Sasha Sydoruk

So, just as I was about to complain about how Scott Hanselman got me hooked on his I-can-stop-listening-to-this-podcast-any-time-I-want-I-just-don’t-want-to-right-now aka Hanselminutes and then left for his vacation and left me high and dry, desperately craving the sweet embrace of the new Hanselminutes, I noticed the new entry on my RSS reader in uTorrent.

There is no way – I thought to myself. He just came back from Africa. He did have enough time to come up with a new podcast. Must be something not very good…

But good it was. In fact, it was awesome. In his new podcast “Language Extensibility”, Scott talks about the future of IronPython and ASP.NET. This subject interested for quite a long time now. My interest was initially sparked by this white paper and this blog post. I tried to look for more information but came up with nothing.

Before you start with the “Language Extensibility”, I would strongly recommend listening to “Dynamic vs Compiled Languages” first, because it provides a lot of useful information that feeds nicely into the following podcast.

Once again, Scott proved that he knows his stuff and if you want to know what is happening in .Net world, his podcast is the podcast to listen to.

Thank you Scott!

Just to vent some of my frustration. Infragistics is a real piece of crap. If you even think about using it for your web project please stop right now. Get yourself Telerik controls and meet your deadlines, go home happy and proud of your work, kiss your wife and hug your kids.

But, if you enjoy debugging weird errors in somebody else’s code, horrible documentation, emailing to a non-existent support and reading support forums devoid of any helpful answers, go ahead and get Infragistics. And you know, while you are at it, sign up for an AOL account as well.

Just to make sure my message is clear – I hate Infragistics with passion. Infragistics is the Visual Source Safe of web controls for asp.net.

UPDATE:

Downgraded the ranting level to YELLOW.

Well, it looks like the journey is over.

Mike Gunderloy of Larkware fame is trying to remove Microsoft and everything Microsoft related from his life.

Choosing to use Microsoft software as the basis for my work, whatever else it may do, contributes to the growth and health of Microsoft. It supplies funds for Microsoft’s continued initiatives in the area of intellectual property and DRM. And it seems to me that the ultimate consequence of these initiatives will be to limit my own freedom of action, both as a software user and a software developer.

This is taken from A Fresh Cup - Mike’s new blog that details his exploration of non-Microsoft technologies as a way to earn a living. So far it looks very intriguing and I am already subscribed to the feed. Currently Mike is evaluating Ubuntu and Ruby on Rails.

This reminds me somewhat of Softies On Rails. The guys from Softies On Rails were originally ASP.NET developers that later completely switched to Ruby On Rails and never looked back. Here is the post - Rails is (officially) life-changing. And here is some more - Why Rails? Part 1: Microsoft pisses me off, Why Rails? Part 2: All the Cool Kids Are Doing It, Why Rails? Part 3: Ruby, Why Rails? Part 4: Because It’s Free and Why Rails? Part 5: Because I Can Test It.

A Fresh Cup looks like it is going to be a great blog and I can’t wait for more posts. Good luck Mike on your journey and make sure you blog the details.

It looks like the new version of the Enterprise Library will have a new block – Validation Application Block. It will provide common validation rules that apply to primitive data types.

What a great idea, hopefully this would be as easy and nice as BO validation in RoR. One of my problems with ASP.NET validators is that they force you to put business logic into UI. And this leads to the duplication of the validation logic. Now you have to write your validation logic in your business object and in your UI. That is if you ever do… I have seen so many examples where people just put all their validation into UI and never replicate it on the BLL. Not cool… I like the Rails way better. You always start out by coding validation logic in your BO, and UI knows how to pick up all the validation errors and display them to the user.

From the post:

The Validation Application Block will include a comprehensive library of common validation rules that apply to primitive data types. For example, we’ll include rules like string length, numeric range, date range, regular expressions and so on. However your applications will typically deal with more complex objects such as Customers or Orders (yes, here at Microsoft we assume every application is based on Northwind ;-), so while the built-in Validators should be great building blocks, you’ll need to do some additional work to specify how these primitive rules apply to more complex objects. We plan on letting you do this in two primary ways: in configuration (which is ideal if you want the rules to be easily changed after deployment), or in code (which allows better encapsulation of rules and ensures the behavior won’t change unless the code does).

