igorbrejc.net » Friday Goodies - 28. March

Jonne Kats said:

Hoi Peter,

Ik kom ook uit nederland, ben niet aangesloten bij de sdgn, maar eind deze maand ga ik naar een bijeenkomst van dotned(www.dotned.nl), omdat ik toch ook meer met andere Nederlands ontwikkelaars wil praten. Ik benieuwd of het wat is, misschien is het ook interessant voor jou?

Jonne

# June 12, 2003 8:39 PM

Jonne Kats said:

Hoi Peter,

Ik kom ook uit nederland, ben niet aangesloten bij de sdgn, maar eind deze maand ga ik naar een bijeenkomst van dotned(www.dotned.nl), omdat ik toch ook meer met andere Nederlands ontwikkelaars wil praten. Ik benieuwd of het wat is, misschien is het ook interessant voor jou?

Jonne

# June 12, 2003 8:39 PM

slobodan filipovic said:

Maybe you can use:Control.ClientID Property
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfSystemWebUIControlClassClientIDTopic.asp

# July 27, 2003 10:29 PM

slobodan filipovic said:

Maybe you can use:Control.ClientID Property
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfSystemWebUIControlClassClientIDTopic.asp

# July 27, 2003 10:29 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

That's it ! Thanks a lot.

# August 4, 2003 3:04 AM

Roland Weigelt said:

Greetings from Bonn, Germany! It's equally hot here. Fortunately at work we've got air condition, but my computer use at home is almost reduced to checking email...

>What struck me was the appearence of a number of blogs in German.
Yup. I think of it this way: If you've got your own website with a blog on it, feel free to use whatever language you like. But if you're part of an international community (DotNetJunkies, Weblogs@ASP.NET, ...) and if your entries end up in the main [RSS] feed of that community, it's very impolite not to use English.

> English has become a second language to me as all the software I use is in English.
Same here. It's a pain to use software translated to German, even if the translation is more or less ok.

# August 7, 2003 2:11 AM

Peter said:

# August 10, 2003 3:53 PM

Scott Watermasysk said:

Actually, .Text does not support comments to comments...

I guess with the current db structure it is 100% possible...but at the moment, it does not happen. All comments are directly related to the current post.

-Scott

# August 12, 2003 3:26 PM

Scott Galloway said:

Umm...Microsoft used to have it, the Natural Keyboard Pro - I am using one right now...it is a big beast and has an odd split keyboard (useful for those of us with occasional burning wrists (A.K.A. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome). It has a USB hub, very ergonomic, function keys (lots and lots...media control,mail,web etc...). You might want to check out some of the newer MS keyboards...

# August 15, 2003 3:32 AM

Jonne Kats said:

Jammer dat ik het dit keer gemist heb. Volgende maand ben ik ook weer van de partij...

# August 29, 2003 3:04 AM

Frans Bouma said:

"those 13 in a dozen hotels"...

haha :D

"I look the cat out of the tree" :)

Ik wist helemaal niet dat er een stichting ter bevordering van het .NET gebruik bestond (Maar goed, Nederland, zo gek is het ook weer niet, er is voor alles een stichting hier :)). Es kijken of volgende maand interessant is om wat te vertellen wellicht.

# August 29, 2003 12:13 PM

Slobodan Filipovic said:

(See link Blocks and Iterators)
You have same staff in Ruby:

"Blocks and Iterators

This section briefly describes one of Ruby's particular strengths. We're about to look at code blocks: chunks of code that you can associate with method invocations, almost as if they were parameters. This is an incredibly powerful feature. You can use code blocks to implement callbacks (but they're simpler than Java's anonymous inner classes), to pass around chunks of code (but they're more flexible than C's function pointers), and to implement iterators.

Code blocks are just chunks of code between braces or do...end.

