So after two days of configuration and moving my articles from my old blog I finally have my new blog set up . I'm still to create my own template, but for now the standard one will have to suffice.

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I haven't played with it a lot but but the most obvious was the far from complete support from the IDE. Given it is not a complete product I'm not blaming MS for it. What I blame MS for is the fact that installing LINQ is a destructive process i.e.: it damages some of the existing features of VS 2005.

For me the One thing that hurt the most was the fact that the refactoring SmartTags stopped working from a keyboard shortcut and that the Refactor option was missing from the context menu of the code window.

Since I could not imagine working without some useful shortcuts I started the process to recover the lost features. I've tried to reset the shortcuts from Tools-Options-General-Keyboard menu but it had no effect. Next I have tried to reset all settings using Tools-Import and Export Settings - no effect. Next there came Google.

I have found and that someone had a similar problem and there was a solution. Few posts from the top there is a 4 steps instruction (which didn't work for me) and than a 5th step which finally worked. I'm putting the stepps I have followed in for your convenience:

1. Start up RegEdit.exe
2. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Packages\{A066E284-DCAB-11D2-B551-00C04F68D4DB}\SatelliteDLL
3. Edit the "Path" value and change it from "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC#\VCSPackages\1033\" to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC#\VCSPackages\"
4. Restart Visual Studio and see if these problems are fixed?
5. Go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE and run devenv /setup followed by devenv /resetuserdata followed by devenv /resetsettings CSharp.

All this stuff makes me wonder. I have been using beta software since I have learned using computers but I cannot remember having this kind of problems. Maybe the betas I use are not as complicated as Microsoft products but hey! They are not developed by the army of developers!

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All of us who have been using any kind of ASP.NET Templated Controls such as FormView, sooner or later come to a problem of extracting value from a field inside a template. For example when you are using a FormView control and want to programatically access a control inside one of the templates. What are the options? You have to resort to some kind of FindControl calls which are way from perfect. I have been thinking about this issue for some time now and I have an idea.

The idea is to change tha way the PageBuildProvider constructs the part of class that represents the ASPX file of your page. (the other one is of course the code behind). So what could be changed? Imagine a situation where you have a page and there is just one FormView on it. The FormView has its templates defined in an ASPX file. What happens now is the ASP.NET framework builds the part of the class given this ASPX file and what we get is a nice intellisense in the code behind telling us that the our class has a field FormView1 of type FormView which of course does not have any knowledge about controls inside the templates. But what if...

But what if instead of the FormView1 being of type FormView, the part of the class constructed from ASPX file provided us with a field FormView1 of type derived from the FormView but with few additional properties which represent controls found inside the templates - in a strongly typed manner.

Now. The benefits of such a solution are obvious mainly compile time type checking.

Is it possible to make ASP.NET 2.0 to provide such a solution? This is a hard question. I have checked the major components that are responsible for the way the classes are constructed now. I haven't gone deep into details but it it looks like some changes inside the PageBuildProvider (or some base classes) would be required. Also a ControlBuilder responsible for building a templated control would have to constuct a whole new class representing our control. I suppose that the major problem lies in constructing such a derived class with all those properties representing inner controls.

So basically I hope MS will/is thinking about making our lives easier and more type safe or maybe some brave developer is willing to try to implement my concept? Either way it would be nice to have such a feature some time in the future.

Some additional considerations include the problem with accessing controls from ItemTemplate of a FormView control when in Edit mode. Another issou would be with controls such as GridView where some of the templates represent a repeating content and not a single data etc...

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I have written few times about the little known features of variuos products etc. Today I will add one more to the list. There is a little known feature that web browsers have that can be very useful...

The feature I'm talking about is the possibility to execute simple (or even complex) Javascript code from the address bar. While reading this go ahead and type something like:

javascript: alert(2+2);

in your brwoser's address bar and hit enter. You will see a messagebox containing the result of the expression passed as the argument to the altert function. A simple calculator, but you can go and create more complex scripts such as scripts modifying some DOM elements.

Here is a script that I sometimes use to get the current DOM of the page - after it has been modified by any user actions/javascripts such as AJAX calls.

javascript: var x = window.open(); x.document.write(document.childNodes[1].innerHTML.replace(new RegExp(/</g), "&lt;").replace(new RegExp(/>/g), "&gt;"))

If the page you are trying to view does not have the DOCTYPE declaration just change the document.childNodes[1] to document.childNodes[0]. I have tested this with IE 6.0 and it seems to work well. For FireFox users there are a lots of plugins available to do the same thing.

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ASP.NET 2.0 comes with a mechanism called two way databinding which allows us to declaratively bind a form element to a property of an object in such way that updates are supported. For the readonly display you typically use the Eval method in your aspx page. For the two way mechanism, you use the Bind keyword (or method?).

Using the Bind keyword is really simple in most scenarios that you encounter, especially if you are using the SqlDataSource control. Problems start to come up when you try to use a more object oriented approach and use the ObjectDataSource control.

Now, still in most cases using ObjectDataSource will not cause you any problems when what u bind is a simple property such as a name of a client i.e.: you have a collection of clients that you bind to a GridView and one of the columns displays the name of the client. To do so you use something like Bind("Name"). The problem arises when you need to bind to a subproperty such as in Bind("Address.StreetName"). This won't work unfortunatelly...

