The Report and Calendar features are both pretty good additions to our toolboxes. These are major chunks of functionality that show up often in many applications so it's nice we wont have to build them from scratch (or showhorn 3rd party pieces in) anymore.

I'd hoped for more of the simpler 'wishlist' items to have made it in, but time is a limited resource.

I still think there are numerous, basic, usability issues that outght to be handled. Although these are minor 'nits', they can make us more efficient. For example, there are various places throughout the IDE where file paths are entered. Whenever the 'file' dialog box pops up, it shows the path from whatever file you last selected. But, it doesn't make sense to show the path to the include files when you are trying to select the style sheet. Nor does it make sense to show the path from 'Project X' when you are working on 'Project Y'. Yet that's exactly what happens.

I think the premier example of the right way to do paths has to be Paintshop Pro from JASC.com (actually, they are now owned by Corel these days). Each section of PSP has its own path descriptors and it's very handy no having to reselect a folder each time your open your files.

Chicago has put itself in the foregound of a battle regarding photographers and public spaces. The city's park police have attempted to stop people from taking pictures that happen to include the "Cloud Gate" sculpture because it's a "copyrighted work of art".

So, an object placed in this park - a park that was constructed with, and is maintained by, tax dollars - is off limits to anyone with a camera. How absurd is that? An area designed to attract tourism, which inevitably means the presence of cameras, is a hunting ground for zealous police looking for a "bust".

When I book a flight, it's a very unpleasant experience. Why I can't simply fly from point A to point B at some reasonably-predictable fare is beyond me. There seem to be thousands of combinations of fares, flight times, flight dates, "stops", days of the week, how far in advance I book it, etc.

Hello, Airlines - time to wake up! I just want to get where I'm going. I don't want to turn the process into a part-time job. To come up with all these combinations must be millions of dollars each year for deep-thinking people, computers, and software to dream them all up. So not only are you making it hard for ME to get somewhere, you are making it hard on yourselves too.

Why is it I can fly 1500 miles across the country for $100 but to go a mere 500 miles you feel it's worth $1000?

Why is it that you want me to book weeks in advance to get a fare that's 1/2 or 1/3 the price of booking it less than 5 days before departure?

Why is it, when you insist on getting me to book a month in advance, that you won't give me a refund if my plans change 2 weeks later? What crazy logic did you use to come up with that strategy?

Here's a clue for you, Airlines: A lot of people just don't want to deal with your screwy reservation systems. And NOBODY wants to pay for a flight if there's any chance they might have to cancel. Ask around, you won't find ONE PERSON who thinks it's ok for you to keep our money if suddenly we have to cancel, even when it's weeks in advance of the departure time.

You may have "friendly skies" but you certainly don't have friendly booking policies.

So I routinely create things with no theme, so that all the "class=" attributes are omitted. I rely on a much simpler CSS page that has TABLE, INPUT, H1..H5, INPUT, SELECT and only a few other HTML tags declared. I can now also modularize the CSS into layout and (separately) visual attributes (color, font, etc.)

I quickly migrated to putting H1 for page headings and H2 for grids and records. This meant I did a lot of editing after creating them. Well, I went into the \components\templates\HTML folder of my CodeCharge installation and edited gridHTML, EditablegridHTML and RecordHTML.xml.

I like having the "caption" cells of my grid as TH instead of TD because they naturally are centered and bolded. So, I edited the xml files (very carefully!) to make them output the <2 and TH. This saves me lots of time and so far, has not been a problem. It will be, next time CCS gets upgraded of course because all my changes will disappear.

I hope that someday Yes will provide a supported way to alter these template xml files so that I can have any number of control layouts I care to create, with wizard-generated headings that I choose.

CCS needs to differentiate between "theme" (meaning an overall scheme of colors, fonts and graphics) and "styles" (meaning the choice of HTML elements used to construct a page). I find DIV and UL blocks frequently are more appropriate and less complex than lots of nested tables. It would be very empowering if I could define and choose alternative styles.

It's been a problem for me when I wanted to have an audit trail of whos changed what and when. The way the Ed Grid works, this means lots of audit updates occur - even when there was nothing change! Bad. Very bad.

Well, I decided to see what I could do about this to avoid the problem.

