ZeroSleep

Favorite VS 2005 features this week...

2005-12-07T21:36:00Z

Right Click On Solution -> Add New "Solution Folder"

Finally, a way to categorize/organize my different project types in big solutions.

/WebDeployments

/WebProjects

/ClassLibraries

/SqlProjects

Robust way to deploy debug/release builds of web-apps:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/reference/infrastructure/wdp/default.aspx

Thank you Microsoft!

Editing .skin files...

2005-12-06T22:34:00Z

Note to self.

If anyone is going to use .skin files to theme .Net 2.0 apps, I suggest making the following tweak to Visual Studio:

Tools > Options > Text Editor > File Extension

Add "skin" w/ "User Control Editor, Apply

Close all open skin files and re-open them. Voila, auto-complete now works.

Great Blog. Great Post

2003-09-23T20:16:00Z

Eric Lippert's blog has quickly become my favorite blog on the planet. Every post has been a gem to me because I love to hear about the internals of the jscript/vbscript libraries -- straight from the guy who developed a bunch of it. Simply because it seems, as of late, I spend my entire day scripting client side components.

So anyway, he's posted a great entry today (non script/com related) about taking ownership of one's mistakes, blunders. Great stuff. Thanks Eric.

Happy Happy. Joy Joy.

2003-09-22T01:19:00Z

Passed my last mcsd.net test today (70-229). That was stressful -- I hate taking tests in general. I believe in highschool, I actually failed an art test once. Top that.

Great experience for a newbie .net guy like myself. It forced me to study several different areas of the framework that I wouldn't have looked at thru the normal schedule of work.

Certification stuff...

2003-09-15T23:05:00Z

Great comments from Phil (http://weblogs.asp.net/pscott/posts/27658.aspx). I'd have to say my initial reasons for getting certified were purely job related in the beginning. As consultants, our company obviously places value in getting us certified so that we can be marketed as .net specialists. I'm sure some clients buy into this and some don't and some should and should not. In the end, I believe this process is helping me with my confidence and skill-set.

We’re not sent thru cert mills, we are told to study on our own time, but the company will allow us to expense X number of exams/books. Most of us barely have time for our projects, so it's definitely a personal endeavor (long nights/weekends studying).

I’ve passed 315/316/320 on the first attempts, with about 4 months of .NET experience under my belt at the time. I used an all-in-one book, Ingo Rammer’s book for 320 and various beginner level C#/ASP.net books (mostly wrox/o’reilly). There was a lot of overlap in questions between 315 & 316, so I found those tests pretty easy.

320 was scary for me, as I’ve never touched remoting (Java EJBs were the closest cousin) so I was unfamiliar with the .net concepts before reading Ingo’s book. I thought for sure I had failed after the last question, but alas I lucked out.

Once 300 came along, I knew my “experience” was lacking as a consultant as I had hard time grasping the MSF process. Let’s just say I failed it more than once, but finally passed on Sunday. It’s helps to have good reading comprehension skills for this test, as a lot of the answers are in the case studies. I however, am a horrible test taker and get to nervous to pay close enough attention. My final strategy was to NOT take notes, do a rush read of the case study and a rush run thru of the questions. This gave me enough time to re-read the study in detail and change my mind about my initial answers later.

One more test to go, 229 (re-take). Hopefully I’ll pass in time for the nifty “You are special” early achiever certification. Overall, the entire process has encouraged me to study more, compete with my peers (which I think is a great thing) and become more comfortable with .NET in general.

First blog...

2003-07-19T01:26:00Z

Well, I guess I have to start this thing sooner or later. First off, a little about myself.

I'd like to thank Scott for giving me access to this great tool. I'm constantly lurking dozens of feeds, probably spending a little too much time reading and not enough coding.

I'll start off by posting a little scriplet I came up with today to help solve an issue with a web control I'm working on. I searched high/low to find something as simple as returning the position of the caret within a textbox, but nothing seemed to work for me. Please let me know if it works for you.