The code generation project Prometheus continues to evolve.  I have the general ASP.NET UI generation completed.  However as I move forward there are some advanced features to add.  One of these is support for lists.  DropDownLists or ListBox controls are the first and foremost issue.  It's fine to generate them but the current issue is how to indicate the datasource for the values to populate the list.  This is more of a conceptual problem then a technical problem as I know serveral ways to do this but I need to determine a nice clean way to make this work with the rest of the site.

I spent a good deal of time working on the CHT product over the weekend.  I made some tweaks to the menu system and added a help system.  It works fairly well if I do say so my self.   I was running through a test and I found something interesting.  ASP.NET out of the box has very spotty support for browsers other then IE.  You probablly don't think this is much of a suriprise as #1 IE and ASP.NET are both MS products but from another perspective issue #2 is the adoption of IE.  It has an overwhelming market share and any company catering to the web market needs to look at its user base and see what the market is needing or wanting.  A product that works with IE is going to hit a large portion of the target.  Also most people using an alternative browser still have IE installed just in case (or b/c they can't get rid of IE ;>).

This brings me to the point of this post.  I have decided to postpone official support for Firefox until at least the next release of CHT.  I have been testing the product in both browsers to ensure the widest widest possible. 

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Here are a few issues I ran into supporting Firefox:

• ASP.NET considers all other browsers as down level, meaining that it renders tables instead of DIVs and some other annoying issues  This can be fixed with a browsercaps section in the web.config file.  Google on it.
• ASP.NET client-side validation does not work on Firefox.  This is because of the validation script used by ASP.NET validation controls.  There is a work around for this.  It also involves the browsercaps issue mentioned above but you must also use custom validation controls of which there are a few out there.  A link to a great article on the topic.
  

So my alternatives are to use hacks in ASP.NET 1.1 or wait until 2.0 comes out with the official fixes for all this.  Considering the limited market share of Firefox and a foreseeable fix I think I will dealy official support for Firefox.  However I will continue to test against Firefox just to see what my CSS and HTML look like in another browser.  I will continue to use the browsercaps hack for correct rendering but I will have to leave cross-browser validation for another day.

Another great article by Joel.  One thing that is glaringly obvious is that I need to add a bug tracking database.

Number 8 is especially impoortant and seems to be the one thing that managers and/or management in general doesn't understand about knowledge workers.

Here's the post

This is a great alternative to Access.  I've used this database for web sites and desktop apps.  There are drivers for virtually any major language (.net, java) and also ODBC drivers.  There are some nice visual front ends for this database but the command line utility is elegantly simple to use. 

Don’t expect features like stored procedures here as this is a very compact and light weight database.  Also the data typing is rather loose so don’t rely on the database to verify data types (which you shouldn’t do anyway).  It appears that PHP is including this in the distribution so this database will become widely available. 

This is a great database to use for prototyping and distributed or mobile applications.  Of course it lacks enterprise features but that may be a bonus in some situations.  The speed of the database is unbeatable so this is definitely a tool to look at if you need a fast light weight portable database.

http://www.sqlite.org/

http://www.freepctech.com/pc/xp/xp00005.shtml

This is  a good article on a feature of Windows XP that I did not know about:

XP Prefetch Explanation

Subversion is a nice open-source replacement for CVS which is the grand daddy of open source version control.  Subversion fixes some of CVS's problems and is a very nice package for the price (free).  I have stopped using Visual Source Safe in favor of Subversion and I believe that Subversion also beats ClearCase in ease of use and maintainability.
 

I have created a quick tutorial for getting SVN up and running.  This should not be a substitute for reading the manual.

SVN New Repository Setup

 1.  Download and install SVN and Tortoise SVN.  Currently at http://subversion.tigris.org/ and http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ respectively.

 2.  Decide on a repository layout.

            I prefer this layout format:

                        /
                        /project
                                     /trunk
                                     /branches
                                     /tags

This layout allows us to have multiple projects in the repository organized by project which is the most convenient organization method by my way of thinking but you may come up with your own as Subversion does not force you to use a certain layout.  A layout can also be changed at a later date unlike CVS.

