Last Monday I saw an interesting post about managerial skill. It’s about asking someone to leave your company. I don’t have any company yet, but when I do, and I need to ask someone to leave, the points raised in that article should provide a good guideline.

The points are:

1. Be quick. Once you have decided to let go someone, quickly action on it. Don’t procrastinate. Prepare all the terms requiered, and immediately have the conversation with that person
2. Be generous. Unless it is a major failure/mistake, try to part in the best term as possible with the person. If possible, give severence pay even when it is not required.
3. Be clear. When having the conversation, start with the hard stuff. Don’t beat around the bush. Don’t use confusing words. Prepare the reasons why you let go that person, in case he/she is asking for it.
4. Get advice. There is a possibility that letting the person go will create legal exposure to the company. Ask advice from lawyer regarding your situation.
5. Communicate. Don’t let the rumours get ahead of you. Make sure the rest of the company is well informed about this decision. Be consistent with what you said to the person, and with what you said to the rest of the company. Never ever bad-mouthed that person after he/she left the company.

For the original article–complete with the informative discussions, visit Fred Wilson’s blog post.

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After upgrading to Ext.NET 1.4, I found out a weird bug with GridPanel. I have a GridPanel which is inside a Container. I set the Container’s layout to FitLayout because I want the GridPanel to occupy all the available space. To ensure that the width is fully used, I set the GridPanel’s AutoExpandColumn property to one of the column.

With that in mind, the GridPanel is expected not to have a horizontal bar. But somehow the horizontal scrollbar appears.

It gets worse when I scrolled it right until the end, the GridPanel’s content is now misaligned to its header.

This problem will not happen if I am not using the AutoExpandColumn property and set the columns width within the available space. I also found out that the horizontal scrollbar will disappear if I manually reduce the size of any column.

With that, I can positively identify that the bug lies in the way AutoExpandColumn works. To solve this, I could either dig deep to Ext.NET internals, or I just use a “duct tape solution”.

Due to time constraint, I’ll just use the “duct tape” solution for now. What we’re going to do is to reduce the column’s width after the data is loaded. I recommend to choose the column that is used as AutoExpandColumn as the target.

Assume that you already have the GridPanel, we will handle the Store’s Load event with fnResizeColumn function.

<ext:GridPanel ButtonAlign="Center"  
	ID="gv" runat="server" Header="false" 
	Border="false" AutoExpandColumn="Title">
	<Store>
		<ext:Store ID="ds" runat="server" RemoteSort="true" 
		UseIdConfirmation="true" AutoLoad="true">
			<Proxy>
				<!-- 
					..... SNIP .... 
				-->
			</Proxy>
			<Reader>
				<!-- 
					..... SNIP .... 
				-->
			</Reader>
			<BaseParams>
				<!-- 
					..... SNIP .... 
				-->
			</BaseParams>			
			<Listeners>				
				<Load Fn="fnResizeColumn" />
			</Listeners>
		</ext:Store>
	</Store>
	
	<!-- 
		..... SNIP .... 
	-->
	
</ext:GridPanel>

The fnResizeColumn method is quite simple.

var fnResizeColumn= function(obj) {
	var colModel = gv.getColumnModel();	
	//reduce the Column width by 50 pixels
	colModel.setColumnWidth(1, //zero-based column index
		colModel.getColumnWidth(1) - 50);            
	gv.doLayout();
}

There you go, fast and easy!

I hope it helps. Cheers!