Visual Studio 2005 first look at MSDN Day

Awesome developments to IDE and ASP toolbox in Visual Studio 2005. VS 2005 is becoming a kind of swiss army knife - All in one tool for .net development. Intellisense for almost everything you do with VS 2005. Had a first look at it today at MSDN day conducted at The Continental by Satyam.

Visual studio 2005 is releasing in November. ASP.net with this version has lot of [50+] new controls to help you with almost everything you wanted.

Some great improvements to vs 2005

• Controls can be dragged in source mode (Note earlier only design mode allowed you to drag and toolbox was disabled in design mode)
• Intellisense for every XML having valid DTD.
• Clean application folder - creates files only when required (eg. web.config)
• Error helper pops up with various options (details of the error, exception class details etc) - In earlier versions you had to go to msdn or google to help yourself with the exceptions raised.


• Standard validations to make the code compatible with selected compatibility option. Intellisense makes sure options are valid.
• Allows mixed development of vb.net and c# in different pages, they can be compiled together to make one dll.

Links related to visual studio 2005

• Official site of visual studio 2005
• Visual basic IDE team blog
• Comparision of VS 2005 with JSF the java counterpart
• Some VS 2005 related samples and code snippets

Summary In short lot of intelligence is built around the IDE keeping developer in mind. Thats what is needed to make a developer's life easier and which inturn helps in reducing the development time.What next after visual studio 2005 ? -Here is the Roadmap by microsoft

 

.net SmartNavigation

What is SmartNavigation?
SmartNavigation is a feature provided by asp.net. When enabled this makes sure your pages are shown smoothly and last position of cursor location, scroll etc are restored effortlessly.

Why this feature deserves a mention here?
Because of the problems it creates. It isn’t very reliable because of the following reasons.

All versions of IE do not support this feature properly

Other browsers are totally unpredictable with this feature.

It creates mess with other user interfaces on postback.

Smartnavigation removes CSS after postback
This was the sole reason for blogging this. Yes smartNavigation strips off css after a postback.
Solution - you need to explicitly specify the path of css as absolute path instead of relative path. You can keep it dynamic by adding some server side code as below LINK href=''< =Request.ApplicationPath %>/Styles/Sanjay.css''

Microsoft's documentation of SmartNavigation

If you still wish to use smartnavigation on other browsers take a look at this code project (Free source) Crossbrowser SmartNavigation Alternative II

Conclusion: Use this feature only when you are sure of your audience using latest IE (at least IE 5) only. And make use of it when its absolutely necessary to make your application work better. And do take care of css paths etc.

Hoax mails..give away phones, bill gates sharing his fortune !

Ah! another spam mail.. asking you to spread word of mouth and they are giving away cell phones free... Or bill gates is sharing his fortune..and you need to cc to some one.
I keep receiving such hoax mails and finally thought let write something on this topic.

Here is a sample mail.

Dear ALL ,
I just want you guys to take hold of this opportunity from Ericsson . Ericsson is distributing cell phones for free over the internet to compete with Nokia, which is doing the same. They want to be better known through the Internet by word of mouth and so they are giving away their new WAP phone.
All you need to do is mail this to 8 of your acquaintances. In two weeks you will receive an Ericsson T18. If you send this email to 20 people or more, you will receive an Ericsson R320 Wap Phone. Don't forget to mail a copy of this email to anna.swelund@ericsson.com to ensure that your participation is noted.

What do they get?
The company or the product gets benifited, surely word of mouth will spread their name to every corner of the world. But people wake up! You are just distributing the garbage..

How can you avoid spreading such mails
Thumb of rule! There is nothing called free lunch. Always strings are attached. So before expecting anything free think again. If you are in doubt, just search few keywords of that mail on any search engine, that will reveal the truth.
Checkout some similar mails collection at www.breakthechain.org

And finally if you still want to try your luck sending these mails.. here is a good list of such letters in circulation. http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org
:p Hehe just kidding..

Do continue to send/forward mails to your friends that are worth their time and attention. Happy mailing ;)