Dot-Not and Whatnot
Someone at veridicus.com created their own .NET Hall of Shame and in spite of being a developer that’s completely dominated by Microsoft tools and technology, I agree with all of the assertions placed.
What is more, based on the suffering of the last few days, I can report the following:
- You can’t bind a sorted list to Windows Forms List Controls because sorted lists move their data around and these controls don’t like that once they bind to a data source. The error message is this: “Cannot modify the Items collection when the
DataSourceproperty is set.” - I have given up trying to subclass the Windows forms Data Grid. The code works but breaks without an error message. The problem spot is that my override of
PreProcessMessage()will silently fail—even when I can set a break point in the super-class constructor and see that my extended grid is being called. The only solution to this problem is time consuming because it involves deleting the grid and adding a new instance to the design surface and hooking up all of the table and column styles all over again. This problem is related to trying to use and develop custom controls at the same time. The Windows Forms Designer is very unkind to this ‘bad’ habit. - There is no “XCopy” deployment command for Windows Class Library projects. Now, there is a similar command for ASP.NET projects. So I rolled my own using the Macro facility in Visual Studio .NET and the declarations in an XML file.
- The Macro facility in Visual Studio .NET is COM based so debugging will suck. This is because Visual Studio .NET 2003 is COM based. As usual the next version (and please say out load in your annoying sarcastic voice, “the next version”) promises to be based almost entirely on managed code. This implies that the Macro stuff will rock sometime in 2006.