Kevin Daly

Diarist news, fun with .NET 2, and stuff (updated 7/12/06 7:36 am for clarity. No, honestly)

Odds and ends in other words.
Firstly, I'm pleased to say I've tested Diarist with the beta of the MetaWeblog API for MSN Spaces and I can say with confidence that on the basis of those tests, once the latter is released it'll work just fine with the generic MetaWeblog option in Diarist. However, since typing in API endpoints when configurating an account can be just a teensy bit tedious, I'm going to add a specific menu option for MSN Spaces as soon as I know what the RTM endpoint will be.

If none of the preceding makes sense, don't worry. It'll work. No worries.

I have a few new versions of Diarist to get on with: a version to take advantage of the Compact Framework v2.0 (since I've been diving into C# 2.0 in more detail lately I've decided to do more extensive refactoring that I'd originally planned...there's a lot I now have the opportunity to improve), possibly a separate version for Windows Mobile 5.0 (although I'm leaning towards a slightly different approach to that, which I'll have more to say about later), and two Smartphone versions (one v1.0 and one v2.0) - thanks to Stefano Demiliani for that idea.
So that will keep me busy.

I'm currently hunting for cheap ASP.NET 2 hosting, preferably here in New Zealand (it makes contacting telephone support less awkward). Once I've taken care of that I plan to launch a more extensive monument to my ego web site than my current little corner of www.asxconnection.com, where I'll post some tidied up versions of some of my more coherent and useful posts as articles, and include not only software downloads (as now), but also provide RSS feeds so anyone who's interested will know when there's a software update available. I'd better start thinking of domain names (let's all hope I do a better job of that than application names).

Over the past few evenings I've been doing some work with ASP.NET 2 custom controls...I love being able to put control-related Javascript in a normal, civilised script file and include it as an embedded resource (as described in an earlier post - that code by the way works fine with the RTM version).
I had a few hours of confusion when I was converting a date input control that adjusts itself to the local culture settings: since it's a composite control I thought it would be reasonable to make it inherit from the new CompositeControl class. Then I couldn't understand why it kept cloning itself in the designer...sort of control cancer. Eventually I decided that it was a side-effect of the fact that most of the child controls are actually added to the Controls collections of three placeholder controls - by changing which ones I add which controls to I'm able to change the order in which the controls are rendered quite easily. But I think that was throwing off the designer and causing them to be instantiated again if I sneezed.
Anyway, it's working fine now (but back to inheriting from WebControl and implementing INamingContainer itself)

Hidden gem of .NET 2.0: the use of Predicates with generic collection classes. That basically lets you write search queries (among other things) against a collection of objects - you don't even have to wait for LINQ. I could have done with that about six months ago.

Current favourite VS 2005 feature: DataSet/DataTable Visualizers. These are already being a great help to me at work right now (well, not at this very moment, because I'm at home, but you know what I mean). Being able to see the contents of a DataTable in row/column format seems like a simple thing, but it's a huge boost to productivity. It also cuts down on my use of excessively colourful language in the work place.

Lastly, I'm hoping to but a Windows Mobile 5.0 device soon but aside from seasonal poverty, one problem I've found is that while the Jasjar is almost a perfect match for my ideal specifications in some respects (VGA, keyboard, all the wireless options covered, and works with GSM networks and therefore fits with my goal to move back to Europe early next year), I'm concerned by what I've heard about it being pretty consistently slow, and the dearth of usable RAM at run time. Good grief, I just said "dearth". In an actual sentence. Oh well.
...So I think I'll wait a few months and see how things settle (and what ROM updates become available).