Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in May 2006

Crash and Burn in the VS.NET Solution Explorer
May 30, 2006 @ 9:11 pm

I got a nice scare today in the middle of some project work when all of the sudden the Solution Explorer decides to GPF anytime it's accessed.

11 comments

Problems with reliably retrieving DOM element bounds in FireFox
May 30, 2006 @ 2:10 am

I've been having lots of problems with retrieving reliable element bounds for a

tags in code after making changes to the content of the

. It turns out FireFox is having some timing issues when updating content and some workarounds are required to get reliable bounds information.

8 comments

Reliably adding Controls or Markup before or after an ASP.NET Control?
May 28, 2006 @ 1:32 pm

Expanding on yesterday's problem with markup script and using Control.Control.Add() I'm trying to find some way to override rendering of a control, from an external control (an Extender in this case). Here are some thoughts, but unfortunately no solutions...

9 comments

The Controls collection cannot be modified because the control contains code blocks (i.e. <% ... %>).
May 27, 2006 @ 9:29 pm

Got bitten today by the 'The Controls collection cannot be modified because the control contains code blocks (i.e. <% ... %>).' error that doesn't let you modify the Controls collection of the page if there's script markup on the page.

44 comments

Getting access to the Head tag in Master Pages
May 26, 2006 @ 3:52 am

One thing that took me a bit to figure out is how to give Content Pages access to the head object which lives in a MasterPage. In some situations I've needed to add custom styles and there's no easy way to do this directly inside of a content page. Here's a workaround to do this by another content panel in the header of the masterpage to push header support to down into the content pages.

40 comments

Vista Beta 2 on VPC - no way
May 25, 2006 @ 1:04 pm

I installed Vista Beta 2 on VPC the other day and had high hopes that it might be a workable solution, but there's no way. Performance of this setup is just absolutely pathetic... I can't think of anything else to do to optimize.

18 comments

Speaking at the Portland Dot Net User Group on May 31st
May 24, 2006 @ 1:54 pm

I'll be speaking at the Portland Aread Dot Net Developers group on May 31st. The topic is Building a reusable ASP.NET Toolbox which is a mixture tips and tricks and a dozen or so components that should be part of any project.

2 comments

Taking a look at Nikhil's Script#
May 24, 2006 @ 3:07 am

Nikhil has posted a new Script# compiler that allows writing C# code to generate JavaScript code. The idea is to map JavaScript functionality into a special library and use a custom compiler that can spit out JavaScript. This idea has some bright potential in light of the ATLAS strategy and could provide some powerful alternatives for interacting with ATLAS client controls.

12 comments

Unique CommandBar Hell
May 23, 2006 @ 6:12 pm

I'm still in CommandBar hell trying to connect to the right "Context" command bar in a Visual Studio Add-in that needs to pop up ontop of table cells in the ASP.NET Editor.

1 comment

A few Help Builder Updates...
May 23, 2006 @ 1:07 am

I've finally gotten around to adding a few new feature requests to Help Builder over the last couple of days. I also ended up fixing a few bugs that should have been fixed some time ago - if only I listened to customers more quickly

2 comments

First Look at Expression Web Designer
May 22, 2006 @ 9:49 pm

Played around with the new Expression Web Designer and I'm pleased to say that it looks very promising. It's pretty rough around the edges at the moment, but it seems to have the right focus and mixture between being user friendly and providing strict support for standards.

3 comments

Web Application Projects and Web Deployment Projects are here
May 22, 2006 @ 8:55 am

A few weeks back Microsoft released V1 versions of Web Application Projects and Web Deployment Projects, which are a couple of tools that most serious ASP.NET developers need to check out and get familiar with. They address a number of short comings with the stock compilation and deployment models in the shipping version of Visual Studio 2005 and bring back a sense of sanity to these areas of development.

45 comments

ReflectionPermission requirements in anything but Full Trust in ASP.NET
May 20, 2006 @ 5:30 pm

I ran into a bit of a revelation today when I got a message from a customer who had been running our Web store in development and ran into a number of issues when deployed on the server. As it turns out the ISP had turned down security to low and this is causing the application to fall down all because a lack of Reflection permissions on protected types...

7 comments

From Web Application Projects to stock ASP.NET 2.0 Projects
May 18, 2006 @ 11:19 pm

There's not going to be a lot of need to do this - go to stock ASP.NET 2.0 projects from Web Application Projects, but I ran into a situation today where I needed to double check some behavioral differences between the two so I actually took a good sized project and moved it back to stock projects. Surprisingly this process wasn't too bad.

2 comments

Sql 2005 install gone bad...
May 18, 2006 @ 5:22 pm

I thought to start the process of updating my online server to use SQL 2005 today, but as usual nothing ever goes smooth on my end... Sql installed Ok, but some of the support services and the client tools didn't and that's causing some problems...

15 comments

Getting the ASP.NET Designer to persist changes from Child Collection Items properly
May 16, 2006 @ 7:25 am

One thing that really bugs me with Visual Studio and the way the designers work is that it's often pretty complicated to force the designer to update itself and persist changes in the designer to the underlying code. This is true in both WinForms and ASP.NET but more prominent in ASP.NET.

3 comments

ActiveSync Manager and Constant disk access
May 15, 2006 @ 1:27 pm

Anybody ever notice what with the ActiveSync manager installed your hard disk is in nearly constant motion?

8 comments

Collection Properties, Child Items and Page and Parent References in ASP.NET Custom Controls
May 13, 2006 @ 7:37 pm

I've been struggling with a way to get a reference to the Page and Parent property in a collection published on an ASP.NET Custom Control. Seems this should be trivial - but collections loaded from the page loading child controls behave a little different than other child controls.

5 comments

Intellisense Code Snippets in Visual Studio 2005
May 13, 2006 @ 3:29 pm

At DevTeach several people were coming up asking about the Intellisense Script Snippets I was using - specifically the trivial but highly useful property injection snippet. Here's how snippets work and the actual property snippet.

3 comments

Response.End(), HttpModules and ASP.NET 2.0
May 10, 2006 @ 1:46 am

I got zinged today by a small change in the ASP.NET runtime that has Response.End() no longer short circuiting the HttpApplication Pipeline completely. It turns out the behavior change is actually a good one, but looking at the ASP.NET implementation is still leaving me scratching my head of how it's supposed to work exactly.

5 comments

Extender Controls: Extending Controls with new Properties
May 05, 2006 @ 4:51 pm

I've been rethinking some previous design choices in the light of using Extender Controls - controls that attach behavior to existing controls and provide functionality that otherwise requires inheritance.

3 comments

Designer support for Complex Objects on an ASP.NET Control
May 04, 2006 @ 9:19 pm

I created a set of ASP.NET controls today that needed to add a complex property to the control. ASP.NET has great support for this sort of thing, although finding the right attributes to set is not exactly trivial. Here is some information on one of the ways you can do this.

9 comments

Getting the Context Menu CommandBar for the ASP.NET designer in Visual Studio?
May 02, 2006 @ 12:36 am

In trying to create an Add-in I'm running into problems reliably capturing the command bar that is displayed in the ASP.NET visual editor. I can get the base CommandBar (Context) but it doesn't work when Tables are active and selected.

Some things you lose when using Web Application Projects
May 01, 2006 @ 2:14 am

I've been using Web APplication Projects for a while now and I'm pretty happy with them. But to be sure there are a few things that you lose of the convenient stock ASP.NET 2.0 File Project model.

19 comments