{ puts "Hello" } # this is a block

do #
club.enroll(person) # and so is this
person.socialize #
end #

Once you've created a block, you can associate it with a call to a method. That method can then invoke the block one or more times using the Ruby yield statement. The following example shows this in action. We define a method that calls yield twice. We then call it, putting a block on the same line, after the call (and after any arguments to the method).[Some people like to think of the association of a block with a method as a kind of parameter passing. This works on one level, but it isn't really the whole story. You might be better off thinking of the block and the method as coroutines, which transfer control back and forth between themselves.]

def callBlock
yield
yield
end

callBlock { puts "In the block" }

produces: In the block
In the block

See how the code in the block (puts "In the block") is executed twice, once for each call to yield.

You can provide parameters to the call to yield: these will be passed to the block. Within the block, you list the names of the arguments to receive these parameters between vertical bars (``|'').

def callBlock
yield ,
end

callBlock { |, | ... }

Code blocks are used throughout the Ruby library to implement iterators: methods that return successive elements from some kind of collection, such as an array.

a = %w( ant bee cat dog elk ) # create an array
a.each { |animal| puts animal } # iterate over the contents

produces: ant
bee
cat
dog
elk

Let's look at how we might implement the Array class's each iterator that we used in the previous example. The each iterator loops through every element in the array, calling yield for each one. In pseudo code, this might look like:

# within class Array...
def each
for each element
yield(element)
end
end

You could then iterate over an array's elements by calling its each method and supplying a block. This block would be called for each element in turn.

[ 'cat', 'dog', 'horse' ].each do |animal|
print animal, " -- "
end

produces: cat -- dog -- horse --

Similarly, many looping constructs that are built into languages such as C and Java are simply method calls in Ruby, with the methods invoking the associated block zero or more times.

5.times { print "*" }
3.upto(6) {|i| print i }
('a'..'e').each {|char| print char }

produces: *****3456abcde

Here we ask the number 5 to call a block five times, then ask the number 3 to call a block, passing in successive values until it reaches 6. Finally, the range of characters from ``a'' to ``e'' invokes a block using the method each. "

# September 1, 2003 9:05 AM

neil mcguigan said:

the fact that your are calling GetOrdinal on every loop may be slowing the data reader down. you should only call GetOrdinal once to get the ordinal of the field, and use that value to read from the reader during the loop.

<pre>
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataReader dr;
dr = sqlDataAdapter1.SelectCommand.ExecuteReader();
int ordinal = dr.GetOrdinal("Title");
while (dr.Read())
listBox1.Items.Add(dr.GetString(ordinal));
dr.Close();

</pre>

also, i doubt this one, but it may be faster to use an SqlCommand object instead of a DataAdapter object to load the command.

cheers

neil m
vancouver, bc

# September 2, 2003 3:02 PM

JosephCooney said:

AFAIK the DataAdapter uses the DataReader to populate a DataSet anyway, so the DataReader will ALWAYS be faster. Having said that, I am not a big fan of the datareader. I feel that it breaks encapsulation. Also because it is a "live" connection to the database it can cause problems if it isn't correctly disposed of. This link shows some fairly extensive testing of the different data access methods: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnbda/html/bdadotnetarch031.asp?frame=true

# September 3, 2003 2:31 AM

John Gunnarsson said:

One nice thing about .NET is Attributes, maybe this article will provide you some ideas how to implement a factory using attributes instead of class methods.

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/factorywithattributes.asp

Have a nice day
//John

# September 3, 2003 7:54 AM

Matt said:

It will be interesting to see what happens when Borland release Delphi for .NET and whether it will be a superior language to C# for Delphi developers

# September 3, 2003 7:05 PM

neil mcguigan said:

what about memory use? you'd "assume" a datareader was easier on memory since it's only dealing with one record at a time. maybe the image above showed something like that but it wasn't displaying.

# September 4, 2003 3:05 PM

JosephCooney said:

Just me again....as well as ANTS you should check out nprof http://nprof.sourceforge.net/Site/Screenshots.html it is open source and not too bad. I haven't used it to profile ASP.NET, only windows forms apps, but I understand that it is possible to profile ASP.NET also.

