Configuration

This is something I confess I should have known a bit more about than I did, it's not *massively* different to the WinForms version. However, as it happens I hadn't ever really used the .Config files, so learning from (almost) scratch it was.

Brilliantly easy is all I could really say - the configuration API makes it a doddle to get stuff in / out of the config. The structure makes sense and the hierarchy is good too.

The fact that you can do config for a given page, or even a sub dir is great stuff. But, onto how the course taught it, basically - started with a basic config file, extended it to show the hierarchy, and then progressed onto how to read and update the data.

We next worked into the Custom config sections, which are pretty cool in themselves, allowing us to write custom sections defined how we want, and how to write the classes to handle it.

The final part of the config lecture was about protecting the config - important if you're storing the connection strings etc!

Overall this was a good lesson - good coverage of what was needed, and showed us how to do basic stuff, but open to reading in more complicated things.

Custom Controls

It must be noted that this is the first of two parts on Custom Controls (though having said that - we never got to the second part - which was classed as a 'if-we-get-there type lesson). I had messed around with custom controls on my "out of office" web site I was working on.

Basically the lesson covered the architecture of the controls on ASP.NET and then onto how to build and use the controls.

We began with a coverage of the Page, viewing it as a control though, instead of the previous overview-y way - explaining what constitutes a Page etc. We next entered the realms of creating custom controls - again - something I've done in the past - in WinForms and briefly in WebForms. The curious thing here was how much time was spent doing it by code, rather than with the designer. I can understand this for the first one or two, but for any complicated control surely it's easier to design it via the IDE - it's a pretty good IDE for doing that!

We covered adding in specific configuration for controls, and how to deal with it, then we covered how to use the ViewState etc.

To be honest a lot of what followed pretty much mirrored WinForms controls - creating composite controls etc adding events and properties. Basically if you can do that, you can do the WebForms equivalent.

This was a good topic for beginning control design, and pretty much applicable to WinForms and WebForms, (I guess with different base classes) but if you're using the IDE it's a pretty similar affair.

So, it's been 2 weeks since I attended the above course in London and said that I would go over it in a bit more depth. I'm at a loose end at the moment and think I'll get right on to it.

Overview.

Firstly, the course is a 5 day course up in sunny/rainy London (cross out for your own experience) run by Developmentor UK (www.develop.com/uk). Ok, the course itself is actually run in the US as well in a variety of locations, and I assume the course is pretty much the same.

The instructor for my week was Niels Berglund, and there were oooh, 12 of us in the class, so not too full. A wide range of abilities there, from those with no C# experience, those who'd develop (and do still) in ASP.NET 1.x and ASP (old skool) and people who'd had little or no ASP.NET experience whatsoever (me). It also stuck with the traditional 'computer' demographic of one female in the group :)

The course is run in a kind of 'university' (or at least my uni) way - albeit in a more compressed fashion - a lecture on a particular topic, followed by a lab session. With the lectures lasting anywhere up to 2 hours, and the labs usually 1 hour.

Architecture.

The first topic is all about the Architecture of ASP.NET, a good place to start - it's always important to learn how the things you're doing work, not just how to make them work.

The information covered in this section was a basic overview of how the interweb works with basic pages, inspecting request / response information etc. Then we expand into dynamic content - which for use is ASP.NET.

A discussion on how the ASP.NET runtime works with IIS (which is handy) - discussing the handler aspect of it etc. Even showing how to write our own Handler (using the IHttpHandler interface).

We then covered the HttpApplication events, BeginRequest etc, and the order they're fired in. Things I've come across with my limited experience of ASP.NET, and good to know the order. Kind of like the Form events I guess, generally made sense.

Next was the usual (and expected) 'Hello World' ASP.NET page :) followed with a discussion over code-behind pages etc, classes, inheritance - stuff you really ought to know before developing pages - of most interest in here was how to use the 'Inherits' tag in the <@ Page> element, which proved useful when converting the default demo aspx pages into code behind pages.

A brief coverage of precompilation and the deployment structure of a site followed and ended the topic. To be honest, I never really thought of the precompilation aspect, whenever I've 'developed' a site, I've always done my usual WinForms technique of SHIFT+CTRL+B, precompiling be default.

