Gold Coast .NET User Group Holiday Party 208 Carl Franklin

Gold Coast .NET User Group Holiday Party

Hey Now Everybody,

Carl Franklin & friends were here along with ribs from Lucille’s Bad to the Bone were in the house Whoo Hoo! .NET 3.5 SP1 Charts is coding with fun for me & tonight there weren’t many charts. I was so happy to attend our GC .NET User Group where C Franklin was & gave a session on VB.NET. Somebody said there is a date for MS C# team is ending & being dissolved, turning black like Mr. Black’s XP. C, Ken, Dr. K & Huck were stellar. There were 3 sessions:

Ken Spencer spoke of SQL MAG & was similar to last year discussing 3D & WPF. He spoke of large goverment agency apps with 80,000 users. 3 D World is what it's about.

C Franklin – Impeccable – Code for for fun! Playing his piano in CT from a keyboard in FLA. The Larry King of .NET Carl was stellar!. @ the end of the night after I ate about 2 1/2 racks of ribs Carl broke out his guitar & played many songs. PWOP Embasador !He spoke of hardware MIDI Could you imagine the keyboard hotkeys on a massive keyboard like that. Chris Sells metioned & he is the next on DNR I think gotta check though. Digital Audio a good library . PWOP Line. This is where the fun is! Thanking us for sharing the fun with code with us & encourage to obsess over good code.


Huck & Dr. K – Surface! The highlight of the night aside from Carl was Surface. There was not a real Surface in the building & we did see some classic flix. This guy is like one of the 5othperson to get an MS SQL cert or something like that. Huck INETA he is an excellent presenter along with Dr. Peter Kuhn. Huck supports INETA! Thanks to INETA, Homnick’s, Alex from Sherlock Recruites & Sherv for the event.

As always all comments welcome!

Thx, Catto

BitArray & Argument Exceptions 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification Post #14

BitArray & Argument Exceptions 70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #14

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. Here are a few important concepts from the 1st section. As I stufy for this test I thought this would be good to post on to learn the content & others would be able to view & comment on it.

• BitArray class – is a resizable collection that can store Boolean values, In addition to being resizable, it upports common bit-level operations such as And, Not, Or, & Exclusive-or(XOR) The BitArry class would be efficient if you are writing an app that needs to perform Boolean math on a set of 42 bits.
• BitVector32 – structures purpose is to aid in manipulating bits in a 32bit integer, and it is perfect for IP address. BitVector32 is not a resiable collection at all. Instead it is fixed at 32bits
• ArrayList – does not support Boolean math
• Boolean is a single bit value.
• InvalidOperationException – Throw an InvalidOperationException if a property set or method call is not appropriate given the object’s current state. EX used if calling assembly called the method to read the filebefore specifying the file name.
• You should throw an ArgumentOutOfRangeException when a caller provides a value for a parameter but that value is invalid
• ArgumentException is a base class for all argument exceptions. You should use more specific whenever appropriate, specifically ArgumentOutOfRangeException & ArgumentNullException
• ArgumentNullException when a calling assembly provides a null value for a parameter that must have a value.
• Both SortedList & an implementation of IDictionary can be accessed by using a key

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

तोस्त्रिंग एकुँल्स & 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification Post #13

मेथोड्स 70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #13

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. Here are a few important concepts from the 1st section. As I stufy for this test I thought this would be good to post on to learn the content & others would be able to view & comment on it.

• All classes inherit the ToString(), Equals(), & GetType() methods from the base Object class
• Reference Types – a type that stores a pointer to the data, rather than the actual data.
• Reference types store a pointer to the data rather than the actual data.
• Types forwarding enable moving a type from one assembly into another assembly without requiring recompiling.
• Exceptions are error condition that cause normal execution to be halted
• Generics use placeholders for their types, which allow multiple types of objects to be used as a parameter
• The following methods all classes have as members:

• • ToString()
• • Equals()
• • GetType()
• • Short Type – can only store values between -32,769 & 32,769

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

ICompareable & Clone 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification #12

ICompareable & Clone 70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #12

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. Here are a few important concepts from the 1st section. As I stufy for this test I thought this would be good to post on to learn the content & others would be able to view & comment on it.

