is the old

       and the new 

I changed everything over but am thinking, even with its deficiencies, I kind of like the old one just cause it’s brighter etc. Opinions?

Chris works for one of my clients. He is a bright young guy (even though he does use a Mac) who has taken to webdesign and even picked up some asp to add to his bag of javascript tricks and put together some nice stuff. What’s been also interesting is because he is very interested in computers and programming, he has become a great point person at my client’s site for handling user issues, training people, adjusting their i.e. proxy settings, etc because he picks up on this stuff pretty quickly. We have had fun working on a bunch of projects together over the past year.

Paul Stubbs- MS Visual Studio.NET Office Tools Program Manager blogging

dotNET

Every so often, Microsoft raids the coffers of INETA. Or so we like to think, when they hire user group leaders, INETA speakers, etc.

Paul Stubbs is one of those that Microsoft recently sucked up. Paul was the leader of MaineBytes for a very long time. So you know, New ENgland, Vermont, Maine. He’s like a local guy in my mind. But now he lives all the way on the other side of the world in Seattle.

Hey Paul (wave wave) How’s it goin’ out there? It was 15 below this morning when I walked the dog! Do they know how to make chowdah out there? If your homesick you can just check out a Sunny Day video (he’s a Mainer you see) on www.franklins.net!

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. :-).