# September 4, 2003 7:17 PM

JosephCooney said:

I'm turning into a serial blog pest aren't I...I'm not sure about the Delphi.NET compiler you refer to, but there is a Component Pascal (OO Pascal, similar to Delphi) compiler available from Programming Languages and Systems @ QUT. John Gough (who is the dean of the faculty there IIRR) "wrote the book" (literally) on writing compilers for the CLR. http://www.citi.qut.edu.au/research/plas/projects/cp_files/cpdownload.jsp

# September 4, 2003 10:17 PM

dthorpe said:

Component Pascal bears absolutely no resemblance to Delphi syntax or functionality.

# September 5, 2003 1:32 PM

JosephCooney said:

Hi Peter. I think TurboPascal was the first programming language I ever used, but I've never had the pleasure of using Delphi. Can you give me some examples or links to advantages of Delphi vs. Component Pascal.

# September 7, 2003 5:48 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

hi Joseph,
Yes. Turbo Pascal, those were the days. Over the versions Delphi added some very nice functionality to the object pascal language. Like the class variables and virtual constructors I mentioned in previous blogs. If you want to get an idea of the language : there is always a little book coming with Delphi, the Object Pascal language guide. I found on-line copies at http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/bdocs/d4/OPLG.PDF (D4) and others. Try Google on "object pascal language guide"

Peter

# September 9, 2003 2:55 AM

Julien CHEYSSIAL said:

I also got the same spam from Viagrx on my new weblog... I agree with you: Handy the comment linkbutton :)

# September 16, 2003 3:21 AM

Darrell said:

Yep, happened to me too!

# September 16, 2003 8:19 AM

Mark DiGiovanni said:

Great app!

# September 24, 2003 7:42 AM

Dare Obasanjo said:

RSS Bandit does have some issues remembering what you've read if the item doesn't have a link or guid (such as in a number of posts on Dave Winer's feed) but I haven't come across issues with it forgetting entire channels.

Can you provide more details because I'd like to fix such problems.

Thanks.

# September 24, 2003 10:34 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

To specify my RSS (1.1.0.16) problems:

My machine is set to standby or hibernated once a day. Usualy I only log on to Windows once in a couple of days. Depends what I've been doing :> RSS is running all the time. When my machine wakes up most post who were marked as read are marked as unread again.

When adding new channels RSS will (always?) forget these if I don't manualy (using the menu) shut down RSS and restart it. And that is quite annoying.

# September 25, 2003 2:37 AM

Dare Obasanjo said:

I haven't heard anyone make the complaints you have about losing channels although the flaky behavior when recovering from standby was a known issue.

Can you try the latest version (1.1.0.36) available from http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnexxml/html/xml09152003.asp and see if this works any better?

Thanks.

# September 25, 2003 10:14 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

Dare, I am sorry but feeddemon has me convinced. I still miss the comments in the main list but I can live with that. Thanks for your support anyway.

# September 26, 2003 3:52 AM

Roland Weigelt said:

I sometimes have to cover the animated ads with my hand in order to be able to read and fully understand the text. But then, at 34 I might by getting old as well ;-)

Roland

# October 6, 2003 3:18 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

As some of my own language made my toes curl I updated this post. Sorry ..

# October 9, 2003 2:24 AM

Fabrice said:

"The compiler will check bindings as well as logic"
The compiler doesn't check databindings. This is a very bad point of ASP.NET, IMO. The databindings are defined in the ASPX files which are evaluated only at runtime.

# October 13, 2003 4:54 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

The compiler does do the checking but in a later (to late stage). vs.net compiles the code behind class and does not do the check yet. At run time asp.net generates a new class which inherits from your base class. In here the databindings are substituted, if they are wrong the compilation of this page will fail. The amount and content of the error info is a little confusing but it does point to a source.
Give it a try, build a small page with a weird data-binding and spit through the errors returned.

# October 14, 2003 2:27 AM

Peter's Gekko said:

# October 14, 2003 5:07 AM

Jonne Kats said:

Hey Peter,

I will be there... The program looks very interesting.

Only Delft is a long ride for me :(

Jonne

# October 15, 2003 3:36 AM

Frans Bouma said:

I'll be there! :)

# October 15, 2003 8:37 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

The Netherlands are very "Randstad-centric". I have to come from Haren, near Groningen. That will be a 2.5 hour ride. I'll take the train so I can use that time to read. Havn't read Dino's asp.net book yet. His xml book is just great.