• Implementing IDisposable enables developers to call the Dispose() method which allows your class to free any consumed resources without waiting for automated garbage collection.
• Clone() method is inherited from the ICloneable interface
• The Clone() method is a member of the InCloneable interface
• The Dispose() method is a member of the IDisposable interface
• The CompareTo() method is a member of the IComparable interface

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

Cultures 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification #11

Cultures 70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #11

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. Here are a few important concepts from the 1st section. As I stufy for this test I thought this would be good to post on to learn the content & others would be able to view & comment on it.

• Neutral cultures are language, but not region specific. Neutral culture names are in the form xx, with only two lowercase characters.
• Cultures with names in the format xx-XX are specific cultres & could be retrieved using CultureInfo.GetCulturs(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures)
• CultureInfo objects examples: en, ko, ro
• Normal execution of program logic should not cause an exception. You should throw an exception whenever something unexpected happens, including receiving a parameter that is out of range.

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

IComparer 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification #10

IComparer 70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #10

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. Here are a few important concepts from the 1st section. As I stufy for this test I thought this would be good to post on to learn the content & others would be able to view & comment on it.

• IComparer – is an interface that should be implemented when you are creating a new collection type that must be sorted by using Array Sort.
• CompartTo() method is a member of the IComparable interface
• Use the Icomparer interface for collections that must be sorted
• The ICollection interface is the base interface for classes in the System Collections namespace. It does not support sorting
• The IDictionary interface is the base interface for nongeneric collections of key/value pairs. It does not support sorting.
• The IEqualityComparer interface supports only equality comparisons.

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

Event Handler 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification #9

Event Handler 70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #9

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. Here are a few important concepts from the 1st section.

• Event Handler delegates standard parameters are objects & EventArgs:
• Event handler delegates require two parameters an instance of the object class & an instance of the EventArgs class
• The EventHandler class is a predefined delegate that specifically represents a€n event handler method for an event that does not generate data. It’s not a parameter for an event handler delegate
• the Delegate class is the base class for delegate types. It’s not a parameter for event handler delegates.
• the Event class is the base event for event types. It’s not a parameter for event handler delegates

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

Boxing, Catch Clauses n Overiding Structs 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification #8

Boxing, Catch Clauses & Overiding Structs
70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #8

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. Here are a few important concepts from the 1st section.

• Correct order for Catch clauses - order from most specific to most general
• Overriding Structures – Reasons to override a method within a structure
i. To avoid boxing
ii. To Return something other than the type names
• Boxing – should be avoided since it adds overhead.

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

Stack, Link Lists, Finally Block and HashTable 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification #7

Stack, Link Lists, Finally Block & HashTable 70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #7

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. Here are a few important concepts from the 1st section.

• Finally Block - Use Finally Blocks for code that should run whether or not an exception occurs
• Linked Lists – can add item in the following places
i. Before or After any specific node
ii. At the Beginning or End of the LinkedList
• Stack – retrieves items as Pop method in the LIFO Last In First Out
• Adding Key to Hashtable – what methods can be called on the key to determine if it’s unique
i. GetHashCode - hash value from the object is used to see whether the hash has been used in the collection
ii. Equals - If two hash values are identical Equals can be called to determine whether two objects are in fact equal before assigning the value to a key

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

Procedures, StringDictionary & ArrayList MCTS 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification #6

Procedures, StringDictionary & ArrayList MethodMCTS 70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #6

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. Here are a few important concepts from the 1st section.

• StringDictionary – Only strings can be stored as a Value in StringDictionary
• Procedures work with a copy of variables when you pass a value type. Therefore, any modifications that were made to the copy would not affect the original value.
• ArrayList Method – the following determine whether an tiem exists in the collection
i. Contains can be used to test to whether the item exists in the collection
ii. IndexOf will return if the item does not exist in the collection
• Strict conversions enabled - you can convert from int16 to int32 because that is considered a widening conversion, because Int32 can store any value of Int 16, implicit conversion is allowed.

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

IEQualityComparer , Dequeue Method MCTS 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification Post # 5

IEQualityComparer, Dequeue Method
MCTS 70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #5

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. Here are a few important concepts from the 1st section.