Lunch

Sandwiches

Web Forms

The building blocks of ASP.NET, the equivalent to the aptly named 'WinForms'. Basically this topic covered things like the page lifecycle, (events etc), in more detail than before. Basic event handling (again not above how WinForms do it, but with that crazy 'AutoEventHandle' thingy.

Web controls were covered briefly - but then this was the Forms topic, not the controls topic (which was to come later), how to += to the control events - exactly the same as WinForms (ace).

The next area was the ViewState. An area scary to the WinForms developer, an unknown, a there-is-no-equivalent-in-WinForms object...  Topics like disabling the ViewState and even enabling it.

That pretty much covered the WebForms topic, not a huge topic, and a lot of it I sorta knew from my practicing (except ViewState stuff), as they most closely link to the WinForms I'm used to.

The Day Overall?

Fairly slow to be honest, and I guess it's important to be honest about how the day went. I think a lot of the slowness stemmed from the fact that I had messed around with these things before, and from my perspective we were covering the beginning stuff for everyone to get up to a similar standard.

The lab work was pretty easy - again - probably down to my limited experience, and the fairly easy concepts introduced.

Oh yes, two posts, one day, exciting for all you readers out there (hello Steve), so what has happened you ask? Well, Security has happened. Oh yes, Forms based, Windows based, None based. We even briefly covered Passport authentication, (when I say briefly I mean that it was mentioned that Passport auth existed).

I have to say - I'm pretty impressed with the Forms authentication we've (mostly) delved into, it seems pretty powerful - and (fortunately) pretty easy to get into...

I'll probably write about all the topics a bit later on, saying where it went right, wrong etc etc but wanted to dazzle you all (again, a quick nod to Steve), with two posts..

Put a spork in me, I'm done.

Welp, Day 3, and yes things are speeding up nicely, already done and dusted with Validation ( a nice easy topic ) we're onto Data Binding, a big'un. It's good though - these are the issues I had when I started writing my ASP.NET version of the internal Out of Office system. How to view only specific columns etc.

I managed to cope with this in my OOO page by using some controls the company had bought (XCeed UltraGrid (I think)), which gave me an easier and more intuitive (from a WinForms point of view) API. I've always found the DataGrid controls to be unwieldy, but now I'm slightly (emphasis on the slightly) coming around to them...

Next up is security - I'm interested in this a lot - hopefully it'll cover how to allow users to login and link to the Active Directory stuff... (Win authentication etc).. We'll see, fingers crossed etc..

What are my impressions of the course so far?
Well - the first two days were a bit slow to be honest, (a lot of it I had a existing knowledge of) - and our instructor has a nasty habit (though not recently) of going off on a tangent and getting 'lost'. I used to have uni lecturers like that... I didn't go to those courses on a regular basis :) As I said, it does seem to have improved today though... We'll see how tomorrow pans out!

Well, things picked up at the end of yesterday, resulting in a couple of 'lab' sessions - based on the Architecture and the Web Forms aspects. To be honest, the Web Forms is certainly the stuff that interests me the most...

I'm currently working on getting the labs stuff setup on this machine - which will give me more opportunity to practice - I have run into SQL Express issues though - just got the install - so fingers crossed I can get it working!

Anyhews, today has started with a 'review' period, (hour or so) and now we're onto 'Configuration' (Web.Config etc). Custom controls and Validation are next... Looking forwards to those - I've only tinkered with custom controls briefly...! Never validation!

So, here I am, at the essential ASP.NET 2.0 course run by developmentor. This is a course I won from the DevWeek conference I attended ooh, 4 months ago now... exciting stuff.

Why did I choose ASP.NET over say WPF, C# 3.0 etc? Well - basically I wanted to get experience in the 'other half' of .NET, the bit I feel I'm missing.

Anyhews, so far - Day 1, seems to be going ok, we're starting slowly with the architecture of ASP.NET - important I guess if you actually want to be able to code properly you gotta know the basics. It is a 'slow' bit, as there is little to no coding at the moment. Though I suspect this will increase soon!

