Fridathon: unstructured learning or hacking you can opt-in to do on any random Friday.

  • What's going on in PAG about smart clients? Composite UI Application Block (CAB) is coming!

    Posted on June 25, 2005

    As Eugenio and Edjez mentioned, the second community drop of CAB is around the corner. What you’ll find in CAB is basically what’s missing the raw widget framework of .NET (a.k.a. WinForms): support for reusability, life cycle management and shared state and events at the use case level, pluggable modules, injection of dependencies between components, and a very powerful loosely coupled event system/broker (among other things). Here’s the team, in all its glory, after finally getting an official war room: [ The war room has been substantially improved with a reorganization we did yesterday. I’ll post more pictures later, but... [Read More]

  • Inferring in parameter types in SqlCommand: does not work with Nullable<T> values

    Posted on June 16, 2005

    SqlCommand can infer parameter types from their values. It has always been that way. Therefore, you don’t need to care about the mapping between CLR types and SQL types. In Whidbey (.NET v2.0), nullable types (Nullable generic class) were introduced to better support database scenarios, where a field that would map to a CLR value type can actually be null. I would have expected the same type inference on parameters to be performed for these types too, basically resolving to the underlying type (i.e. Int32 in a Nullable) and having the parameter set to null if it didn't contain a... [Read More]

  • Search engines don't do magic with crappy websites

    Posted on June 15, 2005

    I hate to do this again. For most well-developed, web-friendly sites (yeah, there are sites that are not friendly at all with the web architecture), search engines will be a great aid in spreading the word. For example, if you search Google for “TechEd GAT Hands On Lab”, right on the first result page you will get what you look for, even if the website was launched just a week ago. Now, do the same for SgmlReader, a user sample in GotDotNet which tons of weblogs and articles link to, and the only one with such a name: you will... [Read More]

  • Being in Somasegar's top 3 customer issues list

    Posted on June 2, 2005

    Yesterday I posted about how Microsoft is listening to customers, and specially the excelent experience I had using Product Feedback. Now it turns out that one of my favorite bugs, one that I reported and kept pushing for almost a year now, is in Somasegar’s top 10 customer issues, third in the list :). I’m specially flattered about the description: [Read More]

  • Microsoft is listening, but you need to talk

    Posted on June 1, 2005

    I’ve broken the mark of 100 bugs entered thorugh Product Feedback!!! I can only thank Microsoft for the diligence in reviewing, and even fixing most of them, even those that I qualified as less important. But when you report a bug, you have to be responsible for it, track it, provide more feedback when needed, regress them when they are fixed, etc. That’s the only way you really contribute to the product. Most of my bugs were were acknowledged as such, and only a handful were either by design or not repro. I’m happy that most of them were resolved... [Read More]