Arrggh! ASP.NET will not support the component designer . . .

I’ve been following this problem with the ASP.NET designer for a little while, and I voted on the issue in LadyBug.

As an ASP.NET MVP and an ASPInsider I am mighty miffed about the decision not to fix this issue. The component designer is one of the most powerful features in Visual Studio and ASP.NET supporting it is diabolical.

I wonder what other ASP.NET MVPs and ASPInsiders think about this issue. I’d like to plead with the PMs on the web team to reconsider this decision. Surely the increased robustness that partial classes brings to designer serialisation address most of the issues – what could you learn from the Windows Forms team?

Roy does interception . . .

Roy Osherove has just published his interception framework. These posts always catch my interest because I know that there is no perfect solution for this in .NET, you either need to live in a COM+ container and use Clemens’ code, or alternatively rely on real proxies (requires MBRs) or context attributes (requires CBOs).

Roy is using CBOs in this approach which means that ultimately the system is constrained. Personally I think the jury is still out on AOP, a lot of very smart people have gone into it declaring it as the saviour of maintainability of code and come back out espousing the virtues of a more explicit programming style.

One thing is for sure though, the students in my class this week will get a chance to play with all of them!

My hair brained scheme is to use CAS attributes (note: not seriously suggesting you do this), but its really a hack and has severe performance implications. The benefit would be is that you don’t need a specific base class.

Acryonym Watch:

• MBR – Marshal By Reference
• CBO – Context Bound Object
• AOP – Aspect Orientated Programming
• CAS – Code Access Security
• YAA – Yet Another Acronym

Shell Extensibility in Longhorn

I’ve been following in awe the series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) by Raymond Chen about IContextMenu and associated infrastructure.

As a managed code developer this kind of code really scares me. I want to build applications that leverage the Windows shell but I don’t want to pay the price in lines of code. So my question to the Longhorn teams is what is Microsoft doing in Longhorn above and beyond tiles and pop-up toast to open up traditional extensibility scenarios to managed code developers?

In answering that (if you get this message ), I’d like to understand how much tool support will be provided for those scenarios – because quite frankly unless I can drag and drop my way to a shell extension then I think a great opportunity has been missed.

How about a game of Tic Tac Toe?

This little game that Geoff and I are playing reminds me a little bit of thermal nuclear warfare in the classic movie War Games.

Neither of us can accept failure, may I suggest a game of Tic Tac Toe?

Amen Brother! (was: Clubbing the Crystal Dodo)

Leon made a fantastic post on clubbing the Crystal Dodo. To be honest, I haven’t fallen in love with any reporting tools yet. I really want something that behaves more like the Windows Forms designer with flow panels and docking.

Specifically, this would allow me to do some interesting things in terms of laying out categorised detail rows horizontally.

What Tablet PC’s need is . . .

There has been a lot of discussion about Tablet PC’s, here, here and here. To tell the truth I lust after a Tablet PC at least four times a week. Its every time I reach for a piece of paper to explain a concept to someone or go to wipe something on a whiteboard.

Having said that, I regularly survey the offerings from the various hardware vendors and what I have found is that they seem to be under estimating the computing requirements of some of their users.

I’m a software engineer, so I value a few very critical features in my laptop (which I use for EVERYTHING).

• Screen Resolution
• Memory Capacity
• CPU Performance
• Hard Disk Performance

The Tablets are finally starting to support between 1-2GB of RAM – thats great. Now they just have to get the screen to do what my Dell Inspiron 8500 (more than 12 months old) does in terms of screen resolution (1920×1200).

The CPU and hard disk performance is slightly secondary to that, but not much. See because I work with a variety of tools I often need to run a virtual machine, so once I have the critical memory issue covered CPU performance and hard disk performance come into play.

For some reason, the following features seem to get more airtime.

• Battery Life
• Size
• Weight

These issues are a distant second. Battery life is all well and good, but even when I travel I am not that far away from a power point. If the device can survive an hour flight from various major cities on the east coast of Australia I would be happy. If I need more battery life I will buy more batteries.

Size – did I mention I had a Dell Inspiron 8500. Thats a wide screen, the bigger the better, provided it fits in my MVP laptop bag.

Weight – my laptop bag is still not as heavy as my school bag was, and I carry the Inspiron, various cradles for my mobile devices, documents from projects I am working on, and my filofax. If I was any lighter I would think I had left something behind.

So – Robert, in essence, your challenge is to convince Dell to put a digitiser on top of the Inspiron screen.

Ripping MP3/WMA from CD’s you own . . .

Just a follow-up on this post. I haven’t really seen a definitive answer, but is it legal or illegal for me to rip my stock pile of legit store bough CD’s?

Steve “iPod Basher” Ballmer

Still catching up on my blogging. I read this on Robert Scoble’s about Ballmer’s comments about iPod users.

Now I don’t own an iPod (I have a nice new Creative MuVo), but I think these could easily be seen as fighting words.

I know Ballmer has an obligation to play up Microsoft’s role in this space moving forward but I think he should at least acknowledge the ground that was broken by Apple with the iPod in bringing mobile digital music into the mainstream.

Personally, I really like Windows Media Player 10 and the integration I get with the MuVo (very simple and straight-forward). My issue at the moment is dealing with the bandwidth requirements for pod-casting, especially when I am on the road on a dial-up connection like tonight.

Not Smart Enough To Debug It

I can’t believe that I have never seen this quote before. Its getting pasted into my one note.

The “Time Rationalisation” Movement

I’m catching up on my blog reading. Nigel posted this eons ago about a global “internet time”. While we have a timezone that we can all thunk down to (GMT) we don’t share the same working hours.

For me personally, I don’t care about working at night and sleeping during the day. Maybe each hemisphere could take turns working at night, and at the cross over we all stop and have a week long party.

Obviously there are issues for industries that work outdoors, but maybe we’d only sweep the streets half the year?