.NET Bits

.NET 4.0 Certificates - Un available for download

I was trying to download my Certificates for .NET 4.0 and noticed that none of them are listed in the certificate manager area of the MCP website for download. Tried calling up the MCP support number and they were not of much help. If any one else is having / had the same issue; please drop me a comment and let me know how you got the issue resolved

Passed : Exam 70-515, 70-516,70-519 - .NET 4.0 Framework exams

I had given a total of five .NET 4.0 Certification exams( list below) during the beta period in April. I am glad that I passed all of them and can cross them out of my list of exams to take for the new framework

 This gives me 3 MCTS titles and 2 MCPD titles .

Since I work with .NET on a daily basis;  I prepared for these exams by reading  up on the new features from MSDN  and also by practising them using Visual Studio 2010

Exam 70-511: TS: Windows Applications Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4 & Exam 70-518: Pro: Designing and Developing Windows Applications Using Microsoft .NET Framework 4- Passed

Visual Studio Key board Binding Poster

If you prefer to use keyboard short cuts more than the mouse   ,please find below the links for the Visual studio Keyboard Binding Posters

Visual Studio 2010 (inludes links for C++,VB,C# & F#)

Visual Studio 2008 (C#)

 Visual Studio 2008(VB)

Exception:Cannot Start your application.The Workgroup information file is missing or opened exclusively by another user

We were getting this error when trying   to connect  to a password protected access file. This is what the connection string looked like

string conString =@"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source="Path to your access file";User Id=;Password=password";

To fix the issue this is what we did

string conString =@"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source="Path to your access file";Jet OLEDB:Database Password=password";

 We removed the User id and changed the password to Jet OLEDB:Database Password

Hope this helps someone

Automatic Properties in .NET 2.0 C# - Yes it is possible with a caveat

 Did you know that you can get automatic properties in .NET Framework 2.0?  

The key to doing so is to open a project in Visual Studio 2008. Make sure that the Target is .NET Framework 2.0 and that is  all it takes.

Even the snippets do not prompt you to create a backing private variable.

However a word of caution is that if you ever have a need to open this project in Visual studio 2005, it will not compile   and you should see the following error

" <VariableName>.get must declare a body because it is not marked abstract or extern" 

" <VariableName>.set must declare a body because it is not marked abstract or extern"  

Visual Studio 2010 RC is out

Visual Studio Release Candidate is out. See the post from Scott Guthrie. If you are interested in finding out what are the changes from VS 2008  or .NET 3.5; I strongly suggest that you check out  this series of blog posts

Another post from Mike Taulty listing out what is new

VS.NET 2010 UI sneak peak

Find below , a post from Jason Zander with some screen shots

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/02/20/a-new-look-for-visual-studio-2010.aspx

Looking forward to playing with the beta when its out

70-565 - Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

Looks like Prometric has published the results for the Beta exam,noticed it appear on my transcript and the prometric website and I'm glad that I cleared it :-)

2 more exams to go  for MCPD EAD 3.5

MCP Profiles & Directory.. Where did they go??

Just yesterday , I was trying to look up some one on the MCP directory (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/directory/default.mspx)

and noticed that the link no longer works . Searched around the MCP landing page and still could not find the directory.

Another feature that was also missing was the MCP Profiles page that was rolled out in early 2008  and gave the ability for MCP's to have a community profile like MVP's .

( link to the blog post from Georgeo announcing it http://blogs.msdn.com/mcp/archive/2007/10/18/mcp-2008-recognition-respect-and-reward.aspx)

Did any one else notice this? Did they get scrapped? Haven't seen any official announcement to this effect though.

If any one knows where they currently exist, drop me an email / a comment

Update 02/12/2009

I got an answer from Sarah Grant at Microsoft .Reproduced below

"Yes, the reason you cannot update your profile is that we found very few people used it and was not making the impact in the community we wished.  It was announced that it would retire in December - and it did"