The Menace Blog

There are still a lot of confusion between access modifiers especially some keywords such as friend, protected, and protected friend. This post is meant to clear things up and distinguish the keywords from each other. Take note that C# keywords are in lower-case (Pascal notation is used below to simply things). In a lot of cases, Private and Public will suffice but there will be instances where you need to limit some exposure to certain types and members -- the logic behind encapsulation.

I’ve been using jQuery more and more lately. I’ve been studying it closely now specially how to work with its API and has been well surprised at the cool things that it can do. After several hours (more like days and days) of examining its capabilities, I was able to put together a project with several pages of demos that highlights some of its functions, events, DOM manipulation, etc. Learning how cool it can accomplish things, I’d though of what practical applications can I use it for in the real world. None of this will matter if I can’t apply it anywhere else besides building fancy highlighting of text, etc.

I’ve been reading a lot about jQuery lately (actually since last month) but more so lately because I’d like to know what the buzz is all about. When I first heard about it last year, I simply just ignored it because I know that jQuery is only one of many UI libraries out there. When Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2008 officially supported the framework via its intellisense, I started paying attention. Now jQuery is becoming more and more popular these days and I’ve noticed that a lot of web sites tends to learn more towards web 2.0 interface now. The UI side of things has finally come back and emerge back in the scene in terms of web development.

Oh I love errors! LOL…and I love posting about them because I learn something every time. With any issues comes solutions, always. You might not be able to find it the first time or the second time but over time, some way or another you’ll be lead to an actual solution. While working on an ASP.NET issue, I encountered an issue accessing an application. The error goes something like this:

The last few blogs that I posted about were about errors and there should be no surprise this time as I'm posting another error that I encountered today while firing up Visual Studio 2008 at home. The error that I received was, there was "no Visual Studio template found" and regardless of what framework I picked when creating a new website or project, no template was shown. Take note that I'm also using Microsoft Vista which also added to the issue (as I'll discuss in a few).

I have encountered this error message in the past when I upgrade a few projects to 3.5 but it has been at least 3-4 months and found myself stuck with the same dilemma once again today. This error can be attributed to many things but mainly it comes down to web.config or ambigiouty in the references. Like my previous post, I would like to make another mental note as I know for sure that this won't be the last time that I will be seeing this error nor for anybody who upgrades to 3.5 that uses Ajax functionalities. After searching the web for answers, there was no definite response but after an hour of continuous searching, I was able to put all the information together which leads to the fix.

I'm looking around on books that evolves around ASP.NET and I'm starting to see a common pattern among a lot of the books. In most cases, they are predominantly written in C# leaving no alternate code in VB. I know that C# is being pushed by a lot of developers to be a better choice (this is debatable), but I just don't understand why there is a favor towards a single programming language (C# in this case). I'm a VB programmer myself and I know that C# is pretty similar and shouldn't be hard to learn, but the same concern goes the other way around. If most technical books are written in VB, then I'm pretty sure that the C# community will have the same concern as well.

Given the error above and more information below: