Rants Tagged with “.NET”
I have started to dig into the Beta 1 of Avalon now that I have a bit of free time and a couple of article commitments. I was surprised to find that there isn't an Avalon solution for something like a tree view yet. If I have time, i'll be writing one...otherwise maybe
Microsoft will notice the big hole and patch in later betas. If anyone knows of a project like this, please let me know.
For the new wildermuth.com, I have the following requirements:
- Keep ease of use to find my blog, rants and questions
- Add registration to eliminate the amount of spurious quesitons I have submitted to me.
- Allow registered users to personalize the site.
- Simplify searching for questions and rants into single point of search.
- Enhance maintenance pages to allow someone but me to maintain the site as needed.
- Keep all old URL's working even as I change the structure of the site.
- Eliminate my home-grown "MasterPages" solution and use the newly built one.
- Allow users to answer questions, submit code snippets, add book reviews, etc.
- More easily support more than one syndication model (RSS, Atom, etc.)
- Keep performance of site same or better than existing site.
- Improve data integrity by moving to a better backed-up data store.
- Include a "client" area to allow my clients to better use the site as a communications medium.
- Improve the "Book Owners" area to make it easier for owners of my book (or forthcoming books and articles) to get sample code and electronic copies of the books/articles.
I am sure there are more, but those are the core of the new requirements. Tune in tomorrow to start matching requirements with solutions...
Back in the day when ASP.NET shipped, I converted this site from the existing ASP based site. As an exercise to really bring in some new features I've wanted and to lose the ASP legacy (I actually still have a page or two that uses string concatenation to put together HTML Tables), I want to do a full re-write of the site.
I use a process where I begin with the requirements, then the data, then the code (no big surprises there). My goal is to blog through each stage of this process and hopefully help my readers learn a bit about an ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2.0 conversion.
Look for rants about this process starting as early as today!
I found it very interesting in a little test that the Flags attribute doesn't seem to change the way that the CLR numbers Enumerations. So that this enumeration:
public enum UnFoo
{
Foo,
Bar,
Quux,
Foobar
}
this code ends up not working as i'd expect:
Foo f = Foo.Foo | Foo.Bar | Foo.Quux;
Console.WriteLine(f.ToString());
this results in:
Foobar
This happens because Foo = 0, Bar = 1, Quux = 2, Foobar = 3, and Foo | Bar | Quux | Foobar = 3. So if you use a [Flags], make sure and number the enum properly:
[Flags]
public enum Foo
{
Foo = 1,
Bar = 2,
Quux = 4,
Foobar = 8
}
Another interesting thing is that I like that Enum.ToString() and Enum.Parse() do the right thing with Flaged enumerations:
Foo f = Foo.Foo | Foo.Bar | Foo.Quux;
Foo pf = (Foo) Enum.Parse(typeof(Foo), f.ToString());
if (f == pf) Console.WriteLine("They equal!");
It's cool that when you -OR- flagged numerations together that the Enum.ToString() turns it into a common delimited list. How cool is that?
I've spent much of the last three days with a client helping them figure out their domain model for their new system. What's been a delight is using the VS 2005 Class Diagram to capture the ideas. Its been very easy to throw up on a projector and describe the relationships between the data. While we're actually not using it to design the system, it was much easier to use the Class Diagram in VS 2005 than to fire up either
Enterprise Architect (which I like a lot for UML/Database work) or Visio. Two Thumbs Up!
I have been struggling and playing with RAD'ing some quick and dirty pages for the
ASP.NET 2.0 conversion of this site. They are Admin pages so they aren't hit often. Quick and dirty seemed to be the perfect solution. I did run into some speed bumps, but now that I understand what they wanted from me, they are working great! I am a big fan of the GridView/FormView/DetailsView controls. Check them out if you get a chance.
My article on upgrading tips for your Typed DataSets is up on DevSource. Take a look!
This new property (*not* event), allows you to wire up clientside code to be executed before the server-side onclick is handled. In the old days we had to do this manually. For example, this is how you would hook up a simple confirmation dialog:
<script language="jscript" type="text/jscript">
<!--
function deleteConfirmation(event)
{
if (!window.confirm("Are you sure?"))
{
window.event.returnValue = false;
}
}
-->
</script>
<asp:LinkButton ID="deleteButton"
runat="server"
CausesValidation="false"
CommandName="Delete"
OnClick="deleteButton_Click"
OnClientClick="deleteConfirmation()"
Text="Delete">
</asp:LinkButton> This allows you to cancel the server-side event if the user says nope! Cool!
This probably isn't entirely correct since I am just looking at the output (e.g. the database rows) to determine this. For each object in profile (i.e. Users), there is a single row in the aspnet_Profile table. This table is made up like so:
CREATE TABLE [aspnet_Profile] (
[UserId] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL,
[PropertyNames] [ntext] NOT NULL ,
[PropertyValuesString] [ntext] NOT NULL ,
[PropertyValuesBinary] [image] NOT NULL ,
[LastUpdatedDate] [datetime] NOT NULL ) The three middle columns are used to store the properties and their values. PropertyNames stores a list of properties with hints on how to retrieve it from the String or Binary column. For example:
IsClient:S:0:4:Parent:B:0:-1:LogoUrl:S:4:39:Expired:B:0:-1:Row:B:0:-1:CssUrl:S:43:28:Services:S:71:239: Each section of this string is the metadata about the property:
- First is the name of a property. This needs to map directly to the property names in the web.config file.
- Then the place its to be stored (S = String, B = Binary). Note that the placement in String or Binary form is based on the datatype or the serialization format. XML Serialization ends up in Strings and binary serialization ends up in the binary area. It seems that numbers also end up in binary format.
- Start Position. For a string it's where in the string to start looking for that value. Understand that this will change as the size of the property changes. Using -1 in a Binary stored property seems to indicate that it is not stored at all. For example, the IsClient is a Boolean, but is stored as a string here, but Expired is also a boolean, but since it has a -1 we know it isn't actually stored.
- Length. If the start position is -1, there will be no length. Otherwise this is used to substring out the actual data in the string and binary fields.
As you would expect, the string field may be a mix of XML serialized data and string data. For example, the string field here is stored like so:
Truehttp://wildermuth.com/images/adoguylogo.gifhttp://wildermuth.com/adoguy.css
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<ArrayOfString xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<string>Cell Manager</string>
<string>Cell Manager</string>
</ArrayOfString>
You'll notice that the first four characters are the word "True" which corresponds to the PropertyNames "IsClient:S:0:4:". Likewise I have a property called Services which is the XML Serialized piece at the end that corresponds to "Services:S:71:239:".
So far I like the profile stuff and luckily it is using the common provider model because the one glaring weakness here is searching. Finding all Users with a specific Property value is going to be very very difficult. My plan is to write my own provider that is a specialization of the SqlProfileProvider but normalizing the data into a PropertyName and Value table. I have not dug deep into the ramifications as it has to do with Groups or custom serialized types, but I don't think they will get in the way.
If anyone has any comment on this, I am very open to hear what you have to say.
I am working on a portal project with ASP.NET 2.0 and I am loving it. Lots of stuff is in the box that I need. The project is using VB.NET so I wanted to make sure that everything was Option Explcit On and Option Strict On...but since it is a Web Application, the normal property pages are nowhere to be found (unless I am missing it). If I create any other project type (I think), I can look at the project property pages and see the Compile tab:
Why are web apps treated so differently these days? Can anyone explain how I missed this?