• You pass an object that supports the interface to override the way that uniqueness is compared.
i. Ex. You can pass an instance of a class that supports the IEQualityComparer interface when you construct a Hashtable to change the way keys are evaluated for uniqueness.
• Value Structures – are typically the most efficient
• InvalidCastException – is the recommended exception to throw when there is no valid conversion between two types, when implementing the IConvertible interface. .
• Dequeue method - Of the Queue class does
i. Retrieve the item from the front of the collection
ii. As it retrieves an item, it also removes it from the collection

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

Interfaces, Inheritance, Constraints & Attributes MCTS 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification Post #3

Interfaces, Inheritance, Constraints & Attributes MCTS 70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #3

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. There are many types in .NET and here are important terms with definitions.

• Interfaces define a contract between types, ensuring that a class implements specific members
• Inheritance derives a type from a base type, automatically implementing all members of the base class, while allowing the derived class to extend or override the existing functionality
• Constraints – if you use constraints to require types to implement a specific interface you can call any methods used in the interface.
• Attributes describe a type, method, or property in a way that can be programmatically queried using a technique called Reflection. Some common uses for attributes are specifying which security privileges a class requires, declaring capabilities, & describing an assembly.

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

Data Types - MCTS 70-536 Microsoft .NET Certification #2

Data Types - MCTS 70-536
Microsoft .NET Certification
Post #2

Hey Now Everybody,

Please feel free to check out my MCTS 70-536 reference page on Chris Catto.com. It’s a page with a summary of all of my posts.
This post is on section 1. Developing Application that use system types & collections. Data Types are very important. There are many types in .NET and here are some along with some details & examples.

• Delegates – Define the signature (arguments & return type) for the entry point
i. To Enable an assembly to respond to an event that occurs within a class
• Generic Types – include Nullable & EventHandler
• Reference Types – Include: Strings, Exceptions, delegate, interface.
• Value Types – include Integer, System.Drawing.Point, & Decimal, bool, char, double & long.
• Enumerator - is a type-safe to return a KeyValuePair
• Types Decimal, Double & float can each store fractional numbers
• Types int & Long can store integers
• Types uint & ulong are unsigned , & can only store zero & positive integers
• ushort type can only store values between 0 & 65,535

Question: The following types could store 1.29?

Answer: Float, double & decimal

Question: The following types could store -6?

Answer: int, double, decimal, float & long

As always all comments welcome.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye for now!

Catto

MCTS 70-536 Microsoft Certification .NET 2.0

MCTS 70-536 Microsoft Certification .NET 2.0

Hey Now Everybody,

I’m going to start posting on some content I’ve been studying for a Microsoft Certification Technical Specialist Exam (MCTS) 70-536. I’ve created a page on my domain ChrisCatto.com where I’m going to have a summary & a bunch of links to all my posts.
I feel that this will be some great content & it will also help me to study by working more with the material. I’ve been sources I’ve been studying is from the self paced training book. I’ve been reading the book & there is also a cd that you get with the book. The cd includes ~400 practice questions that have been really good for me to learn from. They are broken down into 7 categories. I’ve created a word document that is over 70 pages from these questions. I plan to make many small posts so any one can read one post & learn a small topic or use it as a reference.
As always all comments welcome.
Bye for now!
Catto

Browsers Links/Bookmarks Toolbar

Internet Browsers you may use Links/Bookmarks Toolbar

Browsers - Important Program!

Links/Bookmarks Toolbar (One click browsing)

201 - Folders in Links/Bookmarks Toolbar

Hey Now Everybody!

Internet browsers such as IE & Firefox is the most used computer program. We have many preferences & options that are available to use. One is the links toolbar in IE or bookmarks toolbar in most other browsers. The reasons to use a link/bookmarks toolbar is to increase productivity, efficiency & user friendliness.

To use the links/bookmark toolbar once set up all you have to do is to click a favorite URL & the page will be loaded. This is more efficient than typing in an address. It's one click less that clicking the favorites menu then a favorite. A links/bookmarkbar is usually located under the address bar.

A preference is to have the address bar on the top then the links bar under it, no other toolbars are used such as Google or Yahoo Toolbar.

