Arrived, at last

I think somebody in MS is reading my blog entries :-). I just recieved my copy of VS2005 beta! Thanks, MS! Let me see how the installation goes !

You Too, Microsoft?

I had ordered a copy of the ASP.NET 2.0 VS2005 BETA release two weeks ago. And the order seemed to be in place. After a long 2 week wait, I got a mail from MS that they were out of stock. That is disappointing indeed. I should have been notified the moment I was ordering about the situation.

Somebody needs to teach Microsoft how to handle online inventory?

Hunting Delegates

Delegates was one of the toughest subjects to understand for me in .NET. This was because I found no good article anywhere in my vicinity. All the ones I found just jumped to the technical details blabbering the jargons. I usually do not vote for such articles (who needs my vote anyway!) and do not recommend to my friends either. Writing is a form of expression and if the audience cannot understand (may be I am dump!) what the author has expressed (or trying to express, for that matter), then the existence of such an article itself is to be questioned.

Well, to my luck, I found a really good article on web. I do not the know the author and neither do I remember the site address. I read it once and it just stuck on me. In fact, there was no author's name in it. The article explained Delegates so well that I need not had to read it again. As I have commented in my earlier entry, I am going to present Delegates in our user group meeting. If any of you are interested in knowing about Delegates, then please dive in.

If you are not a member or do not know the direction, please send a note to the our leader, Judy Calla. Her email id is jcalla@pnat.com.

Next Talk on June 2005

I am gonna talk on Delegates on June 2005 in Central Penn .NET User’s Group. This has been long due and I had to put this away for some personal reasons. Now I am back and gonna hit the road!

QueryString - A Cool tip

The exciting thing about my work is that I learn new things. Whenever I learn new things, I get excited :-)

Today I learnt some exciting (weird, may I call it) thing about using QueryStrings in ASPX pages.

When you pass a querystring in an ASP page, and you need to check the same, you go ahead and do:

If Request.QueryString("whatever") = "whatever" Then
'Do Whatever
End If

If the page do not get the querystring "whatever", it wouldn't mind.
BUT, in ASP.NET, the page would throw an expception (Object reference not set to an instance of an object)!!!
So, if you have a scenario in your application where you might not pass the querystring, you might want to do something on this line:

If Not (Request.QueryString("whatever") Is Nothing) AndAlso Request.QueryString("whatever") = "whatever" Then 
'Do Whatever
End If

(MAY BE THIS WAS TO REMIND ME: .NET IS ALL ABOUT OBJECTS. IF THERE IS NO OBJECT, YOU AIN'T GONNA DO A DAMN!)

Have you ever encountered such cases? What measures did you take to tackle them? Please add your two cents.

My First Talk

It was Love At First Sight with User Controls in ASP.NET. And lo! I got a chance to speak about the same at the recent Central Penn .NET User Group meeting. Thanks a billion to Judy Calla!

Also thanks to Giphi for lending me his cool laptop for the presentation.

To Code-Behind Or Not To Code-Behind

A really informative and healthy discussion are in Scott Mitchell's
blog entry. Please have a look at it. http://www.scottonwriting.net/sowBlog/posts/1005.aspx

I would lilke to add my two cents to this one. I would vote my 100%
support to Code-Behind. I consider this as a revolution which happened to
me as a
developer. Whatever the Gurus preach, this has changed my life!

I had this one page developed and running in production for months. And
there was a link on this page, which navigtes the user to another page
(Page2.aspx),
which displays some business related information highly useful for the
end-users. For some reason, this page (Page2.aspx) was very slow and
was tming out.
Our helpdesk was being pestered by the angry users. The DBAs found that
the SQL in the concerned stored procedure was the real culprit and they
wanted some time to
fix the same. The management did not want the users to access the
particular page. The problem came to me and I removed the Link and replaced
with a label which went along "This functionality is not available for
now, for technical reasons...". My bosses were worried about doing
another build, but I convinced them that this is different and they just
needed to copy/paste the aspx file to the production machine.

They did as I told, and they were happy that they did.

See the beauty of the Code-Behind? I had done so many changes to the
code-behind file, and if it was an inline code, I would not what I would
do :-)