Sydney .NET User Group

I went out to North Ryde tonight to attend the other Sydney .NET User Group run by Adam Cogan of SSW. There were quite a few presenters and lots of content.

Tatham Oddie did a piece on the ASP.NET Pipeline focusing in on HTTP handlers. It was cool to see his implementation of a URL mapping which gets rid of the URL query string uglies that most sites have today by intercepting hits to URLs with special extensions and maps them to an *.aspx file with a query string (invisible to user). Its actually extremely close to the implementation that Scott Watermasysk uses with .Text and is far more effective that the “Rewrite” approach.

Scott McColloch spoke about using the provider model in DotNetNuke to modify the HTML editor to use structured text instead. DotNetNuke is definately coming along and is a compelling beast. Sometimes I think that the entire ASP.NET team exists only to provide the infrastructure that underpins DotNetNuke which is what the rest of the word uses (well not really, but almost :P).

There were more presentations on some recommendations for structuing complex projects in VS.NET and dealing with the dependency issues, and on MS Access migratation, I’ll cover them in another post. All in all it was a good night! Thanks Adam! 

Code Builders - Feature Creep

Its looking like my post about code builders struck a nerve (read the comments). A few people were concerned that the builders could be used for evil, and I think my choice was poor - although XPath is probably something you would put in as a literal since changing the XML contract is not a minimal change anyway.

One of the comments was how the builders would appear to the developer as they typed so I did up this mock up. I kinda think its between this and smart-tags, I’d go for smart-tags in a heart beat if they could be triggered via the keyboard (can they?).

Not much different eh? And the example is fairly limited because a single method call might have multiple arguments, and more disturbing - how would this look over multiple lines. That definately needs to be thought about some more. If the caret was in a region of text that had one of these “hats” then you could do something like CTRL-DOWN to expand it out and get focus set appropraitely in the balloon.

Anyway - more food for thought.