For me, I looked closely at ASP.NET 2.0. Sadly, there are actually some things MS introduced that really make me ask myself if it is progress or a big step backwards. Furthermore, some bugs that seem to be in the framework since version 2.0 are still in 3.5 — big bugs.

So, let’s say you have a grid on your page and instead of having a button or a link with text that says “Delete” in a row to give the user the option to delete a row from the grid, you define an image. Perfect. It looks great. However, you always end up with an exception in your code at some point that you refer to a tuple that is not in the grid. “How can that be?” you ask yourself as the “Delete” text is only inserted in the grid if there actually is something to be deleted. If you debug your application you will soon find out that the event is called twice by the framework. Wow, you think that must be some new invention called “AutoEventWireup” that supports lazy programming in its best. Yes, since ASP.NET 2.0 you do not need to tell the framework “That method in my code, is supposed to be fired for that control with that event” — the framework parses the method names using reflection and then decides “Oh, goodie, that method must be called when the user deletes a row from the grid.” If you make the bad mistake of defining the event in the designer and have AutoEventWireup set to true — yup, it’s called once by your definition and again because of the automatic mechanism. But it gets worse…. Switch it off and for an ImageLink it will be called twice anyways. It’s a bug. Go to MSDN and you can read all about it. What concerns me is the fact that this bug is in there since 2005. What has MS done with its new innovative frameworks branded 3.0 and 3.5 ? Exactly. Nada. I changed the target to the respective version numbers, the bug prevails. So, what can you do as a developer? I don’t know, sadly, my users will have to live without nice glyph images in their grids now. I don’t care. I use a textual link now and it works. The event only fires once now.

This is yet again one of the many examples that some bugs are simply never addressed. Every software product has those. Be it Visual Studio or RAD Studio. So, my resolution for 2008 will be to do my best to report bugs in QC and RAID so that the next Delphi will fewer annoying bugs like that.

With CodeGear we have a great public bug tracking system called Quality Central - at Microsoft I am still looking for something similar, but have not found something except the MSDN user forums…

Christmas is near… thus, the ECO Team released a new Field Test build for ECO for Visual Studio. The new installer supports automatic installation in Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008. The builds come with a modeler now. Whenever you create ECO models, VS starts an instance of EcoModeler by ModelMaker Tools. As I have used EcoModeler with ECO III already, I like this quite a lot. After installation you can see immediately that the installation was successful as ECO registers in the VS splash screen.

I have to note that it was quite difficult to take this screenshot. VS 2008 comes up in 1 second on my system. Thus, one has hardly time to press “Print Screen”. Sadly, there are some operations in VS that seem to take ages the first time you invoke them as almost nothing is being loaded into memory when you start it. I have to say though that  I like this quite a lot. Whenever you edit a XML file e.g. VS comes up and it is there just after you double click the XML file. If you double-click a pas-file it takes about 10-20 seconds until RAD Studio 2007 shows the file. I much rather had a short start time…but I know just as many folks at conferences who prefer a snappy IDE without load on demand and accept the long boot time. But back to ECO…

 If you select “File / New Project…”, ECO comes with a “solution wizard”. As MS has to use another terminology for anything (seen from the Delphi perspective *grin*), it had to be called a “Solution wizard”. Solutions are project groups in Delphi terms. However, as you will see shortly, ECO really makes use of solutions now as a single ECO application is split in different projects.

As you can see, ECO supports any .NET framework in Visual Studio 2008. Thus, you can target version 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5. This is awesome as version 3.5 comes with Linq and even if you do not want to use any databases or datasets, Linq is really useful for data structures as well. I hardly implement a C# class that does not make use of Linq. If you select “Eco solution” (not a good name yet, but it is beta…), the wizard appears:

Just as you can do in RAD Studio 2007, the wizard allows you to select from a number of presets to get started quickly. However, you can customize anything. In my opinion, the new structure of the wizard is much clearer than before. If you select the “Winform Application” preset and click “OK”, the wizard creates 3 projects in the solution:

The project marked with 1 is the actual application that contains your main form and will be the exe file that you run. Of course, you can have more than one “assembly” with Winforms, the wizard gets you set. A new feature is the separate project for the ECO Space. Furthermore, the ECO Space always has the same “structure”. In all previous ECO versions the ECO Space for an ASP.NET Web application looked differently from a Winforms application. Finally, there is one approach for all application types! The model is also always seperate in a different assembly, which makes it easy to use one model for different applications. You can as many model projects to your solution as you want. Visual Studio compiles the complete solution automatically and the wizard sets up the dependencies for you. Thus, you do not need to be careful when changing the model that your application picks up these changes. The IDE takes care of that for you. If you right click on a ECO package, you can start the modeler:

This is ECO Modeler as we know it, with lots of improvements. I do not know when the last version was released, but this version “feels” much improved with regard to the last version for ECO III. You have visual shortcuts to add classes, attributes, methods and even to create associations between classes. More of that in another blog post.

Finally, if you design your user interface you will meet old friends. Borland Developer Studio 2006 had all those components, but since Winforms was dropped in RAD Studio 2007, the Winform features of ECO were no longer available.

The worst thing about Visual Studio 2008 which just drives me crazy becomes very evident when having a lot of components in the toolbox. There is no filter function as in RAD Studio. It drives me crazy! You have to use the mouse all the time to add components to your form.

Summed up, ECO is already rock solid in VS. I have had no crashes using it. Some of the integration features need some fine-tuning, the name of the wizard being one example. Also the feedback to the user when doing some actions could be more, but I have to point out that it is a  Field Test build. I love the approach to use separate projects. The build process is being made very easy. Sadly, I miss some of the comfort that the VCL gives me using RAD Studio 2007. However, there are quite a few features that are only available in Winforms, so you really have to weigh in both sides. As we are in the .NET world, we can gladly write the GUI in Delphi using VCL.NET!

If you are interested in trying ECO for Visual Studio, go to capableobjects.com, the Field Test is public and thus open to anybody. Be aware that you need Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, the Express Editions are not supported.