# October 15, 2003 11:09 AM

Phil Weber said:

> When it comes to a discussion still nothing
> beats Outlook Express. I wish somebody found
> a way of weaving that into blogs and readers.

Peter: http://www.methodize.org/nntprss/

I'm currently beta testing the next release (0.4) and it looks great!

# October 21, 2003 12:30 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

Hi Phil, my problem with a web-based tool lik ethat is that you are dependent on the feeds which are (re) published by methodizesols. They don't even have the dnj feed...

# October 21, 2003 3:33 PM

Brian Desmond said:

I usually travel with a change of clothes in addition to my toothbrush.

# October 23, 2003 10:45 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

:> Don't worry. My wife will check that part of my packing.

# October 24, 2003 2:23 PM

Phil Weber said:

Peter: nntp//rss is NOT a Web-based tool, unless you happen to install it on your Web server. It's an NNTP server that runs wherever you install it (e.g., localhost); you use a browser-based interface to subscribe to the feeds of your choice (it can import your existing subscriptions via OPML), then point your newsreader at the machine on which it's running. Voila! RSS feeds in any newsreader, including Outlook Express.

# October 25, 2003 1:29 AM

James Curran said:

Peter,

The file refers to an image on your local machine..

# October 27, 2003 10:36 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

OOPs, had hoped .text would fix that for me. I've hosted the picture on my own site now.

# October 27, 2003 7:21 PM

Thomas Tomiczek said:

::Not very new either.....

And not very smart either, if you ask me.

# October 28, 2003 12:43 AM

Julien CHEYSSIAL said:

Well, I'm still a student and I'm in Paris... So, I really can't afford the whole trip (and the PDC itself)... This would have been so cool, since I already know L.A. and people livin' there who would be able to host me.

Anyway, have a nice PDC and bring us some precious informations back !

# October 28, 2003 9:50 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

You know what ? They popped up on PDC TV, 10 minutes after posting this. Come on guys, expose *junkies.com !

# October 28, 2003 3:18 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

You are trying to misunderstand me. What I mean is that you just have read XML just as easy as if () else and understand what a schema does to be able to understand the basics of all new material. And coding Clients["ClientId"] fits not to well in the way 2.0 works.
Not smart ? What you ean by that ?

# October 28, 2003 8:28 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

hi Phil,
sorry for the late response. To much PDC :> My web-based definition does include nntp new servers. My main problem is that the feed has to be processed by a (news) server before I can consume it in my reader. I want to see a feed in a browser and "click-once" to subscribe.

# November 3, 2003 2:57 AM

asdfsadf said:

sdfgdf

# November 4, 2003 2:40 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

Absolutely ! Updated..

# November 6, 2003 1:58 AM

Jonne Kats said:

Too bad I had to leave early aswell, i thought it was a nice meeting. I agree with you on the typed dataset. By the way, when the database schema is updated, you have to regenerate your typed dataset. For my current project I had to to this a couple of time and it is starting to get irritating. I think I will write a script for this. How do you manage this?

# November 6, 2003 3:55 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Ah, YOU asked the question about the IIS administration. ;) You can always use Interop of course to call into IIS admin, since it uses COM objects for administration.

I liked the presentation of Dino too, was very informative though a lot was already somewhat familiar. The ADO.NET presentation was poor IMHO. My remark about FillSchema() was incorrectly answered which clearly showed the lack of knowledge by the person helding the presentation, but that's ok, no-one's perfect :)

# November 6, 2003 7:35 AM

Paul Gielens said:

Dutch doorgaan indeed, if they only presented more architectural topics which would justify the long drive. Where are you located anyway?