 3.  Once you have a layout it's time to create a repository.

            a.  Open a command line

            b.  run this command:  C:\>svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs c:\svn

This creates a new repository at c:\svn.  It is in FSFS format as opposed to the default Berkely Database format. 

The FSFS format appears to be a much better choice in almost all situations but you can consult the documentation for more info.

 c. There will be many files and directories inside the repository but you will not and should not edit these directly.

 
4.  Now that we have a repository let's implement that layout format we decided on in step 2.

The easiest way to create a file format is to create a temp directory and set up the structure in that temp directory and then import that into the repository.

         a.  In windows open a command prompt and do the following:

                        (this can be done in windows explorer also)

            C:\>mkdir tmpdir

            C:\>cd tmpdir

            C:\tmpdir>mkdir yourproject

            C:\tmpdir>mkdir yourproject\trunk

            C:\tmpdir>mkdir yourproject\branches

            C:\tmpdir>mkdir yourproject\tags

           
         b.  Now import this structure into our repository:

            C:\tmpdir>svn import . file:///c:/svn --message "initial repository layout"

           (Pay attention to the forward slashes as they are important, svn is not as forgiving as Windows in the forward/back slash department)      

           
         c. Now we can view our repository structure:

C:\>svn list --verbose file:///c:/svn/yourproject

 
5.  Now we will either begin work on a new project or check in an existing project.

 a.  If we have an existing project we can import it using this command: 

            C:\>svn import  c:\pathtoprojectfile file:///c:/svn/yourproject/trunk -m "initial import"

The syntax of the command is svn import pathofprojecttoimport urltorepository -m "message to label this version with"

Notice that we are importing our project into the trunk folder.  This trunk folder is our main line of development. 

 
6.  We want to export a working copy of our project so that we can begin to work on it.

                       Here is the command:

                       C:\>svn checkout urltorepository pathtoworkingproject

                       Notice that this is the opposite of import command. 

This is a good place to mention that when you have an existing project you want to add to source control you should probably move your original source to another directory then clean out all the unnecessary files, binaries or otherwise, that should not be added to source control, this is anything that can be built or generated.  Once you have cleaned up your files and import the project, you will want to choose the place where you want to work with the project, which might be the same place you imported it from in the first place, so you may want to make a backup of your current working directory because you will need to do a checkout into an empty directory.  Once you have completed the checkout into the empty working directory you can add back any libraries or other binaries (dll's, pictures, etc) that you did not originally add to source control. 

Binaries of any type that will not be changing but need to be saved should probably be archived in some manner, you may choose to add it to your version control system for convenience or simply store these in another directory that will be backed up but not version controlled. 

7.  Now that we've made our changes we need to commit these changes to the repository.

            change path to the directory of your working project

            C:\>cd \pathtoworkingproject

            C:\>svn commit -m "checkin comments"

This completes our command line walk though of SVN.  If you are not a fan of the command line all of this can be done using TortoiseSVN.  I will cover this in another tutorial.

The Log4j project has become the de facto logging standard in the java community.  Even with the introduction of built in logging in J2SE 1.4, Log4j still remains the premiere logging framework for java.  The built in library java.util.logging provides convenience but lacks the features of the more mature Log4j.  However, not including the extra appenders and formatting that Log4j offers the function of the two libraries are very similar.  In my opinion you are much better off using the Log4j framework from the start and sticking with it.  The extra functionality has been worth it, at least in my experience.

Another advantage of Log4j is that there are versions of Log4X available for almost every major language.  I also use Log4net for my C# development and it is very nice to be able to switch languages but maintain a very familiar framework.  Almost all the configuration and even the method calls and classes remain virtually unchanged.  One caveat is that Log4net is in some kind of purgatory at the Apache foundation waiting for official project status.  I notice most of their releases are labeled as beta but I have not had any issues with it so far.  Your mileage may vary.

When you need logging, Log4X should be your first choice no matter what language you are using. 

One of the best sites for clean, clean and yes cutting-edge CSS is Stu Nicholls' Cutting Edge CSS.

