Peter's Gekko

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July 2003 - Posts

First Whidbey beta

In the keynote of the VSLive conference (NY 30 th of july) Eric Rudder presented the MS "roadmap" for the coming year. I wasn't at the conference but watched it on the web. A somewhat tiring "experience" as the sound quality was pretty bad. A lot of clipping and it was impossible to understand some parts of it. People who attended the live version of the event were possibly not better of. Frequently you could hear the howl of microphone feedback.

Anyway, it was woth seeing. Eric told that the first beta's had been handed out this week to a small group of selected developers. A public beta is on its way and MS will hand out "new VS.NET technology" on the PDC at the end of october. Included in the keynote was a sneak preview of Whidbey. It didn't contain any stuff which had not been on "radio trottoir" lately but it was great to see how it had been implemented in the product.

FTP online have made a separate clip of the Whidbey demo : http://www.ftponline.com/reports/vsliveny/2003/whidbey/. The sound is still bad, but the sight is great. Enjoy.

Peter

Posted Jul 31 2003, 09:50 AM by pvanooijen with no comments

Moving Crystal reports to 2003, not that clear

I had updated a project from VS.NET 2002 to 2003. No big deal, till the moment I checked the (Crystal) reports. It took me some time to find out so let me share this with you.

In web.config theres is this section

<compilation defaultLanguage="c#" debug="true"><assemblies><add assembly="CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine, Version=9.1.3300.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304"/><add assembly="CrystalDecisions.ReportSource, Version=9.1.3300.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304"/><add assembly="CrystalDecisions.Shared, Version=9.1.3300.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304"/><add assembly="CrystalDecisions.Web, Version=9.1.3300.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304"/>FONT color=#800000 size=3>assemblies>FONT color=#800000 size=3>compilation>

In there are some references to Crystal assemblies with an explicit version number. To get things to work again you have to update this version nummber to the version of the 1.1 assemblies. Which is 9.1.5000.0

FONT color=#800000 size=3>assemblies>

FONT color=#800000 size=3>compilation>

After this all worked like a snap. I (Google) did not find any clear hints on this, had to find out step by step. Quite interesting but it does take some time.

Actually I am quite pleased with Crystal reports. Powerfull and flexible. But the docs are a traditional nightmare. This is what I destilled for my report:

Add a new report to the project.
Designing it using a local XML dataset for the data
Drop a report component on the webpage.
Make it a typed report, typed according to the report in the project
Drop a viewer on the webform
Tie everything together in the page_load :

reportProjekt1.SetDataSource(dataSetReport1);

CrystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = reportProjekt1;

That's all, a couple of clicks and two lines of code...

Blog on,

Peter

Posted Jul 27 2003, 09:06 PM by pvanooijen with 2 comment(s)

Filed under: ASP.NET, Out of control

What's hot

It's hot in europe. We spent some time in Denmark and besides the beaches we enjoyed Legoland. Besides having a lovely quite countryside Denmark is a technical fruitfull country as well. It's the homeland of Anders (Heijlsberg) who gave us so many years of pleasant programming (I am (was) a Delphi programmer). Denmark is also the homeland of Lego. All of us were huge fans allready but now we are completely addicted. Recommended.

Back home I spent some time on my website. Published a small review of Eric Gunnerson's book. I really am sorry I waited so long to give it the credit it deserves..

I had planned to visit the monthly meeting of dotned. Sorry to hear it was cancelled, due to the summer. They have a meeting every month, august the 28th is the next one.

Also spent a lot of time on databinding in webforms. Try this :

In the datbindings dialog create a custom databinding, ie something like MyFunc()
Try running the webform
It will crash on a "Compilation error"
Select : view full source
What you will see now is a piece of C# source code which tells more about the way asp.net does work than many pages of help files.
Now create a public or proteced MyFunc method in your webform.

My article on the datagrid is still in the pipeline. Dough and Donny are going to spend more time on the articles on the dnj site. Have to wait for that. Another article, on the DataList componenet is in the makings.

Peter

Posted Jul 23 2003, 11:56 AM by pvanooijen with no comments

Check out the document outline

I had not used the document outline (ctrl Alt T) that much in 2002. It didn't work every time or didn' feel right. In 2003 the tool works like a marvel. It really gets interesting when you have a control with templates, like a datagrid or datalist, and change to HTML view. All html controls appear in the tree and the property window follows the control / tag selected. It's an overview you don't want to miss. What would be nice if you could expand and collapse the html tags in the html editor. Just like IE does with xml in the browser. Next version ?

On the coming Professional Developer Conference MS will present the things to come (Whidbey) to the developers community. I just can't wait.

Peter

Posted Jul 09 2003, 11:50 AM by pvanooijen with no comments

Moving to 2003 and templates

hi everybody,

finally moved a project from VS.NET 2002 to 2003. Should have done that before. The feel and speed of 2003 is far better than 2002. A lot of details , the code completion is indeed more intellligent, the performance is snapier on my over-stressed system and the editting of templates is not as flaky as in 2002. So even if you don't need the 1.1 framework (why not, it's the default download) : go for 2003.

I experienced one small conversion issue: One of the webforms included a helper class, this class came first in the unit. Trying to design the form VS.NET told me it can only design the first class in the unit. One cut and paste later I was up and designing.

The project uses a lot of templates in a datalist. (More on that in an upcoming story.) When the template is rendered to html asp.net makes up an ID for the controls in the template. It will be something like "DataList1__ctl1_Label2". It's a pitty you cannot read this ID from your code. In the datalist events the ID will allways be "Label2", without all the prefixes. I would like to have this ID to generate snippets of client side script. Now I have to hard-code the controls' ID. To find out the ID I view the source in IE. Does anybody know a way out ?