MSDN Briefing Bucharest, January 16 2008

I am going to quickly describe what happened in the briefing, then link to the site where all the presentation materials can be found (if I ever find it :))

The whole thing was supposed to happen at the Grand RIN hotel, but apparently the people there changed their minds suddenly leaving the briefing without a set location. In the end the brief took place at the Marriott Hotel and the MSDN people were nice enough to phone me and let me know of the change.

The conference lasted for 9 hours, with coffee and lunch breaks, and also half an hour for signing in and another 30 minutes for introduction bullshit. You know the drill if you ever went to one of such events: you sit in a chair waiting for the event to start while you are SPAMMED with video presentations of Microsoft products, then some guy comes in saying hello, presenting the people that will do the talking, then each of the people that do the talking present themselves, maybe even thank the presenter at the beginning... like a circular reference! Luckily I brought my trusted ear plugs and PDA, loaded with sci-fi and tech files.

The actual talk began at 10:00, with Petru Jucovschi presenting as well as holding the first talk, about Linq and C# 3.0. He has recently taken over from Zoltan Herczeg and he has not yet gained the necessary confidence to keep crouds interested. Luckily, the information and code were reasonably well structured and, even if I've heard them before, held me watching the whole thing.

Linq highlights:

• is new in .NET 3.0+ and it takes advantage of a lot of the other newly introduced features like anonymous types and methods, lambda expressions, expression trees, extension methods, object initializers and many others.
• it works over any object defined as IQueryable<T> or IEnumerable (although this last thing is a bit of a compromise).
• simplifies our way of working with queries, bring them closer to the .NET programming languages and from the just-in-time errors into the domain of compiler errors.
• "out of the box" it comes with support for T-Sql, Xml, Objects and Datasets, but providers can be built (easily) for anything imaginable.
• the linq queries are actually execution trees that are only run when GetEnumerator is called. This is called "deffered execution" and it means more queries can be linked and optimised before the data is actually required.
• in case you want the data for caching purposes, there are ToList and ToArray methods available

Then there were two back-to-back sessions from my favourite speaker, Ciprian Jichici, about Linq over SQL and Linq over Entities. He was slightly tired and in a hurry to catch the plain for his native lands of Timisoara, VB, but he held it through, even if he had to talk for 2.5 hours straight. He went through the manual motions of creating mappings between Linq to SQL objects and actualy database data; it wouldn't compile, but the principles were throughly explained and I have all the respect for the fact that he didn't just drag and drop everything and not explain what happened in the background.

Linq to SQL highlights:

• Linq to SQL does not replace SQL and SQL programming
• Linq to SQL supports only T-SQL 2005 and 2008 for now, but Linq providers from the other DB manufacturers are sure to come.
• Linq queries are being translated, wherever possible, to the SQL server and executed there.
• queries support filtering, grouping, ordering, and C# functions. One of the query was done with StartsWith. I don't know if that translated into SQL2005 CLR code or into a LIKE and I don't know exactly what happends with custom methods
• using simple decoration, mapping between SQL tables and C# objects can be done very easily
• Visual Studio has GUI tools to accomplish the mapping for you
• Linq to SQL can make good use of automatic properties and object initialisers and collection initialisers
• an interesting feature is the ability to tell Linq which of the "child" objects to load with a parent object. You can read a Person object and load all its phone numbers and email addresses, but not the purchases made in that name

Linq to Entities highlights:

• it does not ship with the .NET framework, but separately, probably a release version will be unveiled in the second half of this year
• it uses three XML files to map source to destination: conceptual, mapping and database. The conceptual file will hold a schema of local object, the database file will hold a schema of source objects and the mapping will describe their relationship.
• One of my questions was if I can use Linq to Entities to make a data adapter from an already existing data layer to another, using it to redesign data layer architecture. The answer was yes. I find this very interesting indeed.
• of course, GUI tools will help you do that with drag and drop operations and so on and so on
• the three level mapping allows you to create objects from more linked tables, making the internal workings of the database engine and even some of its structure irrelevant
• I do not know if you can create an object from two different sources, like SQL and an XML file
• for the moment Linq to SQL and Linq to Entities are built by different teams and they may have different approaches to similar problems

Then it was lunch time. For a classy (read expensive like crap) hotel, the service was really badly organised. The food was there, but you had to stay in long queues qith a plate in your hand to get some food, then quickly hunt for empty tables, the type you stand in front of to eat. The food was good though, although not exceptional.

Aurelian Popa was the third speaker, talking about Silverlight. Now, it may be something personal, but he brought in my mind the image of Tom Cruise, arrogant, hyperactive, a bit petty. I was half expecting him to say "show me the money!" all the time. He insisted on telling us about the great mathematician Comway who, by a silly mistake, created Conway's Life Game. If he could only spell his name right, tsk, tsk, tsk.

