September Talk

I am going to talk on Membership features in ASP.NET 2.0. If time permits, I would be touching briefly on Role Providers too. If you would like to listen to these topics, you are most welcome to the September session of the Central Penn .NET User Group (http://www.central-penn.net.)

ADA and Intellisense

All the pages I develop demands Section 508 complaince. And to achieve
this, MS (Microsoft, duh!) recommends installing a June 2003 hotfix for
1.1 (yes, I am still using the "old" version :-)). This, they tell,
would support AssociatedControlID property in the control.

I did install the hotfix and it doesn't seem to work as expected. The VS.NET IDE
still shows that annoying red squigley line under the
AssociatedControlID, but does not give any compilation errors.

I did google and it seems many of ASP.NET developers face this issue.
As a result of my recent adventure in creating Custom Server Controls
and ADA complaince, I think that the hot fix does not UPDATE the
asp.xsd (which drives the Intellisense in VS.NET IDE) file.

Did any one (1.1 users) face this kind of issue lately?

Loop, Loop....

I had got a relatively small but cumbersome C# code to maintain and extend. Well, I was first charged with the enthusiasm of working in C#, but being a pampered VB (.NET) developer, I decided to convert (manually) the whole code to VB.NET. There were two reasons that made me decide this:

1. I could learn the whole code and what the code intended to do.
2. I was leery on making C# code changes to a working piece of software! Yes, I was too leery!

After 2 days of juggling, I got everything to VB.NET! Wow!

But when I started testing, one part of the code started breaking! :-) This was not expected (It's never expected to fail, right? :-)). I had converted a for loop in the C# code to a for loop in VB.NET.

In the C# code, an arraylist was the one which was getting "looped" and when a condition matched, on object gets removed from the arraylist. The world seemed perfect.
But, to my luck, the VB.NET code did not behave as expected.

Later, I learned that the VB.NET equivalent of the FOR loop in C# is the WHILE loop.

Good learning of the month!

Unrecoverable, indeed!

I have been working in VS.NET 2003 since its inception. I have deployed both ASP.NET as well as Windows Forms apps to various servers innumerable times.Today I encountered a problem, which was indeed a dead end for me. When I was trying to build a Web Deployment Setup project, VS.NET threw me a Unrecoverable Build Error. Wow!

When I googled, I found many facing this issue. All of them pointed me to the Microsoft's support site article :http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329214/EN-US/

All I needed to do was to register the Mergemod.dll.

On Vacation

I am going on a vacation to India for one month. I hail from the capital city of Kerala state, Trivandrum. I am planning to meet the T-MUG team in Trivanrum. T-MUG is a Microsoft User's Group in Trivandrum, a group of .NET enthusiasts. I look forward for the fun and excitement.

If you happen to be in Trivandrum, please drop me a line at rajeevg.nair[at]gmail.com and we can meet.

Technology and People

When does technology become a success?
When does the IF-ELSE-ENDIF statements that we key in every minute make a difference?
When?

When the technology we build make a difference in people's lives. There is a very good story on Channel9 of how two developers made a difference....Read on.

VS 2005 Express Versions Free from NOW!

Yes, you heard right!

Visual Studio 2005 Express versions are now FREE! Believe it!

Effective April 19, Microsoft has announced that the express versions (Visual Basic 2005 Express, Visual Web Developer 2005 Express etc. etc...) are going to be FREE FOR EVER!!!

Read the entry on the ASP.NET Guru Scott Guthrie's blog:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/04/20/443461.aspx

Have Fun!