Learn MS .NET

After being involved in the IT business for close to 15 years now.  It continues to baffle me at how few businesses in Nova Scotia actually get technology.

With the use of such sites as Facebook and MySpace getting such wide spread use in our homes today.  The use of Messaging services such as MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger or the use of such VOIP services as Skype.  These services can make working with people all over the world much easier and faster then previous generations.

As a small business owner and developer of web technology, the use of these types of technologies is a daily habit.  Add in the advances in wireless technology and mobile devices it becomes very easy to see that IT is very important.

Blogs are helping businesses reach customers very quickly with employees within organizations not only spouting the praises of their employers or their business but also responding to the negatives that can be found about your business on the Internet.

The wave of the future is to develop a market for your business and to make it a global business.  The technology to do this is available today and much more.

On Monday November 19, 2007, Mozilla released Firefox version 3.0 beta 1. The initial schedule was to release version 3 to beta in July. 

The beta release includes several interesting features

• ability to use web applications to handle protocol handlers ie: using google mail to handle mailto: tags.
• the addition of one click bookmarking .
• direct typing in the address bar searches your history and favorites as well and displays those as choices.
• new download manager with the ability to resume previous downloads will be a real time saver.

More information about the release and access to the download can be found here.

I've been using the new beta for a few hours now and not ran into any issues as such it seems to be a good alternative to Internet Explorer.  Although some of my previous add-ons were disabled when running this version of Firefox.

Yesterday, marked the RTM release of Visual Studio 2008 Standard, Professional and Team System to MSDN subscriptions.  This edition makes some significant improvements to developing applications for the web.  They have integrated the editor that is used within the expressions web tool to allow split window development of code viewing and WYSIWYG editing at the same time.

With the release of Visual Studio 2008, they also released .NET Framework 3.5 as well.  Version 3.5 includes the much talked about LINQ (Language Integrated Query) and data awareness.  This allows you to write queries in LINQ enabled languages to fully manipulate SQL Data, collections, XML and DataSets.

The following Express editions are now available for download:

• Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition
• Visual C# 2008 Express Edition
• Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition
• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition

The express editions allow for hobbyists or students to get interested in creating applications and has a great way to see some of the improvements in the products.

Scott Guthrie provided a great listing of the features and capabilities of Visual Studio 2008 yesterday in his blog.

All in all this was an important release for anyone that is heavily involved in web application development with some of the advances that have been added to this edition it will make a much needed upgrade from previous versions.

On Monday, November 12, 2007 Shancer Software released their first version of Slide Show for DotNetNuke.  Providing the tools to establish a simple slide show within the DotNetNuke Framework.

Using the settings of the module allows for quick addition and subtraction of images from the module.  With a simple  upload of an image it can be placed on the server in the directory of choice with little effort and added to the image rotation at the same time.

Once the images have all been added to the settings that you want to include you can then click the update button which will then allow those images to rotate on the time that you set up within the slide speed drop down box.

To delete any images from the slide show you can simply check the images to delete click the delete button and it will remove all of the images that are checked from the module.  To find out more information about the module it can be found here.  The module can be purchased at Snowcovered.

Error: File Manager is currently unavailable.
DotNetNuke.Services.Exceptions.ModuleLoadException: C:\intranet\Admin\Files\FileManager.ascx.vb(780): error BC30560: 'ZipEntry' is ambiguous in the namespace 'ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Zip'. ---> System.Web.HttpCompileException: C:\intranet\Admin\Files\FileManager.ascx.vb(780): error BC30560: 'ZipEntry' is ambiguous in the namespace 'ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Zip'. at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.CompileWebFile(VirtualPath virtualPath) at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetVPathBuildResultInternal(VirtualPath virtualPath, Boolean noBuild, Boolean allowCrossApp, Boolean allowBuildInPrecompile) at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetVPathBuildResultWithNoAssert(HttpContext context, VirtualPath virtualPath, Boolean noBuild, Boolean allowCrossApp, Boolean allowBuildInPrecompile) at System.Web.UI.TemplateControl.LoadControl(VirtualPath virtualPath) at System.Web.UI.TemplateControl.LoadControl(String virtualPath) at DotNetNuke.UI.Skins.Skin.InjectModule(Control objPane, ModuleInfo objModule, PortalSettings PortalSettings) --- End of inner exception stack trace ---

What a nasty message to receive within your portal as your trying to upgrade to a new version of the software.

I searched the Internet and found a few articles that explained a few things.  In my particular case I simply had to delete the ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.dll file in the bin folder.  This allowed me access back to the file manager.

Hope this helps some people with the issue.