One of the things that really frustrates me with VS 2005 is working with some of the server controls that don't work the way you think they should. Take the menu control for example. It would really be nice if it did more with direct data sets. Instead, you have to present it XML data, but only from like an actual XML file or the like. You can't just attach it to a SQL SP that spits out For XML. And even if you One of the things that really frustrates me with VS 2005 is working with some of the server controls that don’t work the way you think they should. Take the menu control for example. It would really be nice if it did more with direct data sets. Instead, you have to present it XML data, but only from like an actual XML file or the like. You can’t just attach it to a SQL SP that spits out For XML. And even if you have a flat menu structure, you can’t just tie it to a simple resultset and have a nice dynamic menu. Of course, these can be done at all, but not without some pretty thick coding. And the point of the whole thing isn’t to code that much, but to have these controls do the work for you.Another good example is binding data to a calendar control. VS doesn’t do it from the calendar properties so again you find yourself up to your elbows to code the solution. More often than not, I find myself not using these ‘easy’ built-in solutions provided by VS because in practice, few of them are that easy. Take the login control. You can have it be SQL driven, or windows driven. That’s great, but what if I want a windows login site that’s available from the outside world. It would have to provide you a method for logging in with your windows credentials when none are present. Now, I know this can be done because OWA does it just fine. But it’s not easy, and it’s not part of the properties setup by the control. And there’s no easy way to use complex custom mappings from your windows creds to your application security. Let’s say that I want to use windows auth for my ASPX pages. And inside my DB I have certain users or groups that have rights to individual pages or even rows of data that’s determined by some logic inside either the front end, or the backend. There’s no real easy way to map your windows acct to that security model. You can do it with the SQL auth because you can point it at the DB and tell it where to get the security, but with Windows you’re left holding the bag with a much more complicated solution. Let’s see… oh yeah, I was talking about not using those solutions. Yeah, another reason I tend to not use things like the menu control, etc is because of the way they’re implemented. You have to put them inside a form tag and once you get them inside a master page and put 3-4 other form controls on there, it can be hard to manage them and get them to work correctly. A lot of times it comes down to using one control or the other and it’s just a pain. And again, even if you could use them all on one page (which I’m sure you can), it’s so much trouble you’re better off just using something else and saving yourself the hassle. What got me on this topic were a couple vids I saw from TechED on LINQ. Frankly, I didn’t really get the whole LINQ hype until I saw that one vid online. It’s given by Luca Bolognese, who’s about as Italian as you can get. He’s always talking about Ferrari and ravioli, which is great if you ask me. Anyway though, it’s an excellent intro to LINQ and he actually managed to get me excited about VS’08 which is something that I haven’t managed to do yet. So I think I’m actually going to go download it this week and try to do some LINQ stuff.One thing that I’m wondering about though, is whether they’re actually addressing any of these other concerns. I’m not the only one who’s noticed these either. And these are just the tip of the meatball. I do love .NET for how easy it makes some things, but you’ve really gotta do more these days. It would be nice if they would start crossing the finish line on some of these things and actually making some of these things easier to use. To this day, I still haven’t used the Login control because every time I go to setup my provider in the site properties, I get an error. I’m sure I could troubleshoot it and get it working, but so far it’s been easier to use a table adapter and just get on with my life. Not to mix topics here, but the same thing goes for SQL Server and SSMS. Yukon was basically v.1 for a lot of these tools so I cut them a lot of slack. If we still see a lot of the same issues in the Katmai toolset I’m going to be a lot less forgiving. Especially if they’re problems I know people have been telling them about for quite some time. I realize they can’t put every feature everyone comes up with in the product, but there had really better be some significant improvement in the way these tools work or there are going to be a lot of SQL guys hitting the roof… myself included.Anyway, I’m just waiting to see what they come up with. Databases