Why it is not possible to perform a two way databinding in such a way, there are discussions over the Internet. BTW: Eval("Address.StreetName") works as expected. So what can we do about it? Of course there is a solution for this problem and it has came to me when I was thinking why there is no such a problem when you use the SqlDataSource control.

The reason why there is no such problem when you are working with relational data is that you are creating an SQL query that is a VIEW of the data that you want to display i.e.: it has all the columns you need and there are no "sub-columns". So what we need to do is to translate this to an object world.

So basically what we need to do is create an object that will serv as a view on our objects and bind to this view object. For example given the aforementioned client object with a name and an address we create a ClientView object that encapsulates our client object and exposes the needed properties such as Name or StreetName. Those properties in turn call on the properties of the client object either directly as in Name or to some nested property as in Address.StreetName.

Making a select method used by the DataSourceControl to return the collection of ClientView object should not pose any problem. When using such a technique I would suggest putting the view classes somewhere outside the domain model since the only reason they exist is to allow for the two way databinding to work so there is no reason to pollute the model.

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Sometimes you really need to debug some part of the application but you don't want to start it. For example you want to debug some lower layer of the application and the startup time takes too long. There is a quick solution for this problem. You can use the Immediate Window from Visual Studio to start a debug session. Just type a class name (with namespace) and a method name you want to call if it is static. Otherwise you have to add a call to constructor in a form of "new" keyword. Just remember to put a breakpoint somewhere

As far as I know this window is not available by default so use Debug/Widnows/Immediate to show it.

The sad thing is that it does not work for an ASP.NET project, but other than that you can use it not only for testing your own methods, but to call methods of the built in classes such as System.DateTime.Now.

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I'm not working with threads much since ASP.NET hides almost all of this complexity from me, but then I'm not working with ASP.NET exclusively. There are times when I need to do some multi-threading. In times like this I'm very happy that there are resources such as this available on the Internet. Currently It is the best article on threading I have seen. A good read.

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For a long time I have been in need of a mechanism that allows me to create an instance of an object without calling any of its constructors like the Activator.CreateInstance does. All this time I have also been aware of the fact that it can be done. My motives weren't strong enough to dig dipper in to the problem, though. Until recently...

On my recent project I have enforced the use of a factory pattern for creating each object so for example to create a Document object we use something like Document.CreateDocument(). To enforce the use of this method, all classes should have a no public constructors declared. So it worked that way for some time now. Recently I have been forced to make some changes to the code and I have found the public parameterless construcor on the class that I have been modifying. A quick scope change to private and no compiler errors - good I thought. But..

Then came the runtime exceptions :-(. A quick memory refresher to remind me that the reason the public parameterless constructor is there lies in the parts of the code which use the late binding mechanisms of Reflection such as Activator.CreateInstance which throws errors in the runtime. I have used this mechanism in MyObjectDataSource control to create objects for insertion. Another place was a simple in house data mapper.

Now my motivation has been upgraded to a level that pushed me to make some investigation and after a while I've found the solution: FormatterServices.GetUninitializedObject. This thingy creates your objects without calling any constructor. Sweet! No more problems for me.

I have also checked the performance of this kind of instantiation and it is very good, much faster than Activator.CreateInstance. The only drawback is that any logic from the constructors is not invoked, but that is not a major issue for me since mostly the objects construced in such a way are data transfer objects. I also wonder WHY Microsoft controls such as ObjectDataSource does not use this technique but forces you to have the parameterless construcor?

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Today I have been struggling with a typical table layed out page. It was a MasterPage with few ContentPlaceHolder controls - one for content, one for menu and few for other things. The problem was that the place holders were inside the td elements and some of the elements were made in such a way that they dropped shadow (background-image) and it was not possible from the content page to override this behavior (at least not in a clean way). First I have tried to override the style which made the cell to have an image at the bottom by adding the style element inside one the contents. Unfortunatelly it is not valid html to do so. Then I have thought about adding a ContentPlaceHolder inside the head element. Unfortunatelly Visual Studio does not provide the ContentPlaceHolder control in the intellisense so I thought that it will not wokr... But it did!!!

What is a very good thing to know is that despite the VS not telling you about it, you can put a ContentPlaceHolder inside the head element. You can work with it just like with any other ContentPlaceHolder by providing default content for example. It can also be used as a place for additional page level style elements. One great feature that VS DOES provide is the fact that in the content page, when you edit the head ContentPlaceHolder, you get the intellisense for the head element so you wont see any divs or other body elements there.

After this discovery I have made a search on google to find if anyone had the same problem and I have found the following: artcle.

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While working on one of the web projects in asp.net that was targeted for FireFox browser only I have found an interesting thing. Take a look at the memory consumption of a FireFox process:

Now, I wasn't doing anything unusual. Just testing how the site looks like in the browser. And I have only used 1 tab and only for this one application. Also the memory consumption got as high as 300mb in few hours. On my machine (1gb ram) FF stopped working around 500mb. So I think that is just one proof for all you FireFox lovers, that not only IE has problems :-P.

BTW: I have sat with one of the FireFox lovers from my company and tuned some caching options but it didn't help :-(.

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