Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Looking back at a few "Hands on Lab" .Net sessions

I'm back from Bharath College of Engg, where myself and reza took a really convincing and inspiring intro session and Hands on labs ,with the material that we prepared for the SRM and MIT held CNUG Training Meet earlier in last month.we dint use it for Abdul Hakeem or VIT ,those were more casual talks .So,coming back to what we did ,we talked bout the CLR and platforms over which the languages are complied into assemblies ,the manifest ,opened up a few dll's and exe's with ildasm and worked with notepad for some 'nascent' notepad coding with the VS 2003 Command prompt.Again lotta theory ,and history through evolutions made in the programming models and methodologies.Moving over to winforms and simple file operations and dialog controls ,comparing with VB 6.0 and java ,some thing on the string and text reader helper classes ,and the code interoperability and emphasis on the CLR handling the output be it a vb.net or C# form. Then went into ado.net and the various theory again ,the namespaces for the managed providers like Sql and oracle as well as oledb and their namespaces. After some troubleshooting finding out the right connection server and login parameters,we got thru examples for both disconnected and connected architecture . Then we moved into a slow and low stress ride with XML and were on the white board a lot for that. Ended up with a simple xml node traversal,search and display within the app,after explaining ze rules for creating xml files. Break ke bad... moved into webservices and ended up with implementing database and xml applications for the pocket pc .One thing that always tends to get me ot go on and on ,are the "magic of web services and xml" . Still under the influence of Jean 'XML' Paoli 's video from channel9 on xml's histroy and future ,i had all the more reason to. Tried the smsindia webservice from uddi,unfortunately wasnt able to send,i think my operator's not included.Either that ,or i'll be hapy to bu spammed by my sms's when i make up tomorrow :P .

Anyway,thought i'd quickly elaborate on few other common checks ive noticed you can do,so that you can avoid any future problems deadling with asp.net or webservices and so on after someone in CNUG, reminded me of the debugging days form lat years Microsoft Student Project program on asp.net .

1.Error as soon as you attempt opening up an asp.net or webservice
Usualy IIS is installed before installing the .net sdk ,but when you do happen to install IIS after installing the VS, then theres some mapping to be done to "set things right again " . So if you do find an error bang on initially after u attempt to create a new asp.net app or webservice ,then do as follows :
navigate to dotnetv1.~dir/aspnet_regiis -i
eg: C:/ windows / microsoft.net / framework / v1.1.4322 / aspnet_regiis.exe -i
(ive just addes white spaces to make it more readable )
2.IIS service not running or disabled
This also throws an error box when u start an iis related app.Simply enable and start the iis service as follows:
Start->Run -> services.msc
,then right click on iisadmin service, and enable and again right click start. If your worried about resource hogging (like me) then make it manual instead you could make a bat file add a line :
net start "iis admin service" , so that before running ur iis relted app, run the bat file ,it does the start service for you .For that matter you can even start and stop a lot of other services to reduce your resource hogging while gaming or listenting to multimedia / resource heavy apps .but beware ,that closing networking related services assumes that you wont be going online. so pick and choose depending on the occasion . ive attached my gamingstart.bat that i used to have long time back. no time to game nowadays ....8 )
3.Internet eplorer is working offline
Simply make sure taht while running ur asp.net apps , that :
Internet Explorer ->File -> working offline ,is not ticked.
if you do a aspnet_regiis without the -i ,and maybe with a |more ,you can see what it actually does and that -i installs the asp.net version and sets things ok.
PS: the reason im telling you this is that this is one of the most common ,yet unnoticed reason contributing factor to get everyone going - "its not woorkinggg" in your Hands on labs sessions and help to know why it did .... 8 )

Keep Clicking,
Bhasker V Kode
Microsoft Student Champ - SVCE , Chennai

2 comments:

Aswin Anand T.H. said...

hi!! i think this session has been done better than the 1 @ SRM. thought this by looking at the post u made. r u going for another sessin at bharath?

Bosky said...

no it was only a 1-day event.But i agree it was good.As well as looking forward towards more and better sessions as we go along :)