This time my column will be a little late. The main reason for that is lack of high speed Internet access in the hotel I am staying at for a little vacation. I am literally staying in the middle of nowhere, somewhere along the state borders between Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. Even though this is vacation time, I’d still like to write a column for DotNETForDevices. The week after the official launch of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 there should be enough things to write about. In this column I like to share personal experiences, so I could have written about how I lost time trying to bind some controls to a data source. Even without knowing many details, simply relying on auto-generated code, data binding is very easy.  That is, until I wanted to make some modifications and get a more personalized view of some data in an application. By that time I should have spent some time understanding what is really involved in binding data to controls, instead of simply copying some parts of the auto-generated code and tweaking that code a bit. In the end that would have saved time. When I ran into some problems I just started fighting some symptoms, trying to work around things that didn’t work properly, simply because I was calling some wrong methods. But again, to solve these problems properly, better understanding of data binding would have been necessary. Since I am in the middle of nowhere, with no Internet connection, at least not until you can read this column, it does not make a lot of sense writing about this topic anyway. So instead, it seems better to write about Windows. I just entered a little town called Window Rock. It sort of gave me a good feeling. Apparently, Microsoft has not taken over the world yet. This town has some history, probably like 100 years old, compared to Windows only 30. Besides that, if Microsoft would have taken over the world, I am sure that this little town would have been renamed to Windows Rocks! Simply adding two letters to a little town in the middle of nowhere gives this place an entirely different meaning. I am about to start feeling sorry for myself. Here I am, surrounded by some beautiful countryside, and a town name reminds me of Windows? With that I definitely know that I need more time off, so DotNETForDevices might have to do two weeks without a column. It is time to run away from everything computer related completely for a while. That gives me time to reset my own, internal computer, and at the same time feed it with information about things like data binding. When I got that figured out I will definitely let you know about it.

Maarten Struys