Jesse Ezell Blog

"In Polyphonic C#, methods can be defined as either synchronous or asynchronous. When a synchronous method is called, the caller is blocked until the method returns, as is normal in C#. However, when an asynchronous method is called, there is no result and the caller proceeds immediately without being blocked. Thus from the caller's point of view, an asynchronous method is like a void one, but with the useful extra guarantee of returning immediately. We often refer to asynchronous methods as messages, as they are a one-way communication from caller to receiver (think of posting a letter rather as opposed to asking a question during a face-to-face conversation)."

"A couple of weeks ago journalists were exasperated by that fact that Iraqis just went on with their lives and did not panic, well today there is a very different picture. It is actually a bit scary and very disturbing. To start wit the Dinar hit another low 3100 dinars per dollar. There was no exchange place open. If you went and asked they just look at you as if you were crazy. Wherever you go you see closed shops and it is not just doors-locked closed but sheet-metal-welded-on-the-front closed, windows-removed-and-built-with-bricks closed, doors were being welded shut. There were trucks loaded with all sort of stuff being taken from the shops to wherever their owner had a secure place. Houses which are still being built are having huge walls erected in front of them with no doors, to make sure they don’t get used as barracks I guess. Driving thru Mansur, Harthiya or Arrasat is pretty depressing. Still me, Raed and G. went out to have our last lunch together..."
[Where is Raed?]

The source for the FreeTextBox.NET control is now available for download. No Office 11 styles yet, but does include Office 2000 and XP styles and is a very nice little control.

The complete code for controls in Developing Microsoft ASP.NET Server Controls and Components can be downloaded from MSDN. Too bad I already wrote the DatePicker about an hour ago... this ListView control might be useful though. Lots of interesting goodies here that you might find a place for (HtmlEditor, ScrollablePanel, etc.). Admittedly, it might not take more than a few minutes to create some of these yourself, but I'm sure you have better things to do than write custom controls all day long :-).

"The ThreadStatic attribute is what makes this work. The only gotcha so far is that this doesn't work in an ASP.NET application (Web/Webservice) as threads are reused for different requests, hence having the wrong ObjectRegistry serving the wrong user/session. The only solution I can think of for the time being, is having the ObjectRegistry detect if there's a HttpContext, and if so, subscribe to the EndRequest event of the associated HttpApplication and clear itself when the event fires."
[Yves]

Robert McLaws notes:

"Now that more people have InfoPath in their hands, it seems everyone has some sort of reaction to it.

 

My favorite negative reaction is from Richard Tallent. While I love James Snell's reaction, here's my response:

 

1. "Rich" client required. Never forget that InfoPath is from the Office group. Their raison d'etre is to sell "rich" client software. By most definitions of the term, they have been successful in this endeavor. To the degree that they remain successful, InfoPath becomes part of the desktop computing ether. Of course, this sword has two edges...
2. No security. Given that InfoPath produces editors on top of "raw" XML files in the file system, I'm not sure what they could do that couldn't be circumvented by notepad.  That stated, for apps that don't put the XML into the file system, one could either (a) produce different forms for different security profiles or (b) write some JScript. Neither one is especially elegant for the average IT user.
3. Where's the .NET? Yeah, where is the .NET? Yes, the web service support is nice, but there's no managed code support. While I would be surprised if COM interop wouldn't work to let me write the C# code, I have no intention of writing MSXML code in C# (assuming it would even work).
4. No controls. Without #3, this one is moot in my opinion.
5. No offline access. Hmmm.. I've been extremely happy using the file system as my offline store. No magic required. Again, InfoPath is primarily an editor construction kit, so it seems weird for my editor to do this stuff for me.
6. No user base. See #1.

 

It's important to note (as James Snell does) that InfoPath was developed by the Office team for the Office customer.

 

Is it the perfect development tool for all XML applications? No.

 

Is it an interesting step along the way? I think so."

[Don Box]

"Beyond that, you can perform operations impossible in VB.NET or C#. For example, you can inherit sealed classes, such as System.String, and extend them to meet your needs. You can call external DLLs—not just ActiveX DLLs, or Win32 APIs, but any external DLL. You can dynamically add methods, properties, and fields to existing classes exposed by an assembly. "
[DevX]