So, I’ve got a document library, and I’ve added 3 extra columns to it. For simplicity, I shall call them ‘Text’, ‘Number’ and ‘CheckBox’. I filled in some data for them - a number in the Text field, the same number in the number field, and I check the checkbox for all of the items. I end up with a list looking like below…

So, for now, let’s ignore the fact that the value for some of the longer numbers has been rounded in one of the fields - and not ask why MOSS didn’t just complain that the numbers were too big. Instead, let’s ask what the column types being used are…

Consider the following code:
StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter("output.txt",false);

foreach (SPListItem i in myCollection)
{
sw.Write(i.Name);
foreach (DictionaryEntry h in i.Properties)
{
if (h.Key.ToString().StartsWith("Title") ||
h.Key.ToString().StartsWith("Tex") ||
h.Key.ToString().StartsWith("Yes") ||
h.Key.ToString().StartsWith("Num"))
{
sw.Write(" {0} = {1} ({2})",
h.Key.ToString(),
h.Value.ToString(),
h.Value.GetType().ToString());
}
}
sw.WriteLine();
}
sw.Close();
So, what did this produce? Well, I’ve changed the output to align into columns…

b2b2b2 01.xls Text = 65534              (System.Int32)  YesNo = 1       (System.Int32)  Number = 65534.0000000000  (System.String)
b2b2b2 03.xls Text = 65540              (System.Int32)  YesNo = 1       (System.Int32)  Number = 65540.0000000000  (System.String)
b2b2b2 05.doc Text = 131070             (System.Int32)  YesNo = 1       (System.Int32)  Number = 131070.000000000  (System.String)
b2b2b2 06.xls Text = 131080             (System.Int32)  YesNo = 1       (System.Int32)  Number = 131080.000000000  (System.String)
b2b2b2 07.xls Text = 9999999999999998   (System.String) YesNo = 1       (System.Int32)  Number = 9999999999999990  (System.String)
b2b2b2 09.doc Text = 9999999999999999   (System.String) YesNo = 1       (System.Int32)  Number = 9999999999999990  (System.String)
b2b2b2 12.TIF Text = 10000000000000000  (System.String) YesNo = true    (System.String) Number = 10000000000000000 (System.String)
b2b2b2 17.doc Text = 2342345245         (System.String) YesNo = 1       (System.Int32)  Number = 2342345245.00000  (System.String)
b2b2b2 20.doc Text = 4353455656563      (System.String) YesNo = 1       (System.Int32)  Number = 4353455656563.00  (System.String)
c3c3c3 03.jpg Text = 2147483646         (System.String) YesNo = true    (System.String) Number = 2147483646.00000  (System.String)
c3c3c3 10.pdf Text = 2147483650         (System.String) YesNo = true    (System.String) Number = 2147483650.00000  (System.String)
c3c3c3 17.txt Text = 4294967294         (System.String) YesNo = true    (System.String) Number = 4294967294.00000  (System.String)
c3c3c3 18.txt Text = 4294967298         (System.String) YesNo = true    (System.String) Number = 4294967298.00000  (System.String)

Hello? The checkbox is sometimes ‘true’, and 1? String or Int32? WTF? Or that the Text column stores 65534 as an Int32, and the Number field as a String? Okay, I can see why the last one might make sense, but why is the TEXT column a number? And what if I now want to assign a String to it? I tried…

i.properties['Text'] = “Hello World”;

Guess what - exception (SPInvalidPropertyException, to be precise). But maybe, just maybe, I knew I’d be putting text in there later and that was why I made it an effing text column. And why is the Boolean column an Int or a string? I mean, either is a fine choice, but not BOTH.

Don’t get this. Pissed off. Am going home.

This strikes me as very wrong. It’s not like they had to do anything complicated - they’re just transformers. The technology has been understood for a long time. I mean, batteries are one thing, but transformers?

The complication then comes that there are dozens of almost identical connectors, and finding out what connector you had is hard work.

So, couldn’t electronics companies build better power supplies? With fewer ’standard’ connectors (and none of this proprietry bollocks like some laptop manufacturers use - there’s no need)? And perhaps some system of colour coding, or at least documentation of what the connector is? Would that be too much to ask?

A lot of time passed, and I became a developer. One day I was looking at an online chess site and I just thought ‘I could build this’. I had recently started learning about JSP and Servlets to work towards Java Web Developer certification. So, I sat down, worked out the logic, learnt about ‘bit boards’, and build the engine for working out valid moves, given a position. And I wrote it all in Java.

After that, all I had to do was build the website to support that engine, and at this point I stalled. Building websites out of Java was excessively hard - security filters for login, carefully planned data structures, lots of JDBC to connect to the database. To be honest, the hard problem cracked, I lost interest.

Time passed. I started to read about this new thing ‘Ruby on Rails’, and so I thought I should take a look. I went through a couple of tutorials and I was impressed. In minutes I could make a (very basic) site that dealt with security, database interaction, etc., pretty much for me. I just thought “Now this is a simple way of building that site”. So, I did.

I ported my code from Java into Ruby in about 4 hours - most of which was getting to grips with the Ruby language itself. I built a database schema, and based the site around that structure.

And that’s pretty much where simplyxiangqi came from.

What I did was build a test workflow. I’d got delay activities that weren’t working, and I wanted to investigate the possible factors involved.

I know that they were working just fine in Beta 2. I thought the difference here from what I was doing in Beta 2 was that I was setting the TimeoutDuration at runtime, through the InitializeTimeoutDuration function.

So I built a test workflow with 2 different parallel branches. One had a ’static’ (design time) configured delay, and the other had a ‘dynamic’ (runtime) set delay. Both had an InitializeTimeoutDuration function set, though for the ’static’ case all this did was log that it had been invoked.

I ran the workflow. My log file showed that the workflow ran both the InitializeTimeoutDuration functions, and nothing else.

Previously, I’d not run that function at all, so I tried configuring both Delays to not call InitializeTimeoutDuration. I ran the workflow, and again, nothing after the delays ever happened.

So I thought maybe it was because I had 2 delays. I disabled one sequence, and added a new second sequence that just contained a code step. I ran this - and again, anything after the Delay activity was never run.

In the end, I took one of the sequences outside the Parallel Activity. The workflow was now OnWorkflowActivated - Code - Delay - Code. And the second code step never runs.

I know this worked in Beta 2 - has the Tech Refresh broken this?

Comments from my old blog:

I got the same impression - Beta 2 TR has broken Delay Activities…

By Robert at 15:50:06 Tuesday 10th October 2006

Full Title: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation Self-Paced Training Kit

The best thing that I can say about this book is that it gives you a feel for the things covered in the 70-536 exam. Other than that, it’s the worst technical book I’ve read.

It is poorly structured. I mean answers to some of the ‘end of lesson’ questions refer to things that haven’t been introduced yet. If it isn’t an aspect of .NET that you’ve encountered in your work, you can’t answer that! And what’s with all the tables listing the features of all these different stream readers and writers - just show me ONE, and then explain how the others are DIFFERENT.

That said, I’d still have given this 3 stars if it weren’t for the errors. The book is littered with them. Examples of gzip decompression that actually compress, answers to questions with typos, hell, even answers to a completely different question in one chapter. I literally have too many to list. This is appalling quality control. If I can spot them, the reviewers should have. It’s just not good enough.

If it weren’t that it’s the ONLY book on the subject out here, I’d recommend ANYTHING else.