Effective Thoughts

Most fortunately, no one in my family has battled cancer. Hopefully, this will continue. However, we must become more vigilant in this fight. I'm encouraged by Lance Armstrong's renewed push to conquer this silent foe. It is truly an abomination that a people so rich in knowledge and experience have yet to defeat cancer. We put men on the moon...almost 40 years ago! How is cancer anything but a footnote from the 1990's? I urge you to join in with Lance's army . The V Foundation and the American Cancer Society are also responsible agents in the fight against cancer.

Well done! Well done. CodeMash really delivered. Day 2, for me, could be summed up as Scott Guthrie Day. I'm not sure how he pulled off 3 knowledge-laden, engaging presentations...all while on Redmond time. I kept noticing the clock on his laptop. During his keynote at 9am, his clock read 6am. And he was still going strong during his 3-4:15 discussion. Impressive. I hope he gets/got a few hours of nap time on the flight to SeaTac. Highlights: Dave Donaldson's review of NHibernate . This guy just impresses me. He's not a rock star (as in unapproachable, full of himself) but more like the people's developer. Down to earth. Human. Wants to help. I'm excited about the prospect of NHibernate. I've used NetTiers with good success but never really pushed the limits. Although, LINQ may trump NHibernate... LINQ. This Object-Relational Mapper ( ORM ) will revolutionize traditional data access tier development. The Microsoft developer community made solid progress in rec...

I'm so impressed with the organizers of this conference. In some ways, the "grass roots" effort exceeded the effectiveness of "professionally" organized conferences. Some of the highlights: Bruce Eckle - Listen to him speak if you get the chance. Abstract but a good message: we must experiment to learn; your assumptions are probably wrong; designing up front will likely miss the mark Ted Neward - I love it when people break through the religion and the BS to tell it like it is. Ted discussed embracing both Java and .Net to create the best solution to a business problem. Pillar programming problem contest - I spent about an hour trying to figure this one out on a spreadsheet and failed miserably. ;-) (I think I'm missing some constraints...) Regardless, it was a fun exercise and likely, a great way to attract solid developer candidates. Video games - I've never been a gamer but I find the innovation intriguing. The Wii over at Quick Solutions seems to...

It's not rocket science but I found the Team Foundation Server (TFS) installation process a bit tedious and tricky. The install MSI will reactively inform you of what you're missing (with System Health Check) but something more proactive would help. Also, an error within the System Health Check necessitates re-starting the TFS install from scratch. ;-( Regardless, I wanted to share my experience. My purpose in installing TFS is learn the product and prepare to share with others through demos and presentations. So, I'm working off a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop running Windows XP. Also, I chose Workgroup Edition because I don't want to mess with CALs and I don't intend to upgrade to Standard or Enterprise Edition. Workgroup and Standard are the same except Workgroup limits to 5 users. TFS doesn't support Windows XP and I don't want to run Win2k3 Server so I'm using Virutal PC to host my TFS instance. This, BTW, is an amazingly effective and safe way to insta...

This post outlines my approach and findings from converting several hundred .Net 1.1 projects (300+) from .Net 1.1 to .Net 2.0. Approach Retrieve all .Net 1.1 source code from source code control repository At the root directory, use “DIR /C /B *.csproj >> projects.txt” at a command line to dump the full path of each C#.Net project into a file Use the /upgrade option with devenv to convert the .Net projects to 2.0 (devenv "MyProject.sln" /upgrade) Open a new worksheet in Excel Type devenv in the A1 cell; copy it down into the next several hundred rows Open the projects.txt file, select all, and copy Placing the cursor in cell B1 in Excel, paste Type /upgrade in the C1 cell; copy it down into the next several hundred rows In the D1 cell, paste in the following formula =A1& " " & B1& " " & C1; copy it down into the next several hundred rows Select the D column and copy Create a new file called convert.bat convert.bat and paste t...

While I likely won't pursue it (probably not the best use of my time...), I'm starting to point some of my folks down the .Net 2.0 certification route and I wanted to clear up some confusion as well as share some of what I've learned. There are three MS Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) "tracks" one can pursue: windows, web, and enterprise applications (EA). Due to the exam matrix (below), I would recommend developers pursue the EA because it's a combination of web and windows requiring only 5 exams. In contrast, pursuing the web and windows tracks individually requires 7 exams. WEB 70-536 70-547 70-528 WIN 70-536 70-526 70-548 EA 70-536 70-526 70-528 70-529 70-549 Finally, while few materials are available, these are the self-study books I'm aware of (most not yet published): MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation (Not yet published...) 70-536 Exam Prep...