# November 6, 2003 2:02 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

Modern times : three Dutch people discussing a Dutch meeting they attended, and had to leave to early, in English on a US hosted blog...
Yep, I was the one who asked about IIS admin. So it can be adressed using COM, that's nice. At the moment I'm trying to invade a SAP based organisation via .net. The roll out has to be done by their IT department, so far no problems but when things will get more complicated I now have a technique to do IIS configuration (where xml config files no longer work)from a setup program.
Concerning typed datasets : VS.net will generate a new class every time the dataset changes, you can ask it to do this by choosing "generate dataset" on the data-adapter. The xsd.exe tool will do this from the command prompt.
The only thing which was imho really wrong with the ado.net tool was its title, it had not that much to do with advanced. To you and me its contents (as wel as many parts of even Dino's talk) wil be "cut cookies", but the presentation form did the trick. To my neighbour in the audience validating data using a schema was quite new. He understood it straight away and a whole new world opened on him.

# November 6, 2003 2:06 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

hi Paul, posting in parallel. I'm located in Haren, just south of Groningen. Which is a beautifull place to live and has a perfect IT infra-structure. But most things (including meetings/contracts/jobs) are happening in "Holland".

# November 6, 2003 2:12 PM

Paul Gielens said:

Ahh I'm located on the other side, Noord Brabant near Eindhoven. Damn I gotta attend the next time :)

# November 6, 2003 2:20 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Paul: you sure should :) Next time is PDC focussed if I'm not mistaken. Dunno where it's held though.

# November 7, 2003 2:01 AM

Julien CHEYSSIAL said:

I just wish that FeedDemon could manage feeds subscription like SharpReader does. I mean, using a hierarchical (n-level of deepness) treeview instead of the blog channels thing which doesn't allow to nest different lists...

# November 7, 2003 6:55 AM

Zef Hemel said:

I would've wanted to come, however considered Groningen too far away (I live in the city). But if I have time, I might come some time in the future.

# November 7, 2003 7:07 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

You were even closer to Delft than me, I had to wait over half an hour in Assen (of al places) for a train home. Next time I'll go by car, maybe we can pool and organize a visit DotNED expedition.

# November 7, 2003 9:59 AM

Paul Gielens said:

Very slick design, never heard of this reader before.

# November 9, 2003 12:12 PM

Paul Gielens said:

PDC, cool I'll be there.

# November 12, 2003 3:27 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

hi Paul, PDC ? That's past (alas) Time to remove the link ? Make it Professional Dutch C-sharp

# November 12, 2003 6:42 AM

Donny Mack said:

Well, the bad news is that the links are perm. changed, the good news is we have an excellent lookup page for dead links.

The other good news is that this is the final link change and we do have someone going through all the old articles now updating the dead links.

# November 12, 2003 1:44 PM

Donny Mack said:

I fixed your links now

# November 12, 2003 1:48 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

Thanks that's fast ! :> Peter.

# November 12, 2003 1:59 PM

HumanCompiler said:

That's about what my LongHorn machine has in it (maybe even a little more than mine had) and it runs just fine.

# November 13, 2003 1:54 PM

DonXML Demsak said:

I'm using a dual PII 400 graphic workstation (Dell Precision 410 to be exact), with 512M RAM, and a 64M Radeon GPU, and I have no troubles with speed. Bootup time sucks, but that has always been the case with SCSI drives.

# November 13, 2003 2:18 PM

Jonne Kats said:

Ik ben ook weer van de partij, Diemen is bij mij in de buurt, dus dat komt goed uit...

# November 14, 2003 12:36 AM

Zef Hemel said:

Ik kan niet, ik heb op donderdagen altijd tot 15.00 uur college en dan moet wel heeeeeeeel hard rijden wil je op tijd zijn vanuit Groningen :D

# November 14, 2003 3:46 AM

Paul Gielens said:

Is 140 km enkel... ik kan er met m'n pet niet bij waarom die bijeenkomsten niet ergens mid. Nederland georganiseerd kunnen worden. Ik ga d'r maar om tossen ;)

# November 14, 2003 5:28 AM

Peter's Gekko said:

# November 14, 2003 7:43 AM

Darrell said:

"flame me out of here if it is bullshit" - hahaha, very funny. :)

# November 14, 2003 7:50 AM

Frans Bouma said:

The errors related to XML in IE are mostly related to the older XML engine IE uses. So it can happen your code is ok, but IE's older XML engine fails.

Furthermore, XSL is not an imperative language, that it performs line n before n+1. It's a pattern matching language like Prolog or Miranda: it matches patterns and when a match is found, the code related to the matched pattern is executed, probably also a try to match something or to select/emit something.

