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

Building A Great DevelopmentTeam

Found this interesting yet understated piece in the transcripts of Boyd Multerer's video on Building a Great Development Team
Channel9 Wiki: BuildingAGreatDevelopmentTeam: "BM: I have some ideas about how to go about building an effective development team.

When you look at the releationship between developers on a team and also between your development team and your test team there are certain personalities that really stand out, and the thing to remember is that people on the team are people and they have to communicate with each other and they suffer all the normal problems that people have when they are communicating.

So, when I think of building my team. It starts by reminding my of an old guitar player joke:

- What do you call a guy who hangs out with three musicians?

- The drummer.

So, the guitar players are looking down on the drummer and they are thinking 'this guy is not a real musician, we're musicians'. But if you didn't have the drummer in the band you totally lose the beat and they would be all over the place and it would be a mess. If the band was all drummers, they would have a great beat but it wouldn't be very musical.

You need to have all the elements, all the musicians, in the band in order for it to be cohesive, have a good groove and make some really good music and a development team is the same way. You need to have the guy who is really good at double checking his work, really good at double checking everyone elses work and really good at doing schedules. You need to have the guy who is really good at 'Gee this is a really vague and ambiguous problem, we don't have a clear answer and there are competing interests in it' and he's able to listen to the various sides of the story and he's able to come up with some good directional answers. But maybe that's not the person who's going to spit and polish the schedule and make sure you're going to deliver on time. You need to have the person who goes really deep, the engineer who you give a specific really hard problem to. You know they don't care about all the other stuff tha"
source>

got the ipod nano as well !

Now got both the ipod mini as well as the nano two days after its release in the US





will post more later ,(my bro just back from NY,chicago where it was bought from for 200$).



Check out more on ipod nano on techenclave