ok i’m a little bit late in jumping on the whidbey bandwagon. Figured it was time to get going and see what exciting things I’m missing. Considering my past with the .NET framework, ASPFree.com was the first website to run the .NET framework back in july 2000 in the pre-pdc release. No visual studio, no intellisense, no web matrix just visual notepad, a lot of reading docs and a command line compiler to get stuff work, people used to call me crazy!. VS.NET 2002 beta was coming along at the time but was a real pile in pre-alpha days. Man were those painful but exciting days. I was really blind to all the pain being in a pre-beta or pre-alpha was all about. That is quickly coming back but man o man VS.NET 2005 pre-alpha release is pretty decent but still is causing quite a bit of grief. Learning new ways can be painful but hey, wouldn’t be fun if it just worked.
I’m going to really complain and say it took me four years to be converted to use those stupid code-behind pages in VS.NET , now MS goes back and gets rid of them by default. For the purist who actually knows what generic’s are and all the other really complicated stuff most newbie developers don’t (me included). I do agree with separating presentation from actual code. I used to be one of those people who said code behind was joke, created extra files and was a PITA to migrate from one machine to another. Now what does MS do, they go back to a more inline code samples. Now re-learning what I used to like really sucks, as it stands now i’m trying to do a simple dropdownlist box to a look up table in sql 2000 database. I can’t even get that to work. OK for those going oh steve, just do a search or look in help. The help isn’t exactly working, I think that is some fix but it’ll get installed later. This has the same feeling as my early days, bugs galore but I’m not going to even blame MS. They CLEARLY state, ONLY install VS build on a machine that can be re-formatted and installed from scratch. To my ignorance or really high hopes my machine wouldn’t be affected, i installed on my laptop and now my outlook express is fried, will read mail but won’t send emails. I can’t post stuff to my blog, for those wondering, i remote desktop to another machine and post this stuff.
I really like what VS.NET has done as far as publishing webpages. For those who know me, I’m an administrator or try to be somewhat a security guy. One of the biggest holes for security is frontpage extensions (IMO). My first impression of VS.NET 2002 was, ok you have this great tool but all I can do to publish is use these stupid frontpage extensions. Sure I’m going to install Frontpage extensions on a internet facing production web server, NOT!. Give me this great developer tool but still rely on 40 year old technology to publish great code that was done in VS.NET. They did also provide mapping UNC paths but ok sure, I want all my developers to publish via UNC path to several development web servers. OK sure! That ain’t real scable in the real world. Along with the really insecure frontpage methods of publishing webpages, VS 2005 FINALLY include FTP publishing similiar to homesite and macromedia editors among others. Brovo MS, this is a HUGE improvment in publishing works. Even includes SSL support. There are many other items but this feature includes the stuff that Web Matrix has built in! Thanks MS…I’m sure someone on the MS team who does Frontpage extensions truely hates my opinion on frontpage extensions. Nothing personal! 🙂
Another *interesting feature* of VS .NET 2005 is these *little* web servers that are built into VS.NET. not sure if these are going to be useful or not. There are a lot of issues integrating *local* copies of a website into IIS that comes with WinXP or W2k3. I tried viewing one of the webpages that I was developing and had a few of these annoying little sessions in my task bar. The jury is still out on this feature but on a scale of 1 to 10, this rates about a 3 in annoying factor. I haven’t played enough to give a strong opinion either way so its cool for now!
In conclusion, it might appear that my first experience is really rocky with VS .NET 2005. Of course its going to be, but I’m clearly aware of the pain it can cause along with all the time rebuilding machines. I really like the new items such as, whiz-bang website templetes is done to have a database driven website in minutes. VS.NET 2005 isn’t even in beta 1 yet, but things are looking promising. Its 1000 times better than the early betas of VS.NET 2002. For now, i’m going to continue playing around trying to get my “content generator” program up and going. For those who can just review products without having something real to work on, I envy you. This content generator is going to allow me to have a web-frontend, create articles and store them in a database. With a little .NET service yet to be written, will pull the content from the database and create a static website. All I have to do then is maintain the database of content. With a *magic* button re-create the website back to static pages. For those who want real articles written by professionals Check out these links.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/codecompilation.asp
( written by a real developer G. Andrew Duthie)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/whidbey/idechanges.aspx
( written by Michiel van Otegem genius who runs ASPNL.com)
Pondering Thought 
Word on the Whidbey newsgroups from the VS.NET team is that they’ve made the code-behind the default again.
Also, until VS.NET 2005 is released, you’re developers may be interested in my tool called WebDeploy. It does damn near everything (except for FP Ext) that can be done in VS.NET 2005. URL is http://weblogs.asp.net/mhawley/archive/2004/04/02/106769.aspx
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anyone ever seen when you try to add a new item that none of the choices show up in the dialog box. i had a hard crash of vs.net 2005 and now none of the *new* items are listed. afraid i’m at the point i’m going to re-install of vs.net 2005
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maybe i’m smoking crack, but to me authenticated+SSL’d WebDAV seems tailor-made for a deployment scenario, since its layered on top of HTTP, so you won’t have to mess with trying to get network shares going if you want to publish from outside of your LAN.
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that is fine solution too, i don’t map shares. However my internet facing servers don’t reside in the same domain nor is there a trust between them as my internal domain. we store content on an internal server and use app center to replicate content. People publish to the internal server and we control replication through that. this saves from having many hands publishing stuff directly to the servers plus using app center allows for replication to the web-farm. Thanks for the opinion!
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When i try to do on the server code page using intellisense. it works but when its integrated into the whole page the imports statement is wrong. i manually added the code in the code page but yeah ok intellisense everywhere sure! enough grief for a while. I’ve made one more step, the webpage now is able to select from a remote database and list in a dropdown box. One cool thing is i’ve been able to get the freetextbox working on a webpage. Still I’m totally lost when using intellisense and the new version of separating code from presentation layer. i’m all for inline code but how in the world does imports statement work in the source pane. stay tuned, baby steps.
This is a positive, i promise. i found this little checkbox that allows for create code file, its the code behind. now i have a clue the difference how to handle inline vs code behind. ok sure your wondering, doesn’t this dude who appears to have a clue not figure this out. well yes its my worst trait, the most obvious is the most difficult to grasp at first but now i get it so. as i said before, i’m more than aware of the patience required to work on pre-alpha stuff. as i said in one of my newsletters on aspfree, "The best trait an impatient person can have is persistance!" i’ll publish the code sample if vs.net isn’t updated sooner. One last *feature* when I use the code using the code behind the page_load event fires twice but when I move the code to inline, things work fine. This is a blast! Stay tuned…
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The reason appears the page was loading twice is the Handles Me.Load part. Once I removed this the page only fired once. Nice feature..
Here is the code snippet from the code behind using vs.net 2005
Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
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That would work on prior VS also. taking the handles out would prevent double firing.
Thanks,
G.
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