I haven’t been posting anything in a while, sorry about that. The past two weeks I’ve been quite busy since I have started working for Developer Express as their new Director of Developer Relations. I’m having a lot of fun, but obviously there’s also a lot of new stuff to look at, so I haven’t had much time to think about blogging.
I’m using Developer Express XtraBars in my .NET applications. With one of the latest releases, XtraBars also support the new skinning technology, which the website depicts quite inadequately but which takes the experience of an application based completely on DX controls to a new level visually. Now who would have thought that a package such as this would have grave deficiencies in other areas? Well, custom drawing is one such area.
Recently I wanted to create a simple bar item that would be a …
Recently, there have been several requests in the XPO newsgroup about problems with serialization, in conjunction with ASP.NET. I’m still unclear if these issues all had the same sources, but when somebody approached me personally about this today, I thought I’d just look into the web services problem. Please note that I made these tests on the .NET 2 platform, so there may be differences to .NET 1.1. What’s more, ASP.NET and web services are not something I usually have much to do with, so I m …
A while ago, Developer Express announced the availability of a free version of their Refactor! product for Visual Basic .NET. The official download page is accessible via this Microsoft page. Now there’s a video available on Channel 9, showing an interview with Mark Miller, the Developer Express chief architect for IDE tools, and Jay Schmelzer, the lead program manager of the Visual Basic team at Microsoft. Mark demonstrates a lot of the functionality of the free Refactor! version, so if you ha …
Beta 2 of Visual Studio .NET 2005 has introduced a problem that prevents CodeRush from showing its menu entries. A workaround for the Options dialog has been published, which involves binding the command to call the dialog to a keyboard shortcut. One thing that’s not that easy to do is showing the CodeRush tool windows, like the CodeRush Guide, the Messages window, or the tool windows of 3rd party plugins like the CodeRush Documentor. To work around this, I have created a plugin called _CR_Open …
You can find their original announcement here and this link at Microsoft tells you much more about Refactor! itself. With the availability of new C# refactoring functionality in VS.NET 2005, Microsoft seem to have noticed the lack of similar functionality for Visual Basic developers. That’s why a cooperation was struck up with Developer Express for them to offer their fantastic DXCore-based refactoring product in a free version to VB.NET 2005 developers.
There’s lots of additional information …
In a previous article, I showed how nullable types, as implemented in version 2 of the .NET framework, can be persisted using XPO. But what if .NET 2.0 is not yet an option? .NET 1.1 doesn’t have support for nullable types and there’s no such feature in XPO, either. If somebody comes from the database world, it’s certainly understandable that types that can also be null are something he’s accustomed to. On the other hand, XPO is about persisting objects, and in that world, no ordinary value t …
The current version of Developer Express XPO has a Session object that handles one connection to the database together with an object cache for that session. Technically, the Session is a pivotal point in the XPO architecture, all object handling requests go through a Session object. Recently it came to my attention that some people regard it as a great problem that the Session object is tightly bound to a database connection. By default, this is a direct association: you can create more than o …