I've integrated many of his examples into my projects including 3 column layout with DIV's and a nice 3-D tabular effect for menus .

I always try to check this site to see if there any updates because most of Stu's examples make it easier to design standards compliant pages with nice functionality.

I worked at a company where a majority of error notifications from our batch programs was handled by e-mail.  This turned out to be a pretty good system until the dreaded security patch for Outlook arrived on the scene.  It essentially neutured Outlook as you counld no longer send message from a script (VBA or even Visual Basic) without getting a pop-up box.  Brilliant solution and quite elegant as it fixed the problem immediately and finally (well kind of).  However, those of us who came to rely on Outlook to do certain things, like send our error messages and process communications pulled our hair out and nashed our teeth. 

Recently I have come upon a nice hack to get the functionality of Outlook back.

http://www.dimastr.com/redemption/

This hack will let you use a similar object model to the original one without the security restrictions plus there are some additional properties and methods that the original object model did not have.  Well worth looking at if you want to automate Outlook.

I have completed the migration of CHT to use a 3 column dynamic layout using DIV's.  I haven't found many examples of this especially with ASP.NET.  I will eventually expand this into a full tutorial.

Advantages of DIVs vs TABLEs
You can find this someplace else but I want to emphasize the reason i switched to div's was for troubleshooting and ease of maintenance not standards compliance (but that's another upside).  I find that I can read through my HTML much more quickly and the div actually provides a semantic meaning to the content versus a bunch of nested garbled tables. 

Traps
The hardest part was making this dynamic.  For instance what happens when you only want a two column layout or a one column layout? 

Implementation
The key is using a panel control (actually 3 of them or more).  The ASP.NET panel control is actually rendered as a div (in most browsers, you may have to use the browser caps hack to get the correct rendering in all browsers but this is pretty easy).  Once you are working with divs then the normal CSS rules apply.  The secret is applying styles dynamically so that the divs can be resized based on whether they contain content or not.  This is actually straight forward.

I promise I will post the sample code soon.

I'm not sure if this just affects Gateway laptops or if all laptops are subject to this issue.  On a laptop even when the correct mouse drivers are installed you are not able to set all mouse properties.

One of the annoying ones is the "lines to scroll" for each mouse wheel rotation.  It defaults to a very annoying low amount of 1.  This is not very good at all.

To get around this you can use the TweakUI powertoy from Microsoft to change the lines per scroll.  Download the powertoy then open it, go to the Mouse branch then Wheel, make sure Use mouse wheel for scrolling is checked and then choose the Scroll by X lines at a time where X is the number of lines you want to scroll.

asp.net dev without Visual Studio

I need to research this further.

I've been thinking recently about a possible maturity index for languages/platforms.  I use Java and C# as my main development languages.  They are very similar in syntax and in function.  If you can do something in one language you can probably do it in the other.  The differences are usally a bit of "syntactic sugar."  The major difference is the maturity of the documentation and of the available "code in the wild" by which I mean demo, samples and full fledged open source libraries.  Java has this in spades.  C# and by association .NET have a lot of this and it is growing each day, however Java has a much bigger head start and a more-open source build-it-yourself mentality. 

Hence the point of this post.  VB was my first language.  I came in to it at version 6, obviously at the end of its life cycle.  However, VB was in its prime.  You could find books, magazines, samples and examples galor.  Programmers had explored every angle of VB, not only had they put on the rubber glove and explored its orifaces but they had opened it up and shined the light on its entrails.  VB was a mature, highly productive platform, which is something that Java is now and C# is definetaly becoming. 

This is not to put down C#.  On the contrary, when C# has the maturity that Java now enjoys it should be a true work of art.  I think that as the .NET platform enters into version 2 we should see C# hit its sweet spot.  The major thing I see holding it back is the lack of open-source (read FREE) software.  Obviously it is designed and publilshed by Microsoft for the intent of selling MS product.  I see promise in that most popular Java utility libraries (JUnit, JDoc, Log4J) have been ported to .NET.  I would like to see more enterprise applications out there.  An open source appserver and web server would be nice.  Some decent object pooling and threading libraries would help. 

I think these will come, its just a matter of maturity.