Jelle Druyts

Well it's been a bumpy ride so far, I can tell you that. Working with alpha builds is always a bit of a "challenge" so of course we knew we could expect some trouble, but regular crashes and excessive memory consumption are now part of my regular day Let's just say there's still quite a lot of work on Visual Studio, so I think I know why they're calling it "2005" nowadays

So for now, we're still on the CTP build released on MSDN a few weeks ago, but maybe we'll switch over to a newer build if there's a chance of getting a more stable one. Anyway, it's a good thing I'm developing inside a VirtualPC, so when all else fails I can still revert to a more or less clean VPC and just pull the sources from SourceSafe.

But the good news is that there's such a flood of really great stuff coming in Whidbey errrr "Visual Studio .NET 2005 formerly known as Whidbey" (I think I'll stick to calling it "Whidbey" though ) so I'm really excited about it! I've been mostly working on the ASP.NET side of things, and it's just incredible what they've been doing over there. Security, Personalization, DataBinding, Web Parts, Themes, Masterpages, ... It's all there and it's really well architected. And best of all: it even seems to be pretty stable in this build

The trick here is to try and forget some "best practices" from ASP.NET 1.x because there are just a lot of new ways to do things now, and most of them don't require any code at all. Take DataBinding for example, with just 2 lines of markup, you pull your data from your Web Service and bind it to the new GridView control:

<asp:ObjectDataSource ID="infoData" Runat="server" TypeName="WeFly247.UI.Proxies.PassengerWebService" SelectMethod="GetFlightData" />
<asp:GridView ID="info" Runat="Server" DataSourceID="infoData" />

Goodness!

So I'm pretty much done with the general structure of the website, I'm now going to focus on connecting it to the business tier and feeding it some actual live data.