Ok - I give in where's it all gone?...

M

mandelbrot

Centurion
Joined
Jul 1, 2005
Messages
194
Location
UK North East
Dear All,


Bl°°dy Microsoft!

I've just been upgraded to VS.NET 2005, and I can't find the definitions for the controls! Where's it all gone? In 2003 the controls were defined and instantiated in the code itself - much easier to understand and manipulate. Now, it appears, Microsoft have taken a backward step and reverted to their old ways of hiding the definitions away somewhere...

Could anyone point me in the direction of some literature that will bring me up to speed (from 2003 to 2005) without too much reading (facts rather than waffle), or give me a quick explanation on the development of Windows forms, please? (I'll be forever grateful!).


Thanks in advance,
Paul.
 
Ok - found it.

Still don't understand why MS can't leave something alone that works perfectly well!

Bl°°dy stupid way of doing things, if you ask me - what's wrong with simply dropping the code into a region as they did in 2003?...

Mutter, mutter, chunter, chunter, RANT!
 
Partial classes

Partial classes are new in .Net 2.0, and personally I like the way the designer-generated code is more clearly separated from the actual class code. It's a lot tidier in my opinion.

Horses for courses, I suppose. I'm sure you'll get used to it. :)
 
Re: Partial classes

LOL!

I think it actually makes the code less readable - there's an extra level of obscurity to code, now, and an attempt, even, to hide away the code that, nine times out of ten, we all need to look at.

It took me most of yesterday afternoon to find the code I was looking for, and was extremely annoyed when I had to unhide some core elements of the project I was working on to be able to read what I needed...

VS.NET 2005 or rather .NET FW 2.0 also seems to be slower. I performed a really simple operation (populating a datagrid using a dataset) and it seemed to take way too much time, especially for a 2.8Ghz Dual Core. The same process, on my older P4 1.5GHz machine, seemed to have practically no lag!

Thanks for your input, MrPaul - I'll try and grow to like 2005, but I don't think it will ever match 2003 in my estimations... Bring back 2003 - it was far, far better...
 
Re: Partial classes

Mandelbrot, I certainly understand your point of view on the fact that hiding designer code can actually be confusing and frustrating for a user experienced with DotNet programming, but plenty of people disagree. When VS2005 came out everyone started asking, "Where's my designer generated code?!"

The hidden designer code brings back that mysterious black-box feeling of VB6, where many things seem to happen magically because you aren't quite sure what is going on when you can't see what happens under the hood. Some of us don't appreciate that we are distanced from the underlying workings of the designer, but others appreciate the simplification and reduction in clutter. I couldn't stand it at first, especially with VB Express, where, by default, there is no way to access designer generated code through the IDE, but I've grown to appreciate the separation. Designer generated code never really got in the way, but when you are doing something where you need to get at designer code, such as developing controls, it is nice to have a separate tab for the generated code and to be able to get to it without losing your place in your own code.

I think Microsoft made a couple of mistakes in the implementation, especially completely hiding generated code in VB, but on the whole the feature adds more value than it takes away.
 
Re: Partial classes

I will admit that I have found a couple of things easier; the documentation processes are trully a stroke of genius, as are the verbose nature of the combined stack trace and error display in the output.
 
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