So do not look at XSL as a bunch of forloops or something like that, when you do, you will never grasp XSL.:)

# November 14, 2003 8:57 AM

PeterGekko said:

De SDGN houdt zijn bijkomsten altijd in Ede. Is voor (bijna) iedereen 2 uur gaan. DotNEd is afhankelijk van sponsors die ruimte ter beschikking stellen. En de meeste bedrijven zitten...

<????>Those of you who wander waht this is all about : we are discussing where you should organize a meeting in the Netherlands.</????>

# November 14, 2003 1:00 PM

PeterGekko said:

Thank goodness, no flares :>. I really think I do understand what XSL is trying to acheive. Match a pattern and execute some code when it finds one. But I have seen too much code full of for loops and xslt "apps" trying to do things which can be done far better in "normal" code. My major point if its implementation in IE cannot transform an input stream it should keep its hands off and not raise silly error messages.. And I really dislike the "syntax" of an xslt stylesheet. Give me a class with events which fire when finding a match. Like the xmlreaders. But the latter will be a matter of taste.

# November 14, 2003 1:15 PM

Peter's Gekko said:

# November 16, 2003 12:15 PM

JosephCooney said:

I've used XSL(T) mainly to generate code, but am by no means an expert. Where the output was also XML XSL(T) was great, otherwise it was not really that much better than other languages. IMHO the really good part of XSL is not XSL at all, but XPath. It makes processing XML documents SO much easier. Writing XML DOM code is so much nicer too with liberal use of XPath (altho I might be biased).

I don't really see how XSL mixes data and code. XSL(T) is about transforming XML documents into other XML documents (and maybe non-XML documents too), so it is code, not data. The fact that you can call a method in a .NET assembly from XSL(T) merely reinforces this (just like you might call a stored procedure from .NET code etc), XSL(T) just has a more declarative style while your VB.NET or C# code is more imperative. Including code in an XAML file is mixing declarative and imperative styles of coding, and probably breaking the seperation between presentation and the rest of your application, but XAML is obviously not XSLT either...

Altho Don Box's weblog title might suggest a negative view of XSLT, he does seem to use it sometimes (like for generating the RSS feed for his blog), and he uses Visual XSLT from ActiveState.

# November 16, 2003 4:53 PM

JosephCooney said:

Hi Peter - re: the example from Dino's book, if you want to turn XML into HTML somehow these pieces of literal text would have to be included somewhere. If the job that a piece of XSL is performing is to turn some XML into HTML then you would think that this is an acceptable place to include this, right? I guess the fact that you are producing an XML document (or XML-like document) means it is a little harder to see the difference between literal output and XSL constructs (hint: if it has <xsl: > at the start it is probably XSL). Ironically from my experiences producing XML documents as output is where XSL is strongest (rather than producing non-XML output).

Re: XSL blowing up at "transform time" rather than at "compile time", yes, this is a problem altho in my case the "run without error but mysteriously fail to give the correct output" was more typical. I guess the closest thing you can do to compiling is to validate your XSL document against the XSL schema. I downloaded Visual XSLT from ActiveState today to check it out (after Don Box raved about how good it was, and then I saw a glowing review on ActiveState's site from Aaron Skonnard). I seem to go through waves of infatuation with XSLT (always for codegen). I wonder how long this one that you have innitiated will last.

# November 17, 2003 11:16 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

hi Joseph.
The location of the HTML is OK, I would like the "code" to be somewhere else :). Yes it is confusing, I know I can see by the namespace of the tag if it is an xsl thing, but nevertheless.
I took a look at Visual XSLT. Couldn't install it properly, guess it takes my side-by-side Whidbey for the active VS. But the idea looks great. As it takes the schema of the XML doc as a starting point, it could be a whole different ball-game. As I am by origin a strongly typing OO programmer and used to love things like COM typelibraries. Schema's are my way to go. Couldn't check yet how Visual XSLT lets's you enter the passive data, like the html in the example. The tool is on my to-do list.