Anyway, technically this presentation was the most interesting to me, since it showed concepts I was not familiar with. Apparently Silverlight 1.0 is Javascript based, but Silverlight 2.0, which will be released by the half of this year, I guess, uses .NET! You can finally program the web with C#. The speed and code protection advantages are great. Silverlight 2.0 maintains the ability to manipulate Html DOM objects and let Javascript manipulate its elements.

Silverlight 2.0 highlights:

• Silverlight 2.0 comes with its own .NET compact version, independent on .NET versions on the system or even on operating system
• it is designed with compatibility in mind, cross-browser and cross-platform. One will be able to use it in Safari on Linux
• the programming can be both declarative (using XAML) and object oriented (programatic access with C# or VB)
• I asked if it was possible to manipulate the html DOM of the page and, being written in .NET, work significantly faster than the same operations in pure Javascript. The answer was yes, but since Silverlight is designed to be cross-browser, I doubt it is the whole answer. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to make some performance optimizations for IE, though.
• Silverlight 2.0 has extra abilities: CLR, DLR (for Ruby and other dynamic languages), suport for RSS, SOAP, WCF, WPF, Generics, Ajax, all the buzzwords are there, including DRM (ugh!)

The fourth presentation was just a bore, not worth mentioning. What I thought would enlighten me with new and exciting WCF features was something long, featureless (the technical details as well as the presenter) and lingering on the description would only make me look vengeful and cruel. One must maintain apparences, after all.

WCF highlights: google for them. WCF replaces Web Services, Remoting, Microsoft Message Queue, DCOM and can communicate with any one of them.

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The Nano Flower by Peter F. Hamilton

Something happened to Peter F. Hamilton between the second and third volumes of the Greg Mandel trilogy. He turned from a good average writing style to a great one. The Nano Flower is almost at the same level as Pandora's Star and births Hamilton's detailed universe. No wonder there was no fourth novel in the series, it would only drag the writer down.

The book has everything I came to expect from Peter F. Hamilton: hard sci-fi, detailed socio-political context, aliens, the party of braves, the sociopathic villains, a reference to Lord of the Rings... I do believe that Tolkien inspired Hamilton to write, but now it has become the chink in the writing armour, Achilles' heal. I've read a few great Hamilton books, but each had the basic layout of a battle between good and evil, groups of people uniting under improbable ideals to defeat an all too dark a villain. The qualities that attracted so many people to Lord of the Rings, for example, like camaraderie, honor, desire to help others, are not so attractive to me anymore. They are basic, very unlikely to truly define a character. I would very much want to see a Hamilton gray book. Maybe the new Void Trilogy will fulfil my wish (if I don't die of waiting for it to appear), although the vengeance driven character that remains pure and good at heart described in the first volume doesn't give me a lot of hope.

Anyway, even if I do seem to concentrate on what I don't like or what I would change in the writing of this great book maker, my appreciation for him is way higher than any possible defect in his writing. So, if you don't totally dislike sci-fi, go to a book store and buy Peter F. Hamilton books.

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I Am Afraid of Americans - David Bowie

I was looking for songs by David Bowie, one of my favourite singers, but I wanted to find something different than the brilliant Under Pressure which he performed together with Freddie Mercury and which is my "subway song" :) And I found another "coproduction", this time he teamed up with Nine Inch Nails, another band that I enjoy (Perfect Drug is their best song, I think, although I may interpret it more personally than others).



The funny thing is that I remembered to post a Bowie song when I heard a quote from Criminal Minds, a series I am watching:
Garcia: [To Reid and Morgan] When I was in the ambulance I could hear the song 'Heroes' playing in my head. I kept flashing in and out of consciousness and I remember thinking, 'Wait. Is David Bowie really God?'

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Speeding up Javascript in one quick move

If you don't want to read the whole thing and just go to the solution, click here.

I reached a stage in an ASP.Net project where a I needed to make some pages work faster. I used dotTrace to profile the speed of each form and I optimized the C# and SQL code as much as I could. Some pages still were very slow.

Now, I had the idea to look for Javascript profilers. Good idea, bad offer. You either end up with a makeshift implementation that hurts more than it helps, or with something commercial that you don't even like. FireFox has a few free options like FireBug or Venkman, but I didn't even like them and then the pages I was talking about were performing badly in Internet Explorer, not FireFox.

That got me thinking of the time when Firefox managed to quickly select all the items in a <select> element, while on Internet Explorer it scrolled to each item when selecting it, slowing the process tremendously. I then solved that issue by setting the select style.display to none, selecting all the items, then restoring the display. It worked instantly.