Since IE is the most popular browser let's inspect how to set up our links bar. First the links bar has to be displayed. This can be checked by going to the view menu (alt + V), right arrow, down arrow to links then enter. The links menu should have a check on the left of the word. The toolbars may be locked (checked) or unlocked (unchecked). By default IE has the links bar on the right side of the browser, what can be done is to click hold & drag the word links to the left of the browser window to give the user the maximum amount of space to store favorites.

To save a webpage URL/Address you may click hold & drag the shortcut icon (icon to the left of the http in the address bar) to the links toolbar. There is a black vertical I that will show & when you see that you may stop holding the mouse button & the favorite shortcut will be saved.

Toolbars 201 - Use of Folders in links/bookmarks toolbar is very efficient. This allows users to have many more favorites located on the links/bookmarks toolbar. To create your first folder in the links bar one way is to start by saving a current page to your favorites (Cntl+D, tab, L, tab, enter). In the create in choose 'Links' Then click the 'New Folder' button. Type in a short name such as Biz, press enter (or click create) & click OK (on add to favorites window).

The length of the names on my links/bookmarks toolbar is usually 1 or 2 characters. You may rename them by right clicking then rename (IE). For example you may rename Google to G.

That is all there is no more,
Bye for now!

Catto

Browsers & Google Chrome

Hey Now Everybody,

As you may or may not know Google released a new web browser called Chrome in early September. As soon as you see it you realize the different UX on the browser since the tabs are at the tippy top & not a menu bar or address bar. Web browsers such as Chrome & IE (internet explorer) are the single most used application therefore they are extremely important. Think for a quick second, you’re reading this in a browser & probably using IE7 (if it’s ~2008). For the average user (like my Mom) a browser may be the only program that they use aside from an Office app such as Word or Outlook. With that two important items regarding browsers to take with you are:

Bookmarks / Links toolbar (use the toolbar including folders)
A browser preference that you have the option to use is use the bookmarks or links bar. Within the bar you may use folders to create added efficiency & organization.

Browsers Memory Usage – (Minimize then maximize IE to save memory)
Temporary slowness can occur to browsers & can make our systems temporarily slow. This may occur when a browser gets to a page that uses a large amount of memory or many tabs open. We can take actions to free up memory & make a system / browser quicker again. I love & often use this next sentence. When IE is minimized then maximized again there is a great deal of memory freed. Browsers such as Chrome that are multithreaded has advantages too, each tab in Chrome is a separate process therefore when a tab gets closed the memory is then free again.
You’d never guess but I’ve made some more lists, of my opinions after UAT’ing (User Acceptance Testing) Google’s Chrome browser
K8’s Chrome’s Top N List:
1. Open Source - The code is open source with the WebKit rendering engine. Therefore people can contribute to the project which is a good thing. Google’s mindset is to learn from people on the web. An example is the TOS (Terms of Service). Google displayed actions very quickly to how they will accept feedback & learn from others. Initially there were quite a few negative posts on the TOS (Terms of Service). Section 11 was adjusted a few days after Chrome was release. Originally the section was a long, legal verbiage & stated basically that anything you did with the browser Google would have rights over, now the section is one simple sentence stating the individual has rights to all of their own content.
2. Omnibox – this is the name of the ‘address bar’ that Chrome uses. I really like this feature since it has intellisense when typing & it acts like a Google search. In the recent IE & Firefox browsers there is a search window on the top right (Ctrl+E) this makes two text boxes on the top of ht browser. The Omnibox is here to stay since it’s two for one (a search window & address bar) with intellisense.
3. New Tab Page – this feature is also here to stay. When opening a new tab (Ctrl+T) in a traditional browser the page opens a blank, info or home page. When opening a new tab in Chrome it shows the 9 most used pages as thumbnails, along with the most recent closed tabs & bookmarked pages. What this does is makes it easy to get to pages you frequent. It looks similar to the quick tabs view (Ctrl+Q) in IE.
4. Speed / Multi-Threaded / Memory Usage – The speed of the browser is supposed to be quicker than other browsers. I’m not sure on that & would love to see some technical tests. I do personally think that it runs JavaScript faster than other browsers. What I do really like is how the browser is Multi-Threaded, were each tab has its own process. This means a user can end the process for one tab & it won’t affect the other. Memory usage is interesting to me since there is a task manager with-in the browser itself which makes it easy to close a tab if it’s not responding & the other tabs will remain untouched. Please keep in mind IE8 beta 2 is multithreaded too.
5. Incognito mode (Ctrl+Shift+N) Browsers these days have this feature where a user can browse & not keep any data on the local system such as browsing history, cache & cookies. I use this feature when shopping for diamonds for my wife so if she looks @ the history she won’t know what pages I was on.
6. RSS – It’s re-dogone-diculous that Chrome doesn’t support RSS. This is the biggest area where Chrome can improve. I really feel that strongly about this one & sure it’ll be there someday. When on a page that has an RSS feed to subscribe to there is not an easy way to subscribe. IE7 had this option as a button (alt+J). Firefox does too & I think the UX will be similar to Firefox with an RSS image in the Omnibox.
7. Focus of buttons & textboxes - Similar to Safari since them both use Webkit I really like the feature when a button or a textbox has the focus it is highlighted & easy to see. Once you use this you won’t want to go back. Someday all browsers will use this feature. It wasn’t discussed much but I feel this is such a nice feature I had to mention it.

