Manuel Abadia's ASP.NET stuff - Monday, November 27, 2006

Visual Studio.NET 2005 has a really cool feature called debugger visualizers. I provide an introduction to this feature and I talk about a set of debugger visualizers I created for the .NET data structures.

I have been taking a look to some compiler tools and I found ANTLR, that seems to be pretty good and it has a full blown IDE that kick ass, ANTLRWorks!

A long rant about the current incompatibilities between browsers and the CSS specification.

This posts completes the Microsoft AJAX library OOP enhancements, giving a lot of information that will be needed to fully understand the following posts about Components and Controls, Binding, Actions, the Runtime infrastructure, xml-script and more.

The health monitoring system is a cool new feature of ASP.NET 2.0. This post can help you to understand what is it, how to configure most of it and hopefully you'll end up using it in your applications.

Finally I have started to look at the Microsoft AJAX Library (Atlas).

This post is an indepth look at the OOP features of Atlas with a lot of internal details of the implementation.

I was going to start posting about Atlas, but as you have probably read here, now Atlas has a new name and the next version will have some changes to reflect the new product name.

I think it is better to wait for a few days to see if a new Atlas version gets released in order to create samples that work with the latest version. If the next version does not get released soon I'll start posting about atlas anyway so stay tunned.

NDoc was the de facto standard to create documentation for .NET but it has been discontinued.

Finally Microsoft has created the SandCastle project to provide a decent documentation tool for .NET developers.

I have been reading some books about business intelligence and I give my opinion about them.

On my second day of vacation I bent my ankle playing stepmania so I can't use my right feet for at least 14 days :(

So I'm spending most of the time in the computer (as usual) but without internet access.

I hope to be able to do something unusual at the end of the month...

I'm going on vacation until the end of august.

I'll be here and here most of the time.

Unfortunately I don't have internet access available but I'll be checking my email from time to time.

Of course I take a computer with me so I'll be learning something new this holidays (maybe Atlas or SSIS).

If you can understand portuguese I recommend you to take a look at Luis Abreu's webcasts about Atlas.

Have a nice month

The last post completed what I wanted to explain about data source controls.

As a summary, here is a full list of the posts about data source controls of the last months:

I explained the generalities of data source controls here:
* Data Source Controls - Under the hood (1/4)
* Data Source Controls - Under the hood (2/4)
* Data Source Controls - Under the hood (3/4)
* Data Source Controls - Under the hood (4/4)

The theory about designers is here:
* Introduction to designers
* ASP.NET designers. The ControlDesigner class
* ASP.NET designers. The DataSourceDesigner class
* DataSourceDesigners... Non visual controls?

A custom data source control sample with full design time support:
* A custom DataSourceControl sample
* Creating a custom DataSourceDesigner

I hope you find them useful.

In previous posts I created a custom data source and explained the theory of the DataSourceDesigner class. Now I implement a designer with full design time support for the custom data source control.

I have made a list of a few frequently asked questions about the ObjectDataSource.

Being able to dynamically call an arbitrary method on an object or the ability to get/set any arbitrary property by name at run time is very important when it comes to do some generic stuff. In .NET Framework 1.x the only way to do that was using reflection and that means to do it slow.

Fortunately, the .NET Framework 2.0 introduces a new class that let us to quickly call an arbitrary method without the overhead of a reflection call.

A review of this book that is targeted for a Java audience but the main content can be useful to .net developers too.

In this post I talk about the upcoming release of .NET Framework 3.0, some hints about what I'm doing right now, how design time support is going for the ExtendedObjectDataSource package and a nice tip: how to debug design time stuff (the easy way ;)

Studying all the inner details of the data binding infrastructure and the data source controls pays off. I have created the first DataSourceControl with user interface I'm aware of, the PagerDataSource.

Some MSIL low level tools that could be useful, especially Deblector.

There is a free Http Module that performs XHTML validation for each ASPX pages that is served. I comment my experiences with it and some things like a big TreeView bug in ASP.NET 2.0.