"run without error but mysteriously fail to give the correct output" :) Well known phenomenon...
XSLT Infatuation ? Have to look that up in the dictionary. Ah yes.. Well you're productive using it:

http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/JosephCooney/posts/3660.aspx

That will be another step in my crash course.

# November 18, 2003 1:43 AM

JosephCooney said:

Hi Peter - I'm glad to see you didn't take my previous comments the wrong way. On re-reading it I couldn't help think that I sounded like a know-all prick. I know I don't know everything, but I could be a prick. Productive with XSLT? Sometimes, but my templating code generator uses ASP.NET style <% %> syntax, not XSLT to generate code (but it does use XPath a bit). My brother Dom says XSLT is deprecated in favour of XQuery anyway.

# November 18, 2003 9:03 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

Hi Joseph. You're a great "sparring partner" to get my thoughts clear. :> I'll do one more post.

Visual XSLT may be nice but its setup smells. After a failure in installing I had to reregister VS 2003 with IIS to be able to debug again and I had to repair my Whidbey installation because all components had gone. Guess it's a part of the alpha game.

# November 19, 2003 8:35 AM

Peter's Gekko said:

# November 19, 2003 8:39 AM

JosephCooney said:

Re: XPath - I also find the SelectNodes and SelectSingleNode methods (which are members of XmlNode which pretty much everything in the Xml namespace is derived from) to be very useful. You pass it an XPath expression and get back a list of nodes (for SelectNodes) or a single node (for SelectSingleNode). I believe that creating an XPathNavigator is more performant, and using the more light-weight XPathDocument (rather than XmlDocument or XmlDataDocument) is also supposed to help performance. I'm fairly sure Dino's book covers this. Having said all that I've never noticed any perf. problems with just using SelectNodes and SelectSingleNode.

# November 19, 2003 4:08 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

Dino is pretty short on the XpathDocument class. It's supposed to be very performant. In Whidbey Xpathdocument is far more prominent.

# November 20, 2003 2:17 PM

Paul Gielens said:

Laten we het trouwens maar engels houden, wel zo sociaal.

I know but it wouldn't it be in the interest of te sponsors to attract as much attendees as possible? It would be (in my opinion) a small effort to centralise these meetings.

# November 22, 2003 3:14 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

hi Paul, the next meeting will be in Amsterdam instead of Diemen. The room provided by the sponsor was to small for the amount of people who registered. Centralized ? I'll vote for Utrecht. Still a long way :>

# November 22, 2003 1:50 PM

Kris said:

Hmm,

I'm just around the corner (B&L) and would like to see it... but unfortunately I'm in a meeting till 16.30. Hope to see a report.

# November 27, 2003 1:06 AM

Paul Gielens said:

I'm eagerly awaiting...

# November 27, 2003 10:06 AM

Peter's Gekko said:

# November 28, 2003 1:53 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Good overview, Peter!

Were you the one who tried the user defined types in Yukon in combination with the DataColumn objects in Whidbey? :)

# November 28, 2003 4:38 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

Thanks Frans,
yes that was me and my big mouth :{}. I am trying to work with UDT and the like in VS. The usefull documentation is below zero so it's a lot of trial and (even more) error. If it leads to something usefull I'll turn it into an article for the sqljunkies.

# November 28, 2003 6:00 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Peter: I was the one asking the UDT question :)

More info on the subject would be great! I don't have access to Yukon, so I can't fiddle around with it myself, but information about it would also be great, since as you said, information about UDT's and Yukon is below zero (as if they're not fully decided how to implement it or something)...

# November 28, 2003 1:15 PM

Peter's Gekko said:

# December 1, 2003 1:18 AM

Andrew said:

It's good idea but broken:
>new ActiveXObject('MSComDlg.CommonDialog');
throws error:
>Automation server can't create object.
checked on winxp/2003, running from local machine.
Any suggestions?

Thanks.

# December 3, 2003 3:20 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

There are gotcha's:
- The browser used must support ActiveX. IE does
- The user must have the rights to access the UI. Not always the case.

Peter

# December 3, 2003 4:43 AM

Andrew said:

I'm Administrator and using IE(MyIE;-)...