The Gears team from Google really produced a great browser. In time we’ll see if the community adopts it. One way we’ll be able to measure this is the amount of add-on’s are created by the community. If you look at Firefox there are a large number of add-ons which displays how much the community loves Firefox. The image is from the Chrome comic book displaying how Chrome is a safe browser & I thought it was so funny I added the image to the post. Everyone will not use chrome but the web is better with it.

As always all comments welcome. That’s all there is there is no more.

Bye for Now,

Catto

SharePoint, Dot Net Nuke, Skins & Social Computing

Hey Now Everybody,

In September I attended a great .NET Nuke user group meeting. It was a stellar session held by Sheldon Cohen. This meeting was about 15 people which was different since usually there is 30 - 60ish. Having a small group was good for discussion & easier to meet people. The session started early & was jammed pack. Sheldon covered skins using DNN.

Last week I attended a FLA .NET user group which was on SharePoint & Social Computing presented by Stacy Draper. The session was kind of an introduction to Social Computing & SharePoint including definitions of a blog, email & instant messaging. A point he made was that social networking is just one aspect of social computing which I thought was a good point. As always I learned a few things & it's nice to see some of my friends who I see at many events along with meeting a few new people.

I read a post by one of my favorite Evangelists Mike Benko who has a many great webcasts & a good site @ BenkoTips.com. He was looking at his blog & saw many of his post were regarding events. So I in turn have looked @ my blog & see a direction I want to go. I want to place more personal original content including MSTS exam content, browsers, RSS & efficiency.

Bye for now,
Catto

FLA .Net User Group Meeting SharePoint

Hey Now Everybody!

The FLAdotNET user group SharePoint session presented by David McNamee was great. The focus was on SharePoint Designer where he showed some nice examples of controls such as a data driven Data View. Personally I enjoy working in SharePoint designer specifically since you don't need access to the server to make some nice adjustments to pages, & you can edit the page directly in a non ribbon IDE similar to Studio .

Special thanks to Beanstalk Networks for providing the facility. The people were nice to see such as Terry, Dave, Morgan & many more. I asked how to display charts similar to a control like the data view Mac stated buy a 3rd party compony. Mac's presentation included some extremely vulgar explicates it was truly rated R. He from Tampa (~5 hrs) & Mac's impersonations were really funny epically those of Russ (calling out raffles) & Joe (adjusting his glasses as only Devfish does explaining some code). Within SharePoint designer there can be adjustments to the master page content place holders that can made a site not look so SharePointy.

I ate some pizza & got a few Code Mags along with a t-shirt. When I went outside I got a delicious taco that they were handing out on Clematis street from Rocco's Taco.

All commments welcome.

That is all there is there is no more. Bye for now,

Catto

Catto won a 4 GB Zune!

Hey Now Everybody,
I won a 4 GB Zune from Microsoft for attending a webcast and filling out a survey! I couldn’t believe the email when I read it, it stated it wanted to verify my shipping address so I replied & the Microsoft rep said it would be shipped out soon.

About a week later I received it. Whoo whoo! The webcast was ‘MSDN Webcast: Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V Virtualization’ I’ve viewed many webcasts & really enjoy them. As you can see in the picture I have .NET Rocks playing. That is all there is there no more.

