This is what I mean by I.T being cool yet sux, or exciting yet pain in the god knows where! We cannot survive in I.T profession if we don’t update yourself, ie. like…forever … and ever.

Professional-series certifications (MCITP and MCPD) require an update every three years from the date that you earned the certification, or your certification will lapse.

More info: New Generation Certification Lifecycle Policies

So like, I recently done 5 exams and become MCPD – Enterprise Application Developer or whatever. I still haven’t receive the certificates yet, must have been lost along with the Cyclone Gene. I entered my home address for mailing; should have use P.O.Box or work address.

Anyhow, according to that certification lifecycle policies, those papers prove their worth for 3years; after that you can throw them away and start pursuing new set of papers. So mine will last till 2011, then what – I don’t know.

PS: The Second Shot offer extended till June 30, 2008 so you might as well take that chance and finish as much as you can.

Yippie! It’s Friday again!. Been occupied with things this week, I didn’t even realized that the week is almost over.

This whole week, I got to work on time. Oh yes, ON TIME!. Our normal office hours is 8:00 – 5:00; Normally I get to work around 8:30 – 9:30 in the morning and knock out around 5:30 – 6:00 in the evening. It’s amazing that I’m on-time this week and proud for myself. You go gal!

Come to think of it, I never wake up myself in the mornings. Every morning at 6:30, Dad bangs at my door and tries to wake me up. I never move an inch from those bangings. Around 7:00, my mb alarm shrills in my ears; what a tedious job to switch it off and go back to sleep. Around 8:00, my bro comes in and yell at my ear. He would ask whether I’ll go with Dad transport or take a taxi later. His yelling is the worst and I can’t shut him off. If I don’t budge by a few yells, he would kick me and pull me down from bed. Most dreadful thing he does is jump on my bed with his slippers on. (more…)

Keeping in mind that LLBLGen generate dynamic sql statements and no need for storeprocedures, sometimes it’s hard for me to find the right code to retrieve data using complicated queries. Eg. those of multiple JOIN statements and DATEPART functions.

The followings can be used in search functions where you search by date range or by datepart such as by Day or Month or Year.

For my first scenario, I want to search records by “Date” ie. “dd/MM/yyyy” only and not considering the Time part.

By default when you insert a Date using WinForm DateTimePicker or Infragistic ultraDatePicker, the Time part goes in as 0s. eg. “10/01/2008 12:00:00″. But sometimes there are cases where you have to record the Time as well. My saved records include default Date values as well as DateTime values.

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Source code for .Net Framework Libraries are available for download with the next release of VS 2008 and .Net 3.5 next year.
ScottGu explains more.

Have been said, it’s way too advance for me to dig through those source code as I’m still struggling to learn the efficient use of the libraries itself. But hey, it’s all good that you get the source too. Cool!

In our current project, we have to work with WinForms using VS 2005 and VSS as the project source control. There are two solid developers and one developer/Product Manager involved in the coding of this project. Our Product Manager suggests and prefers we use VSS rather than SVN for better source management (check in/out). As for us, developers (me and my bro), we had a great time using SVN in the last project and prefer to use SVN; nevertheless both of us are flexible and agreed to work with VSS after a few discussion. Things are fine when I focus on designing forms and my bro working on code behinds. But the problem arises when we start testing on a few forms, which need both of us to work on design view.

In VS2005 WinForm IDE, it adds or writes to the licenses.licx file whenever you use custom controls/third party controls such as Infragistic in your form. Though I’m not so sure, I observe that the licenses.licx file is not needed if you work entirely with normal winform controls, but with third party controls, it acts as a config file storing the references of the controls.

Once you add a project to VSS DB, the licenses.licx file is always binded since it’s part of the project property. You can check out the code just fine but when you work with the form design, you’re forced to check out the licenses file. If you don’t/can’t check it out, you can’t do anything to the form design. With VSS, it’s really a pain if one developer checked out the licenses file exclusively, others can’t do any design work on any of the forms. To solve the exclusive checkout on licenses file, we tried to exclude the licenses.licx from the project and let it stay in local folder. Unfortunately, the file itself is part of project property and once it’s excluded, it loses the references as well. For that little experiment, I’ve lost two of my form designs and have to start all over; thank god, they were just small forms. With that failed experiment and out of ideas, we searched for the solution on the web. Found out that it was a known issue for VS2005 IDE and the fix would only available with the next release of Visual Studio. The only work around they suggest so far is to use VSS multiple check out mode.

We don’t want to use Multiple check out mode in our VSS DB for:

1. VSS doesn’t provide individual file multiple check out mode but for the whole DB,
2. There are a few careful steps to take before checking back in the multiple check out file. (You cannot check in directly. You must get latest on that file to ensure you get different versions from other developers to merge the file then only you can successfully check it back in.)
3. VSS merge is a real pain and should I would never trust it. Unless ofcos’ you don’t care about losing some of your codes or have a separate backup, go a head and try it out.
4. There is the need of source control administrator for merging files.
5. And again, don’t trust VSS Merge and can’t rely on it.

But untill the next VS release, it’s the only possible way so we don’t have a choice but to use that method. Don’t have time to dig up properly either. So gonna stuck with this problem for the whole project. It’s just making my life miserable. *sign*

Readings: MS Feedback | Forum Q&A

Guess what, there is a new feature on Google Reader. It’s going offline. You now have an option to read your feeds in offline or online mode.

We’ve used the newly released Google Gears, a browser plugin that enables offline web applications. Once you’ve installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they’re available even when you don’t have an internet connection. To get started, simply click the “Offline” link in the top right of Google Reader.

You’ll need to download the Google Gears Setup file (188kb) which then download and install the plugin directly. This would take a while if your connection is slow.

Google Gears (Beta) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:
# Store and server application resources locally
# Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
# Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Once it’s done, you need to restart your browser and allow the plugin on the site. You then have the option to download your feeds and save them for offline reading.

Enabling the Google Gears plugin for the site


Downloading Feeds for offline reading

Online and Offline modes can be easily switched through by clicking on the tiny button at the top. The reader will synchronize the feeds accordingly.

Reader in Offline mode

More Info Links:
# Developer Site
# Developer Knowledge Base

Isn’t just sweet?

I’m wondering…

• I’m wondering, asp.net 2.0 website project does not create project file and .dll file and where all those code-behinds compiled into?
• I’m wondering, if we are to deploy it, do we only deploy .aspx and .ascx (front-end) files or have to include code-behind files as well?
• I’m wondering, why .pdb files are also included when you add project references to the website project.
• I’m wondering, why some referenced .dll creates .xml files as well.
• I’m wondering, do we need to add those .pdb and .xml along with referenced .dll in the deployment.
• I’m wondering, the main difference between asp.net 2.0 web application project and web site project.

And I’m still wondering…