So I nearly took the Vista build plunge last night, and it would have been my first one. Luckily enough, my DVD didn't finish burning until after 11:30 PM, so I didn't feel like staying up real late. Good thing I hit the sack. Reading my blog posts this morning reminds me of very sound advice - wait for Sam to do it first! What's his advice, don't. Seems this build isn't ready for prime time. I guess I'll go ahead and stash the DVD away and wait for Beta 2.

So I’m playing around with the new ASP.NET Wizard control. Quite an impressive control to say the least, however within 1 hour I realized there were 3 annoyances that I think were implemented incorrectly.

1 – The wizard control has 2 events, NextButtonClick and FinishButtonClick, that are raised when the user’s clicking through the wizard. Both use the same event handler, and thus the same event args. The WizardNavigationEventArgs has a Cancel property that acts just like the CancelEventArgs. However – cancelling within the FinishButtonClick event when FinishDestinationPageUrl is set, doesn’t work – you still get redirected.

Workaround? Sure – but its not obvious and requires some comments inline so developers know whats going on.

private void FinishStep(object sender, WizardNavigationEventArgs e)
{
   if (!Page.IsValid)
   {
       this.wizardControl.FinishDestinationPageUrl = string.Empty;
       return;
   }
   this.wizardControl.FinishDestinationPageUrl = “AfterPage.aspx”;
}

The reason setting e.Cancel = true doesn’t work and clearing the destination page url does, is that the OnFinishButtonClick doesn’t care if you’ve cancelled or not, but redirects the user to the destination url as long as it exists. Now – if you don’t want to redirect to a page, but still show a completion message, you can create another wizard step and set it’s StypeType equal to “Complete”. When doing this, cancelling within the finish event works as expected.

2 – There are some instances that during a wizard, you have multiple paths based on the data entered in the current step. Being able to dynamically choose your next step works great in the Wizard control because it remembers what step you came from (a bonus feature that I wasn’t expecting!). However, setting the next active step isn’t one that “falls into the pit of success” that I’ve read / heard about a lot within the last week.

One would think the WizardNavigationEventArgs would allow you to set the next page index – but you cant… NextPageIndex is read-only. But the kicker, is they have an internal method (SetNextStepIndex) that is used by the Wizard control. While it would make most sense to allow the next page index to be set via the EventArgs since they have code in the OnBubbleEvent method to set ActiveStepIndex for you, but you have to resort to setting the ActiveStepIndex property on the wizard control itself.

3 – Okay, so this one falls into “why do we have multiple properties for the same (?) thing!” category. The Wizard control contains properties like StartNextButton[Text/Style/Type/ImageUrl] as well as StepNextButton[Text/Style/Type/ImageUrl]. When I was first configuring the wizard control, I didn’t realize that both of these existed and only set StepNextButton*. Much to my amazement, my 2 step wizard didn’t have what I just set it up to be. Needless to say I had to go digging through docs and intelli-sense to realize that, “Yes Virgina, there is a real santa claus.” A bit confusing and annoying if you ask me because if you want all your “Next” buttons to look the same you have to set 2n properties to do so!

Okay – enjoy your coding, I just had to get these few annoyances out!

So I’m currently playing around with ASP.NET’s new Membership / Role providers with a dummy application, and I came across an error in the documentation concerning the MinRequiredNonAlphanumericCharacters property.

The documentation clearly states that for configuration via web.config should use “minAlphanumericCharacters” attribute which is to be set on the membership element. The example right below explains that “minRequiredNonAlphanumericCharacters” should be used, however the example configuration shows it using the invalid item.

It should be noted that “minRequiredNonAlphanumericCharacters” is the correct attribute name that should be used, as well as it is not set on the membership element, but on the provider add element itself.

I’ve also been told that the documentation has been updated internally and will eventually get published to the web in the future…so until then, remember this post.

The feature that was cut from ASP.NET 2.0 now makes its debut as an HttpModule. Dmitry states that this isn’t the same code base that they were working from, but is another implementation. Very cool for those intense caching applications!

As Jeff points out, I too usually don’t buy into conspiracy theories, but reading this makes you really think. I may have to pop in my 9/11 DVD that I purchased a few years back and re-watch it now, looking & listening for those possible detonation explosions.

Ran across a couple posts late last night from a blogger code-named “happyfunboy”. Seems like he has the general consensus of how the new Partner Membership Center is working. His posts are a pretty good synopsis of the good, the not-so-bad, and the changed (no ugly, never ugly). If you’ve not figured out, we are listening, and your input counts. If you don’t want to publicly post your experiences / suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact me. If you do post, shoot your url on over to me so I can pass it on.

So I may be a little late to the game on this, however, its the first time I’ve seen the list which makes me think there are many others that haven’t seen the list of breaking changes from .NET 1.1 to 2.0. A few notables include:

• “Conditional Grammar ambiguity” – Because of the new nullable syntax, there are certain scenarios where the compiler cannot tell the difference between a conditional operator and the nullable ? syntax. (bool A; for (A ? F() : G(); ; ))
• “Ambiguity between comparison and generic definition” – The addition of generics has led to an ambiguity between a generic method and function parameters. (int a, b, c; F(a < b, c > (7));)
• “Ignore ‘remove’ and ‘clear’ directives” – This change only affects web.config and application.config files that remove a section handler declared in a parent configuration file.
• “FormsAuth should not leave tickets around for 50 years”
• “<location> path attribute cannot end with any of '.', '/', or '\'.” – In V1.1, a user can put <location path="app/"> in the config file. The config system won't complain about the trailing forward slash, but the problem is that the config settings inside this location tag actually won't get applied in a request to that path.
• “The title element on aspx pages with a runat server tag was instantiated as a HtmlGenericControl in v1.1, in v2.0 it has its own type HtmlTitle but this doesn't derive from HtmlGenericControl and thus the compat break.”
• “HttpContext is a sealed class. If users created their own wrapper to expose this and returned their wrapped instance as the Context property for pages / usercontrols, their apps would fail unless they implemented the new properties on HttpContext. “

At approximately 5PM PST this evening, the new Partner Membership Center went Live! Check it out, and let us know what you think!

I just found out that the VS2005 Web Deployment Project bits are now released for public consumption. You can find more information out about it here, download the bits, read the article to get started, and provide feedback at the forums. Enjoy!

From the site:
“Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects provide additional functionality for building and deploying Web site applications that you create in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. This add-in includes a new tool that enables you to merge the assemblies created during ASP.NET 2.0 precompilation, and it provides a comprehensive UI within Visual Studio 2005 for managing build configurations, merging, and pre-build and post-build task using MSBuild.”

Microsoft Korea has put together a pretty awesome flash video rapping to VSTS. They have the translation there too for those that don’t know Korean.