1. Do use ASP.NET MVC (or at least learn the web like everybody else)

Don’t deal with ViewState, don’t deal with leaky abstractions of the web in a way that confounds you. You’ll thank yourself for writing cleaner code that you can test, and for mastering the deceptively simple art of web development. “It’s all just markup” is a mantra that will keep you on track when you feel overwhelmed with the new model, but it’s a new model you want to learn. If you don’t want to learn ASP.NET MVC, do yourself a favor and disable ViewState at the page level, and do what you can to avoid using it, whether that’s baking your own MVC-like “markup + business objects” design, or embracing the client-centric development model with JavaScript against ASP.NET controls that don’t require ViewState. Make friends with the Repeater.

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“Using statement?”, you may ask. “What is so interesting about that? I use it every day importing tons of namespaces!”
Well, i mean the other using statement; that one that results in a nice try..finally in IL, without having to write lots of code.

Well lets say you want to access a file, a database, or whatever resource that needs to be closed after usage:

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39 Free Microsoft eLearning Courses Great source for official free Microsoft E-Learning courses. They offer some classes like:

Collection 6187: What’s New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Collection 6261: Developing Rich Experiences using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 & Visual Studio 2008

Collection 5934: Introducing Windows Server 2008

I was compiling some VHDL code to run on the Cadence NCSim simulator with our new tools depot setup when I encountered this compile error:

ncvhdl: 06.11-s002: (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
ncvhdl_p: *F,NOLSTD: logical library name STD must be mapped to a design library [11.2].

After some investigation, it turned out that our tool setup was missing the critical $CDS_INST_DIR environment variable that our cds.lib file was referring to for the STD library definition. After working with IT to properly define it, the build went through without any problems. The cds.lib file was defined like so:

include $CDS_INST_DIR/tools/inca/files/cds.lib


Typing DOS commands on the Windows Command Line prompt is a most efficient and faster way of doing things in Windows XP. For example, did you know you can use it to automate your Visual Studio builds? Or watch Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope from the DOS prompt? Here’s a run-down of the most useful DOS commands available in Windows XP. Some of these DOS commands even do not have an visual alternative.

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Try as we might, there’s no stopping Windows Vista from gradually replacing our tried, true and beloved XP. Microsoft’s already phasing out XP out on all but the ultra mobile laptop market. So if you’ve already accepted the facts and you happen to be in the market for Windows Vista right now, here’s is a little secret that Microsoft doesn’t want you to know about that will save you $100 on any full version of Vista out there. Read more »

For the past two years, I’ve been content to build my Visual Studio projects individually by hand through the graphical user interface. Each library we shipped had a vcproj file that we used to build a DLL. For each vcproj, we had to build release and debug versions. Some projects were dependent on other projects’ libraries so while a single DLL might be shipped, it may have taken 3 vcproj builds to build it. This was totally fine because the process was not so bad as the need to release these libraries was minimal and in between builds I earned a chance to relax browse the web a bit. However, that’s changed this year. This year we have to ship VS2003 and VS2005 versions of everything. Suddenly all the work has effectively doubled. Now I am not so happy to sit and build everything manually anymore, especially since as we near the dreaded release deadline, we need to distribute the latest DLLs for testing. This means building DLLs over and over again, for VS2003 and then again for VS2005.

I’ve finally concluded that enough is enough, I am going to automate the entire build process so that I can build all the DLLs we need without any user interaction.

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After upgrading my server with the latest patch, one of the problems was that my ASP.NET website properties was greyed out. I was unable to change 1.1 to 2.0.

The simple fix on sub directories is:

go into IIS -> Right Clicking on the sub-directory in question and selecting Properties -> clicking on the directory tab -> Clicking Create under the application settings section. You will then be able to change the ASP NET version on the sub-directory.

To ge the whole site into 2.0, i just recreated the site.

So recently I had to read an xml file and then bind it to a dataset/gridview. I knew there had to be an easy way. This is how I ended up doing it:

aspx

asp :GridView ID="gvDocActivity" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" /

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Found this group called NYCResistor in New York obviously that’s offering Gameboy code development classes starting in a few weeks. Looks like all you’ll need is a laptop, Gameboy and flash carts are optional. If you ever wanted to know how to develop games or apps or whatever for the Gameboy and happen to live in the New York area, you can sign up here. Read more »