Bye for now!
Catto

HHH Microsoft Event Launch '08 Ft Lauderdale

Hey Now Everybody,

I attended the Microsoft Event Launch 2008 in Ft. Lauderdale HHH(Hero's Happen Here) this month & had a great time. There were some great sessions & presenters including Joe 'Dev Fish' Healy , Jonas Stawski, Max 'Put it together, Powershell guru' Trinidad, Blain Barton & Glen Gordon.
The events topics was Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 & Visual Studio 2008. I recieved a copy of all of these along with Vista ultimate, which was a very nice gift. I'm building a PC that I'm planning to install Windows Server 2008 & I'll post on soon including the 8 gigs of ram I plan to place in there.
There were quite a few people I got to see there such as Dave, Larry, Morgan along with many other people I have met & it's nice to talk technology with people at these events & .NET user groups. Check out a couple quick clips I posted.

All comments welcome!

That's all there is, there is no more.

Bye for now!

Catto

Catto's 2008 2nd 1/4 Tech todo list

Hey Now Everybody,

I'm going to list some personal technical topics I plan to focus on for this year's second quarter. I love lists, I used them often @ home & work. The reasons I feel lists work well for me are since I stay focused on what I need to accomplish by spending my time efficiently & when I get some of the items done there is a sense of accomplishment.

Catto's 2008 2nd 1/4 Personal Tech List


1. Chris Catto .com's permission based authentication
* Improve my domains authentication & authorization. I've made some big improvements recently where the public can create a user. The next step I want to make is to place some better content that an authenticated user can view.
2. .NET Code Catto Blog @ Chris Catto.com
* As many of you may have seen in the beginning of the year I had a .NET Code Catto Blog that was run on Blog Engine .NET from Codeplex. There was an adjustment made by my hosting company & now the blog doesn't display on the screen only the yellow screen of death. There is an issue with full vs. partial trust levels, therefore my goal here is to research & resolve this issue & get my blog up & running again on a subdomain as part of my domain such as http://Blog.ChrisCatto.com/NetCodeCattoBlog/.
3. MCTS 70-536 Exam Prep
* I've been thinking about studying for a certification & have decided on the MCTS Web Dev Cert. There are two exams & I've started studying for on of the exams. I'd like to continue this & prepare to pass the first exam.
4. Argotic Syndication Framework on CodePlex
* There is a new release of the Argotic Syndication Framework & I'd like to create some flix similar to the DNRTV episodes on the Framework.
5. Adjust My Commenting Frequency
* I really enjoy reading blogs & have learned a great deal from them. I also like to comment on many blogs however I feel this can take up some of my time & it's not the most productive for myself. I plan to cut back on commenting on blogs for the next three months to improve my time management & spend the time on my own domain & exam prep.
6. Blog Content
* Assuming the Blog Engine issue is resolved I plan to continue posting on my blog & place some different type of content up there. The content I'd like to have is some exam topics, browser topics & a photo tutorial. The photo tutorial is how to upload & print pix @ Wal-mart or Kodak, this is a request from my Mom & I feel others will find it useful too.

All comments welcome!

That is all there, there is no more!
Bye for now,
Catto

Argotic Syndication Framework release 2008.0.0.0 on CodePlex

Hey Now Everybody,
I’ve been loving Codeplex lately & I’ve joined a stellar project which is the Argotic Syndication Framework. The main developer on the project is Brian Kuhn and has even been DNRTV. There is a new release so be sure to check it out! I hope to make some flix someday that will be similar to the DNRTV’s but shorter. I personally think Brian's development is only the tip of the iceburg on this project.

The project summary:
The Argotic Syndication Framework is a Microsoft .NET class library framework that enables developers to easily consume and/or generate syndicated content from within their own applications. The framework makes the reading and writing syndicated content in common formats such as RSS, Atom, OPML, APML, BlogML, and RSD very easy while still remaining extensible enough to support common/custom extensions to the syndication publishing formats. The framework includes out-of-the-box implementations of 19 of the most commonly used syndication extensions, network clients for sending and receiving peer-to-peer notification protocol messages; as well as HTTP handlers and controls that provide rich syndication functionality to ASP.NET developers.

