Orcas Beta 2 Features – Split View

In Beta 2, MS have given ASP.NET web forms and controls the Cider treatment. That is – you are shown the design and markup views side by side just as in the visual designer for WPF. This is called “Split View”, and can be extremely useful – unless your page uses controls that don’t behave well in design view. In that case you’re probably going to want to turn them off.

If you need to turn off the default split view, to prevent VS from hanging for several minutes till it’s rendering attempts timeout, then you will need to go into the Options dialog and change the settings. Goto Tools>Options>HTML Designer and select the Source View setting. That will change the default mode that the page will open in. It’s a great improvement on VS2005, where if you double clicked on a web form you had little option but to wait for it to timeout.

If you’ve got a wide screen display, you might want to check “Split views vertically“, to allow you to see more lines of source.

How would I spend my $100?

Joe Duffy is busy at work writing a book about concurrency in .NET. He asks how we would spend our $100, given a choice from a set of topics available. Well, I’d have to spend mine like this:

$5 – (0) Parallel algorithms (Comp Sci., technology agnostic)
$5 – (1) Architecting large scale concurrent programs
$5 – (2) Windows concurrency internals
$5 – (3) CLR concurrency internals
$5 – (4) Windows (Win32) concurrency API best practices
$5 – (5) CLR concurrency API best practices
$5 – (6) Client-side concurrency
$5 – (7) Server-side concurrency
$5 – (8) Reusable concurrency primitives (building and using them)
$5 – (9) Performance and scalability
$50 – (A) Debugging

And here’s why. Because debugging concurrent systems is Ruddy Hard!!!!! I wish I had $200 J

2c/

Formatting in Data Bound Controls

I recently ran across a problem with data bound controls in ASP.NET, where I set the string formatting specification (by the book) and nothing happened. If you come across this problem you are probably missing the HtmlEncode attribute on your column specification. Without this the braces are probably encoded and thus the formatting string is unrecognisable to the control. Consider adding the HtmlEncode=”false” to your binding specifications – it worked for me.