Microsoft spanglish documentationo? February 24, 2006
Posted by Aaron in : Work , trackbackBit of warning, this is a bit of a nerdy post.
So I’m poking around the guts of the Microsoft .NET framework 2.0 trying to implement unusual behavior for a check box. One visit to the documentation lands me at a page titled “RegisterExpandoAttribute”. “Expando?” I ask “what the heck is that? spanglish?” The page replies:
Registers a name/value pair as a custom (expando) attribute of the specified control.There it is again, and I’m no closer to knowing what expando means, so I hit google. No one seems to have a definition for it but finally I run across a Mozilla page talking about an odd javascript behavior that they have decided not to support (it isn’t part of the standard, but IE allows it):
Microsoft has an expando attribute that one can put on a class to allow instances to hold ad-hoc properties.Ok, ad-hoc properties, I guess I can search for that now, not exactly a definition, but at least it’ll lead me closer to one. I search more and discover an article about c# talking about ad-hoc property objects aka PropertyBags more commonly seen in asp.net code as ViewState.
So now I’ve got my definition sorta, expando attributes are ones that aren’t perhaps there by base definition, but can be added and referenced by name at run-time. Sadly my question remains and it is only the tone that changes… Expando? You know there is this word, Expand, that I can tell they are familiar with, and it has this other form where it is lengthened to Expansion. I think that’d be pretty ideal for this case.
Update: Before I actually finished this post I stopped and wondered if Expando was actually spanish and not just some crazy american slapping an “o” on expand. Turns out that I am the crazy american, and expando does mean “I expand” in spanish. So I guess RegisterExpandoAttribute while it is still spanglish as a whole, isn’t as crazy. Though would it have really hurt their documentation people to do a better job of explaining what an expando attribute really means to the system as a whole?
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Guess that bit of Spanish you paid attention to sort of paid off. Thank goodness for having to learn a second language. (Latin excluded at present) Tee Hee
Paid off? I typed expando into google’s translator. The only spanish I remember is for “Thank you” “your welcome”, “yes” and “no”, and “no more”. I only remember that much because of the trip to mexico. Specificly the last phrase I learned to deal with children. oh and “In the name of jesus, get back” which I learned from one of the children (funny story, perhaps I should tell it sometime).
That would be why I said “sort of”.
Google “building asp.net 2.0 web sites using web standards”. Included in the article is some info on Expando. interesting article. I learned a lot from it. (not an expert, but get paid for doing it).
How’s the trip to Venzuela comming along.
chuck