Jelle Druyts

There's a quite lengthy post from the VB team about the data design time changes between Whidbey beta 1 and beta 2 (via 3Leaf Development).

In there, I found a little gem that will solve one particular annoyance I have with the current Typed DataSet generator: while the columns are generated as strongly typed objects, they're declared as internal so they're no use outside the declaring assembly. Hence the column names in quotes in my previous posts about DataSets and Web Services:

testData.Employee.Columns["ID"].ColumnMapping = MappingType.Hidden;
testData.Employee.Columns["CompanyID"].ColumnMapping = MappingType.Hidden;

This will fortunately change in Whidbey, allowing more strongly-typed and thus safer code:

testData.Employee.IDColumn.ColumnMapping = MappingType.Hidden;
testData.Employee.CompanyIDColumn.ColumnMapping = MappingType.Hidden;

I had planned a rant on that but it seems I've been pre-empted by the team that figured it out on their own At least, if the C# team is also doing this but I can hardly imagine that they wouldn't follow the pattern here. It's the small things that can really make a difference you know...