Can you guess where I am going with this?

Most ASP.Net applications have a MasterPage now. Even most other types of sites employ a template for all the pages in a web application, with the changing page content set in a div or some other container. My solution is simple and easy to apply to the entire project:

Step 1. Set the style.display for the page content container to "none".
Step 2. Add a function to the window.onload event to restore the style.display.

Now what will happen is that the content will be displayed in the hidden div, all javascript functions that create, move, change elements in the content will work really fast, as Internet Explorer will not refresh the visual content in the middle of the execution, then show the hidden div.

A more elegant solution would have been to disable the visual refresh of the element while the changes are taking place, then enable it again, but I don't think one can do that in Javascript.

This fix can be applied to pages in FireFox as well, although I don't know if it speeds anything significantly. The overall effect will be like the one in Internet Explorer table display. You will see the page appear suddenly, rather than see each row appear while the table is loaded. This might be nice or not nice, depending on personal taste.

Another cool idea would be to hide the div and replace it with a "Page loading" div or image. That would look even cooler.

Here is the code for the restoration of display. In my own project I just set the div to style="display:none", although it might be more elegant to also hide it using Javascript for the off chance that someone might view the site in lynx or has Javascript disabled.

function addEvent(elm, evType, fn, useCapture)
// addEvent and removeEvent
// cross-browser event handling for IE5+, NS6 and Mozilla
// By Scott Andrew
{
if (elm.addEventListener){
elm.addEventListener(evType, fn, useCapture);
return true;
} else if (elm.attachEvent){
var r = elm.attachEvent("on"+evType, fn);
return r;
} else {
alert("Handler could not be removed");
}
} 

function initMasterPage() {
document.getElementById('contenuti').style.display='';
}

addEvent(window,'load',initMasterPage);

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CSS issues with AjaxToolKit controls like TabContainer

Update: this problem appeared for older versions of AjaxControlToolKit. Here is a link that says they fixed this issue since 21^st of September 2007.

You are building this cool page using a TabContainer or some other AjaxControlToolKit control and everything looks smashing and you decide to add the UpdatePanels so that everything would run super-duper-fast. And suddenly the beautiful page looks like crap! Everything works, but your controls don't seem to load the cascading style sheet.
What is happening is that you make a control visible using update panels and so the CSS doesn't get loaded. I don't know exactly why, you would have to look into the AjaxControlToolKit source code and find out for yourself.

I found two fixes for this. The first is the nobrainer: add another TabContainer or AjaxControlToolKit control in the page, outside any updatepanels, make it visible, but set its style.display to 'none' or put it in a div or span with style="display:none". The second is the AjaxControlToolKit way. In the Page_Load event of the page or user control that contains the TabContainer or AjaxControlToolKit control add this line:

ScriptObjectBuilder.RegisterCssReferences(AjaxControlToolKit control);

This is part of the ExtenderControlBase class in AjaxControlToolKit, which is inherited by most if not all of their controls.

Now it should all work wonderfully.

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Javascript external file not loading!!

Ok, so I used a javascript script in my page by referencing the external file and it worked. I did the exact same thing with another file and it wasn't loading! After scratching my head bald I've decided to switch the places of the two tags and voila! the script that worked would not load! The one that did not work previously was purring nicely.

My calls looked like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src='script1.js'/>
<script type="text/javascript" src='script2.js'/>

After scratching my skull a little more (blood was dripping already) I realized that the script tags are atomic tags, they should have no ending tag. Why would they, the content is specified in the src attribute. But on the DOM page for the script element there is an obscure line saying: Start tag: required, End tag: required. I switched to <script></script> format and it worked.

Oh, you are wondering why the first script worked? Because somehow an atomic script tag is erroneous, but it doesn't return any error. Instead it is treated like a mistyped start tag and the atomic portion of it is ignored. The second script would not load since the browser expected a script end tag. Maybe he even interpreted the second tag as an end tag for all I know.

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innerText for IE and FireFox

Apparently, the innerText property of Javascript elements is not available for FireFox or other browsers other than Internet Explorer. FireFox exposes something similar, but with the name textContent. Why would any one of these two butt-heads learn from the other and cooperate for the common good?

The functionality of this property is to expose the inner content of an element minus any html tags. With something like <div><span class="red">Red text<span></div> the div innerText/textContent property returns "Red text". It could also work when setting, stripping tags from the content before setting innerHTML, although it seems that for both implementations setting innerText or textContent is equivalent with setting innerHTML.

There are also links about javascript functions that would replace, improve or otherwise ease the developer's work by adding the same functionality.

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