Nuwan Online - Nuwan Weerasinghe’s Web Log

It seems as Microsoft is planning to release the source code for the .NET framework libraries pretty soon. This is in more detail.

With my new job I have the opportunity to try out certain things which were never really a part of my work before. I’m getting involved in Windows Mobile development for Devices such as MC 3090 and also in the process in using SQL Server 2005. Apart from these major involvements, I will also have to try VB.NET (I am a C# guy who loves curly brackets and semicolons), .NET Remoting, Windows Services etc.

So. Its quite a lot to learn with less time. After all, ASP.NET is not the end of the world.

Today I was trying to run a test for the first time in my New Platform VS 2005 from NUnit V2.2 and it failed. It says  ‘System BadImageFormat Exception : The format of the file ‘UnitTest’ is Invalid.’

Tests similar to this ran perfectly fine in VS2003 and NUnit 2.2 for me. So I did a little bit of googling (now that this is a Dictionary term) and straight away found I’m joining a club. Some says NUnit 2.2.3 has fixed this. but I did not upgrade mine as yet. But I had another testing tool which is unlike Nunit is a Plug In ot the VS Enviorenment which is Test Driven .NET  which did not complain and worked perfectly. 

There was a comment at Darrell Norton’s Blog about being able to run tests directly from VS 2005. Not sure how……….need to find out. But until such time……………..its all TEST DRIVEN .NET for me.

Also find some tricks and workarounds people have tried before on the same issue here.

Today I became a member of the Yahoo group for Visual Studio .NET.

Good that there is such a group and would love to see what others are saying and doing.

I’m getting a hang of all the issues related to code migration from VS2003 platform to VS2005 platform. It seems like my .dll files are going to work just fine. But I will have some playing to do when it comes to Server Controls such as the DataGrids. VS 2005 DataGrid has certainly undergone some modifications and this means some properties and methods of a DataGrid will be manipulated. So my VS 2003 DataGrid is a little alien to the new enviorenment. Hope other controls are just about fine in the new enviorenment.

To be honest, I feel as if I’m way back in early 2004 when I was putting all those long hours trying to figure out how ASP.NET 1.1 controls work. Now it’s my turn to learn ASP.NET 2.0 controls.

It’s back to the drawing board…………………………………
I heard someone saying ‘History Repeats’………………………………………………………………………………………cool.

We have decided to start our development work with Visual Studio 2005 for the new project. I had to make some changes to my computer first. I had Windows XP SP1 and finally decided to just update it with SP2 even though I have previously experinced that my machine got slowed down after this update. Any way I have no choice but to go with it.
Upgrading with SP2 was quite time consuming and took me more than 1 hr.

I installed VS 2005 to my E drive since I also have my VS 2003 in another drive. I’m not sure whether this will have any problem in the future. Upto now all my projects done in VS2003 are working smoothly.
I must admit that the VS2005 setup was smooth, but I did not install MSDN for VS2005 due to lack of disk space.
We will be start development on this new platform from next week and we will introduce ATLAS controls into our application.

Should be some very interesting weeks ahead……………………………………………………………………….

As usual our .NET user group meeting on the 7th was exciting and was awaited by many, since the likes of Merill and Wella hardly disappoints people with their presentations. Merill’s presentation on coding best practices, performance enhancement and bugs was a good one. It was a compact and well organized presentation and I always like Merill’s ability to explain stuff in a simple way. I had lot of things to learn there and I did………….

Wella did a cool presentation on CSS. I’m yet to touch what is in VS 2005 in terms of CSS and designing. Wella was kind enough to share this link with us. It’s Very Interesting.

Finally, there was a power failure in the whole Borella area and all the presentations were done in total darkness except for the light generated by the projector. (Projector was running on backup power).
Merill with a dark tea shirt and a trouser was invisible……………………………………[ :- ) ]
Wella was luckily wearing a more lighter coloured trouser………………………………[ :- ) ]

All in all it was fun.

You can visit here to get an idea of how ATLAS could be used to achieve asynchronous features in an application. Also you can download the code of the application.

This is a week old post, as I was continuosly struggling to find time to update my blog. December .NET User group meeting was well attended as the topics were “Hot”. It was timely I thought that the Group starts concentrating on Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and beyond.

Since Visual Studio 2005 with SQL Server 2005 is already a buzzword among developors and enthusiats, I thought the two presentations by Manzi and Wella were serving the purpose of getting everyone interested in the new fetaures and stuff.
The Project which we are expecting (it’s still under negotiations) is expected to push our skills and also our development platform (.NET 1.1) to an ultimate maximum. One key concern is the inevitable use interactions with the system, which will end up in so many server calls. As this would also have an effect on the Overall Usability of the System (with constant refreshing of the Browser), we were having high hopes to migrate our existing code to VS 2005 and Try and Accommodate ATLAS
features to take advantage of the Asynchronous model. (Call it AJAX if you like).

Honestly, I was diappointed to learn that ATLAS is not available in the coming VS 2005. So I can really hope and wish that Microsoft Puts it out pretty quickly for us to go ahead with our plans.

I’m pretty sure that all those guys who were there for the AJAX presentation by Merill Fernando (MVP ) at the Latest .NET Forum meeting have more than enough reasons to be excited about future web development projects. For me, If I had known this technology six months ago, It would have made a definite impact on the performance of the application which I was working on. AJAX will optimize server calls by sending only the Data Content and by Not Refreshing the whole page.

However the most pleasing thing for me is that none of the technologies surrounding AJAX are not new but they are being used here in a manner to optimize the power of these technologies by combining them into one. The AJAX class Libraries are free for download from here.

I ‘ve found paper titled “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Application” in which AJAX was first introduced by Jesse James Garrett.

This very recent article on ComputerWorld is a Good Starting point for beginners or any enthusiats on Ajax.