I began playing with the events to see what information was going to be available to me. Well, the answer is, "Not much."

I put a checkbox on the grid as an indicator that "this record has bee updated". That's fine, except (for some reason) when the (Before or After) Update events fire, This checkbox only has the value of the last row of my grid. Hmmmm more "bad".

If the checkbox is bound to the underlying Data Source, then it becomes available for each row as EdGrid.Datasource.Checkbox1.Value, AND it reflects the value for each row. Ta Da! But wait, not so fast. There is a problem. That checkbox does not have a corresponding column in the Data Source, so a nasty SQL error appears, telling me it's not going to update the database.

Now comes the interesting part: What if I removed the non-existent column from the Update query? All would be fine. BUT! How to do this? Well, there is a Command object contained in the Ed Grid (it's a property of the grid class). I named my checkbox "Marked" and assigned the checked/unchecked values to 1/0. Thus, the Command object's SQL property contains either "Marked='0'" or "Marked='1'", so it's easy to simply excise this from the EdGrid.Command.SQL property.

Voila! I also now have a useable indicator of each row in the grid, which can tell me whether it's been updated or not.

A refinement to this technique would be to use a Hidden textbox with a default value of 0, and with a little javascript, "set" the hidden control's value to 1 whenever one of the other columns is modified (via the onclick() client-side event). That would make the detection of changed rows automatic. To finish things off, whenever the "changed" control is a "1", dump the Update instead of executing it.

There are still some details to work out before this is fully functional. When they are, the Ed Grid will only update rows where data was changed, and thus, NEEDS to be updated.

Once it is done, I'll be posting the code and documentation on gotodon.com

Documenting the "runtime" elements needs to be more complete and insightful. There are a lot of functions that don't appear in the help file - for reasons known only to Yes Software. Maybe they are only temporary or maybe they forgot. But it's a pain either way. It's not always clear how to use them, either - even when they are in the help file. Take the add/remove parameter function. I defy anyone to makes use of these just by reading the help file.

Good documentation is not voluminous, it does not merely regurigate the parameters which must be passed into functions. It is (brief) and insightful description of the software - "why" as well as "what", so that the user can understand why something does what it does, not just that you have to give it 2 parameters that are strings.

I think a regular and consistent organization of the runtime into classes would help greatly with understanding and using CCS.

Things like, "all the entries for a specific month" (or year). Of course, you can write queries that embed functions to split date fields into months (or whatever the situation might be), but it seems that most people are not cognizant of one critical factor:

These queries cause "table scans".

Table scans are slow. They read every stinkin' row in the table and perform a calculation. Bleahh!

If you need to search the data a certain way, insert it into the database so that you can lookup the values directly. For dates, store the rows with separate year, month, day columns.

You will also make the application less dependent on one particular database implementation (they all seem to have their own set of functions which are different from everyone else's). So, when you find that Access is isadequate (which should take you about 3 days to figure out), you can switch to mySQL with minimal pain and rewriting.

I'd guess the same concept would apply to record forms.

Of course, this would automatically "morph" the form to include the columns of the datasource fed to it. This would be useful for situations where certain security groups have access to all fields and others don't - the data source could be a query and based on the security level, the query changed. Thus, the displayed columns would also change.

So why did the C# keybindings change?

While reading the above item on a .NET blog, it hit home with respect to CCS. How annoying it is that I have to press CTL+F8 to quick-publish a page (when I routinely do that as my "default")?

Wouldn't it be nice if I could define my preferred set of key bindings (like Visual Studio 2005 is going to do)!

What would be nice is a control panel of sorts for recording the last-edit, last-publish and even version numbers of each file in the project. At the very least, something that would jog my memory about what I've changed. I might work on 4-5 pages then publish. I really object to "publish all" because of (1) how long that can take and (2) I might have several pages "under construction" and not ready for release.

Come to think of it, a publish/don't publish option would be great. I'd want this to work not only on files but on entire folders.

When CCS does it's publishing function, a better indicator of what was published would help a lot. Tying this back to the version idea, the indicator could say something like "Version 1.4 replaced with Version 1.5 on http://someURL.com". Saving this to a file (or providing a facility to write a database) would be SO nice.