The complete post is here.

On November 19th, I took and passed 70-536 exam. The exam was not very difficult. Of course there were some questions that made me think for a while, but other than that the exam was quite good. The question breakdown from MSDN was quite accurate; so make sure that you pay good attention to security, data compression, file IO and serialization.

For my exam preparation I used the following materials:
1. The book
2. Transcender
3. A lot of hours reading MSDN. A lot of the information can be found only there.

My next step is 70-528. I already have the book and already past chapter 2.

While working on an ASP.NET page I had to read and write some hidden variables in my code behind.

I figured I could use the following:

Page.RegisterHiddenField(”test”, “testvalue”);

This would create a hidden variable in my HTML which I should be able to access with JavaScript like this:

document.getElementById(’test’).value

The task seemed easy, and I figured it would take around 10 minutes to get everything working. Only there was one problem. The hidden field was rendered like this:

<input type=”hidden” value=”testvalue” />

What is the problem here? Id and/or name are missing! And because of it, I cannot access this variable in my JavaScript.

What is the solution? Use HtmlInputHidden. Here is how to use it.

<input type=”hidden” id=”test” runat=”server” />

And in your code-behind you can assign correct values:

test.Value = “testvalue”

Make sure that the HtmlInputHidden is registered.

protected HtmlInputHidden test;

Now, I encountered this problem in ASP.NET 1.1; In ASP.NET 2.0 this problem has been resolved. Using Page.RegisterHiddenField will produce something similar to this:

<input id=”test” name=”test” type=”hidden” value=”testvalue” />

But, Page.RegisterHiddenField is marked as obsolete, so you can still use it, but it is not recommended. What is the recommended solution?

ClientScriptManager.RegisterHiddenField(string hiddenFieldName, string hiddenFieldInitialValue)

This is the recommended way to work with hidden variables in ASP.NET 2.0. To find out more information - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.clientscriptmanager.registerhiddenfield.aspx

I have blogged earlier about Streamlined. Streamlined is a great way to very quickly create admin portion of the site in Rails. Well, it seems like .net and asp.net people are trying to achieve similar results.

Meet SubSonic. It used be known as ASP.NET ActionPack, but recently it was renamed to SubSonic.

Subsonic helps you create DAL classes and UI in ASP.NET. It looks very promising and I can’t wait to try it out in my project.

SubSonic support SQL Server, MySql and Enterprise Library. It works only with ASP.NET 2.0    

Another great post from Scott Guthrie about IIS 7.0.

I can’t wait for this thing to come out; but it will be a while. IIS 7.0 will be available with Vista Client for development, but the Vista Server will come out in a year. And that means you can play with it, but you cannot really deploy on it. It seems though that discountasp offers some hosting on IIS 7.0.

Anyways, the good news is that you can create more than one site in Vista Client and you can also have more than 10 connections.

or using Digg terminology - Joel vs DHH smackdown!!!

If you didn’t read Joel Spolsky’s “Language Wars”, please read it now. And now go read DHH’s response to the article -  Fear, Uncertain, and Doubt by Joel Spolsky.

I happen to like both technologies involved in the smackdown. ASP.NET and C# pay my mortgage and Rails is really enjoyable to work with and I am planning to spend more time learning it.

Currently I am concentrating on C# because I am studying for MCTS 70-536 - .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation, but when “Agile Web Development with Rails—Second Edition” comes out - I will buy it.

I am very interested to see how this story develops…

I see this debate coming up all the time. People will spend a lot of time arguing benefits of certain tools and languages instead of actually working on the project. Did I say people? I meant me. I spent huge amount of time trying to decide whether to write a web site in Ruby On Rails or ASP.NET that it is not even funny any more.The outcome?

Finally, I decided on ASP.NET 2.0; but I did waste a couple of months going back and forth between two environments. The good thing the project was my own pet project so the delay this big was not a problem.

The article also highlights the language choices for Copilot - C#, ASP.NET and C++ for Windows Client. But what is even more interesting is the development environment for FogBugz - Wasabi.

“FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.”

I think Joel mentioned this before.

Anyways, the article is really great, just like everything else from Joel. You might not agree with everything Joel preaches, but he definitely makes you think twice about the things you always took for granted. Go read the article - Joel on Software