# December 3, 2003 5:18 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

Setting the security level for the local intranet in IE to high will produce your error. Set the level to medium or lower and you can create the dialog.

# December 3, 2003 5:28 AM

Andrew said:

After I've set up configuration for local intranet
to "Initialize and script AciveX controls not marked as safe", other error encountered:
>The control could not be created because it is not
properly licensed.

Strange :-(
Resume- it will definitely not work in default user
configuration anyway.

# December 3, 2003 5:29 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

It is always tricky to use ActiveX things and stepping out of the browser is something which will give many administrators the shivers. My "solution" does work with security set to the default medium level. All the details are up to MS who implemented the Common dialog ActiveX wrapper.

# December 3, 2003 6:56 AM

Michael Harris said:

'MSComDlg.CommonDialog' is a licensed control. It works from client side IE hosted script only if a Microsoft dev tool (like VStudio) is installed on the client to provide a design time license.

# December 3, 2003 8:05 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

That's clear. Indeed the whole thing doesn't work on a machine without tools. This discusson is not unique

http://www.tek-tips.com/gviewthread.cfm/lev2/4/lev3/29/pid/351/qid/53330

Which does show a very nice and simple solution. I'll create a new post based on that.

# December 3, 2003 12:34 PM

Peter van Ooijen said:

This post cannot be edited in the .TEXT admin, there is a :

<div style='visibility: hidden; width: 0px; height: 0px'>
<input type=file id='fileBrowse'></div>

before the script snippet. Maybe it will stay there in the comment.

IE eats the div and the .text editor actiually does show an input button.
Makes you quite desperate.

# December 4, 2003 3:52 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

Received my new membership card the day before santa Claus.Good job ! Last years card got me a MSDN-lunchbox at the PDC.

# December 4, 2003 2:39 PM

Music Free said:

Well, you could move your blog over to weblogs.asp.net, everyone is off topic there anyways. Alan Dean generally never posted on topic either. Oh well, I guess some people don't really want to blog on .NET and provide anything usable to the rest of the community. My recommendation is to open your personal blog somewhere else and provide a link to it from your dotnetjunkies blog.

# December 8, 2003 9:17 AM

Peter van Ooijen said:

Ok, you're not interested. But I don't understand the context.
Peter

# December 8, 2003 2:35 PM

Rick Ross said:

You wrote "Delphi still does have constructors, their implementation is limited to the dispose pattern."

What you meant was destructors.

Destructors in Delphi for .NET implement the Dispose pattern. This allows for the easy migration from existing VCL applications to .NET.

I'm not sure why you see this as a negative thing. What more would you want to do in a destructor, at least in .NET? Would you want it to call GC.Collect every time a destructor was called?

Another item to note is that its not "strictly" but strict protected or strict private.

Again, this is not a bad thing. I never really liked Delphi's definition of private and protected. Notice that this will not effect existing code.

One thing to remember is that one of the goals of Delphi for .NET is to make it trivial to go from VCL to .NET. Do you know of any other language that allows *GUI* applications to work on both platforms?

At BorCon 2003 in San Jose, California, Borland demonstrated taking a Delphi 1 application and recompiling and running *unchanged* in Delphi for .NET. Really impressive.

As for the presentation, who actually did the demos?

# December 14, 2003 8:42 PM

Arno van Jaarsveld said:

Hi All,

A little bit disapointing that peter decided to form and base his opinion on just this one session. The session peter was talking about is on of the many sessions during the last CttP (Conference to the Point) of the SDGN. The problem with the presenters laptop was a low video signal, and a extremely long vga cable, resulting in a flickering beamer due to signal loss. So in the middle of the presentation we decided to change laptops and Dennis (the presenter) finished his presentation on mine. Off course my laptop install was a little bit different than his and that showed in his presentation but i think he still did a great job. You go ahead and try being productive on your someone else's laptop...

And for the record I totaly disagree on peter's oppinion about Delphi8 from a language point of view.
Delphi is and hopefully will be my first language of choice and lets wait before there's actually a finnished product before we start ventilating oppinions.

Blog on

Arno

# December 15, 2003 3:53 AM

Peter's Gekko

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