Victor Garcia Aprea : LadyBug: They Listen!

LadyBug: They Listen!

I highly encourage anyone playing with the Whidbey bits to take some time, register in the MSDN Product Feedback Center (a.k.a. LadyBug) and start submitting feedback. Based on my experience I can tell you that you won’t be wasting your time and you are going to get a reply to your submission, it may take a little while, but most likely you will get a response.

I have submitted a few bugs and suggestions myself (yes, I need to take some time, dig into my whidbey_bugs.txt file and start submitting those…) with different types of priorities and I was kind of surprised about how one of them turned up; I filed it as a ‘suggestion’ (‘bug’ was just too much for this one) and it is about a very low-level detail of the viewstate serializer that changed from 1.x to Whidbey in a way I didn’t like. My suggestion only received 1 (one) vote with a rating of 1/5. It was *my* own vote and I chose a rating of 1/5 because I thought “oh well, they’re in beta now, they’re surely worried by other most important stuff, so let’s be easy with them and just rate it with very-low priority”.

Sincerely, I was not hoping for this submission to get very far; luckily I was wrong!! :-)

I’m pasting a summary here (or you may want the real thing instead):

Problem Statement: Opened by vga on 5/26/2004 at 4:10 PM

=== Edited by vga on 5/26/2004 4:10:44 PM ===

There is a notoriously lack of support for the System.Web.UI.WebControls.Unit type in Whidbey.

In v1.x this type was assigned its own type code (49) which saved the serializer from having to store an –often large– string representing its assembly-qualified name.

In Whidbey, Unit is not backed up with a type code meaning that its full type name needs to be stored into viewstate, which means storing once the following additional string:

System.Web.UI.WebControls.Unit

Let’s take for example the following Unit instance:

Unit u = new Unit (“100px”);

In v1.x this instance will end up serialized into 8 bytes while in Whidbey final footprint will be of 39 bytes.

More info @ http://weblogs.asp.net/vga/archive/2004/05/26/WhidbeyWillBringsUsAShorterViewstateGuaranteed.aspx

Edited by Microsoft on 6/25/2004 at 7:05 PM

Thank you for submitting this bug report. We are currently investigating the issue and will keep you informed of the resolution.

The Web Platform & Tools Team

Edited by Microsoft on 6/30/2004 at 4:25 PM

The Microsoft Sub-status is now "Working on solution"

Resolved as Fixed by Microsoft on 7/22/2004 at 7:06 PM

Thanks for the feedback, we've now added the Unit token.

The Web Platform & Tools Team

As you can see this was “Resolved as Fixed” which means they’ve modified the current bits to add support for the Unit token, *way* cool!

Now, look at the dates and pay some attention: my initial submission was made on 5/26/04, almost a month later, on 6/25/04, they said “we’re investigating the issue”; my reaction to this was “oh sure… I can see the ‘thanks, but we’re a bit busy on other stuff’ already…”. Then, on 6/30/04, exactly 5 days later, they send a ‘we’re working on a solution’. I still didn’t buy this one and just though that sooner or later my little poor suggestion was going to die with the common “we will consider this for vNext”. Three weeks later –on 7/22/04– , when I’ve already completely forgot about this, a “Resolved as Fixed” was submitted. Yes, as I said before “it may take a little while” to get a final response, in this particular case it was “only” 56 days, but it was definitively worth the wait! (in case you haven’t noticed already, yes I’m happy!).