Some new features in this release include:
a) Targeting of both the .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5 platforms
b) Implementation of the APML 0.6 specification
c) Implementation of the BlogML 2.0 specification
d) Native support of the Microsoft FeedSync 1.0 syndication extension
e) Simplified programming API and better online/offline examples

All comments welcome!
That’s all there is, there is not more.
Bye for now!
Catto

Sleepless in Dallas – SharePoint Weekend Hosted by Infusion & Microsoft

Hey Now,
I just had an indescribable weekend at the SharePoint Sleepless at Dallas event . This was an event that had training all day on Saturday then there was a coding completion where we were coding all night developing SharePoint features for the CKS. It was a stellar event thanks to Infusion & Microsoft where they provided food, facilities & gifts. I also visited my brother which was really nice too went to one of the best steak houses ever called Saltgrass with a fun Texas atmosphere. The events agenda went as follows

Saturday 9am Greeting/meeting everyone & breakfast. Saturday there were sessions went on all day including SharePoint form Sheldon Fernandez & Nadeem, Matt Ordish OBA, Matt McDermott.on Master Pages & real usable tools (sweet session), Chris Koenig. on Silverlight, Tim Gade on MSOffice, Zain ‘Is This Thing On’ Naboulsi. was there too. Among many other skilled people I’ve read a couple other posts Fluckiger's regarding the events.

‘SharePoint is a game changer’ I heard from Sahil on DNR & it’s so true in my opinion especially after attending, it’s the fastest selling MS Server. I was on a teamed up with a great guy & our presentation went alright we just didn’t have a good enough quality features developed to show the judges. Our goal was to implement a feature on SharePoint to provide the user hotkeys. So when you press & hold the alt button down on the keyboard the letter of the hotkey would be underlined. I learned a ton & especially that fact that deployment in SharePoint has many more processes & more permissions are needed on the server than traditional ASP.NET. We ended up not winning & were awarded ‘Most Improved’. Good luck to the team going to Cali who was made up of some good people & very skilled. I hope you 3 win (Ricky Derek & Michael ) .

I can’t speak for everyone but I sure had a great time & really enjoyed the competition portion best. We stayed up all night coding. The flix (120 sec) below are in my opinion show how much fun we were having. I think when you view it’ll make you laugh or at least smile. All comments Welcome

Big shout to T for the support & making this weekend possible.

That’s all there is there is no more, Bye 4 now,

Catto

List & SharePoint - Sleepless the Ultimate Developer Weekend

Catto’s List 1.22.08

I love lists & use them often. They help me get things done. I feel good too when I look back and a few things are marked done. Here is a current list I have:

Infusion – SharePoint Sleepless the Ultimate Developer Weekend. I entered the sleepless in New York contest last year (received a thankyou email) & this year I’ve entered again for the roadshow contest. I got an invitation! It’s a weekend of SharePoint Training & a competition.. It’s seems to be the ultimate developer weekend. I'm going to Dallas this weekend to compete & learn.

Silverlight Slide.Show – I’m so happy I have my first Silverlight project public. Check it out. My favorite blog codinghorror author Jeff Atwood works for Vertigo which produced this open source image viewer available on codeplex. I used the code & impleneted it on my site. I really like it & think this is currently best way to view images on a web page.

BlogEngine.NET 1.3 – I have moved my web hosting & want to have my own blog engine not one from blogspot or any other public. I think if I host it then I have more control over it & I”ll have all my posts in my database for my historical records. I’m workinking on implementing BlogEngine & hope to have my blog back at my domain soon.

Code Camp 2008 South Florida – Whoo Haa! Last year I heard of code camps via the best podcast DNR (check it out #219 my email is read).. I attended the Code Camp last year it was great. I think since then I’ve learned so much & really looking forward to attending this year.

Entity Framework – I attended a recent Fla .NET user group meeting where Shawn 'The ADO Guy' Wildermuth presented the Entity Framework. It was really good, saw a couple of my friends there Dave, Jonas & Max. I learned quite a bit about the Entity Framework & Shawn signed the book I’m currently reading which he co-authored. .NET Framework 2.0 AppDev Foundation (I plan to blog more on this book this year)

Whew! Honestly sometimes I don’t get things done on my list so I hope that placing my list on my blog will help me & I hope that you enjoy seeing what I’m think and working on. All Comments Welcome

That is all, there is no more,
Bye 4 now,
Catto