Brennan’s Blog

A line has formed around building 42 at the Microsoft campus as anxious developers await the release of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. The word on the street is that it will be coming out any time this week so it could be a couple more wet, cold nights in Redmond. Microsoft appreciates the dedication and is hosting a Matrix trilogy projected onto the building tonight to help the fanboys pass the time. I wonder if they had Visual Studio in the Matrix. And what would Neo's code look like? I bet his color scheme would be hot. But I digress.

Ok, so there is no line, that I know of, but I am definitely anxious to start using it. I will just download it from MSDN once it is out. My main need at the moment is the Javascript support that it will provide. I have become accustom to Intellisense in C#, VB and even XML and not having it in while I work with Javascript has made me feel like I am back in a terminal window hacking Perl in vi. I try to get by with as little code as possible because I know it will not be easy to maintain.

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The job market for software development is short on workers lately. When the Dot-com Bubble burst it had a chilling effect on the software development field. College students chose other majors and now there are not enough workers to fill the open positions. This situation has created a supply versus demand ratio that has boosted the salaries of those who are working as web developers. I had thought it was just a temporary phase and that college students would start to get back into the IT majors, but it has not happened yet. And despite offering very compelling starting salaries employers still cannot fill positions.

Last week I had three separate people ask me what they could do to get into web development. I am glad they asked because it is clearly a great time to get started while the job market is slanted heavily in the favor of new hires. I asked one of these people to send me a list of their questions so that I could respond here.

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Developing an ASP.NET AJAX application can be a difficult when the Javascript source is dynamically included with the page. Embedding the Javascript within a page or a user control causes the location of the source to move around which makes it hard to set breakpoints. It also means the code cannot be reused in other pages as easily as an external source file. But the trick is giving the external source file the information it needs to instrument the page, such as defining a variable with the ID of a control. Within a page you could normally set the variable to the ClientID of the control.

<script type="text/javascript">
var contentPanelId = '<%= ContentPanel1.ClientID %>';
</script>

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Visual Studio 2008 already includes some basic support for Intellisense in Javascript. It is actually quite amazing what you can do with it but it apparently does not fully support Javascript source files that are embedded within an assembly. I use this technique with my SmallSharpTools.EmbeddedScripts project. You can see it in action with some of the demos I prepared. It includes a smart server control that manages the script dependencies with helpful design-time support. What would be extremely useful would be a way to have Visual Studio 2008 pick up the script references like normally referenced scripts.

If you agree, and I hope you do, please vote on the feedback item I opened.

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I read HTTP compression in ASP.NET 2.0 by Mads Kristensen the other day and tried it out on a website that is using ASP.NET AJAX. I found that while the development web server run by Visual Studio handles it all just fine, IIS 6 on the server does not. Somehow the process is corrupting the page state. So while I want to use the compression to get what I can for bandwidth savings I had to work around this problem.

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There has been some discussion on using third party assemblies after a post from Scott Hanselman called Some Guiding Principles for Software Development. One of the rules suggests that you should buy instead of build whenever you can while another rule suggests that you should limit the compile-time dependencies on code you do not own. In response to these guidelines the creator of BlogEngine.NET, Mads Kristensen, wrote Think twice before using any third-party assemblies that also encourages not using third party assemblies along with a list of sample scenarios. It appears that he avoids third party assemblies more aggressively than I do. I try to follow a few simple rules when considering a third party dependency.

• Can it be done easily with just the standard .NET Framework?
• Can I get the source code for the project?
• Does the project include sample projects as a reference?
• Is there sufficient documentation available to get started quickly?
• Is the project active with regularly planned releases?
• Is there any significant value in building it from scratch?

There are projects released by Microsoft that meet these requirements, such as the Enterprise Library and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. What I like about these two projects is they are hosted on CodePlex and all of the source code is freely available. There is also plenty of documentation and working sample projects as a part of the installation that make it very easy to get started.

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I have worked with tools like FreeTextBox and TinyMCE which are graphical HTML editors which run in multiple browsers. Developing these applications are difficult because of various browser incompatibilities and shortcomings. For a while the Apple made browser Safari did not have the necessary features for these graphical editors to work. If that were still true today and there was a Sliverlight editor it would automatically work in Safari using the Silverlight plugin which has been ported to the Mac for Firefox and Safari.

Since the Silverlight applications can be developed with C# it can conveniently avoid browser incompatibilities so the effort to produce a WYSIWYG editor would significantly be reduced. And with a Silverlight interface you may be able to add a few additional features that a browser cannot offer with an HTML/JS only solution.

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I have been reading Oren Eini's blog Ayende @ Rahien (great blog, by the way) and he recently mentioned a bug ReSharper that he wants resolved. The product has several bugs which irks me as well. It has such great potential but in so many ways it has been so disappointing.

For example, at one point it started including support for MSBuild. The features looked impressive and since I spend a lot of time working with MSBuild scripts I was interested in leveraging the new features. I use the MSBuild Community Tasks which is a collection of custom tasks that provide functionality which is not included with the standard tasks. One of the tasks is Zip. When I import these custom tasks and reference the Zip task I see an invalid error message because ReSharper ignores the Import directive.

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It won't be long before we can get our hands on the final release of Visual Studio "Orcas" and .NET 3.5. For those of us who did not attend MIX '07 you can still get a sneak peak. I watched Web Development Using Visual Studio "Orcas" by Omar Khan and I am quite impressed with the changes they are going to include.

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I have updated LinkMindr.com with a few improvements. The big change is limiting the tag cloud to just 35 of the most recently modified tags. At the bottom I have a drop down list for all of the tags so users can still access all of their tagged items. This conserves real estate on the page and makes the most used tags more accessible.

As a part of this change I also converted the page to use PostBack events as triggers for the UpdatePanel which is a features of the new ASP.NET AJAX control suite. Previously I had a clever jQuery call handle all of my AJAX functionality but with the latest changes it became easier to handle this functionality with event triggering.

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