More info later....

Has anyone else seen this message? It appears when go back to my Visual Studio instance containing my (admittedly too large) solution of 170 odd projects (or maybe it's not too large??).

The mouse cursor goes into 'busy' mode and I basically can't do anything with visual studio (it goes into 'Not Responding' mode - hence the pale look of the screen shot).

I use Sourcegear Vault as my source provider, and also run 'Resharper 2.5'  and the SQL 2005 addins in this instance.

It's really frustrating, and I haven't seen anything online about this, i.e. I have yet to find anyone else who has discussed it. A couple of my colleagues here do suffer from the same problem, so at least I know it's not isolated to me.

Anyone else suffer from this pain?

I've inherited some user interface (UI) code created by another developer a while ago, and it's a pretty standard affair - you know the sort - functional. It doesn't look pretty, but it does what it says on the tin and well, that's all it needs to do. Anyhews, one of the 'core' features of the UI is how a 'set' of controls (nicely wrapped in a panel) are displayed based on the selection of a drop-down box.

Now, one of the inherent troubles with this design is the way these panels are displayed - one behind the other. This makes for interesting times when using the WinForms Designer. Specifically what I had done was move one of the panels (we'll call 'A') to see the panel behind it (sticking with convention this shall be 'B'). After doing the editing I needed to, I dragged the panel A back over the B, ensuring the positioning was dead centre - easy to do with the VS2005 designer.

So, time to start the form, ahh. Panel A is visible, B is invisible, no matter what the combobox says. Curiously, it doesn't show anything at all, just a blank panel. This isn't good - I didn't really want to have to undo all my changes. Needless to say - a long drawn out procedure of checking my code, running through the debugger began.

Yes, the panel was having it's visibility changed:

panelB.Visible = true;

but, stepping through the debugger, the actual value wasn't changing... Why not??!!? Ok, has my code made it gone wrong? - lets try seperating the panels, and putting them next to each other -> start debugging -> works fine... hmmm, ok retry dragging B back into position. Debug. @#$%!! Not there again. What's going on??!

Then suddenly it hits. It is me, when I've been dragging the panels, I've been dragging panel B not over panel A, but into panel A. Panel B was actually inside Panel A. Whooops. I guess because the size of the two panels was exactly the same I couldn't see the fact that B was inside A. The solution - ensure that neither was in the other, then set the Location property of both to be the same, rather than drag it.

Nuts.

Recently I've downloaded the 'Orcas' Beta 1 release of Visual Studio, so I can play around with .NET 3.5 and the new Visual Studio. I chose to install this on a VPC, good practice and all!

So I setup a Vista Enterprise VPC, from scratch, got it all setup, added it to my companies domain and then set about installing Orcas. Then I ran into trouble, I kept on getting an error when attempting to install:

Return from system messaging: The service cannot be started

I searched through many a google result, many a 'Live search' result, but to no avail, I found lots of people who had, had different problems installing, but no-one had mentioned my problem... The question really was; Which service wasn't running? Obviously this would have been easier if the error message had actually mentioned this!

I found a lot of people saying that they needed to install the vista updates from the Orcas CD, so I tried to do this, but again got the 'Service cannot be started' message. WHAT SERVICE!!!!

Right, ok, these are 'updates' to vista, so the liklihood is that it's in the Windows Update, so I can at least give that a go... Start -> Windows Update, Error! This isn't good - have I damaged Vista in some way??? Best hope not... Fortunately this time I got an error code - ( though admittedly I've forgotten it here :( ) - however the help on Vista found the error code perfectly, and stated that the Windows Update service was stopped.

Ok, restart it then - Services -> Windows Update Service -> Disabled... Disabled? Marvellous, then it suddenly clicks into place, presumably this is the service that .NET 3.5 and Orcas have been complaining about, and the service is disabled as a policy of the company.

Right, so remove the VPC from the domain, and stick it into a workgroup, reboot, Windows Update - YAY - we're back in business.

Now running the Orcas setup it appears to be running, and yes, literally as I just typed this the 3.5 framework has been installed, so fingers crossed the rest will work just fine.