We planning to host interactive and "hands-on" developer readiness program bootcamps for the latest technology [with TTT (train the trainer) tracks], for Visual Studio 2005 and .NET2, as well as Visual Studio Team System in the second half of March 2006.

If you are interested in these programs, please contact us on drpsupport@bbd.co.za.

1. March 08, 2006 09:00 45minutes   
• Session: What is WWF and why consider it?                                
• Presenter: Andre
2. March 09, 2006 09:00 45minutes   
• Session: The good, the bad and the evil of ASP.NET 2!                
• Presenter: Peet
3. March 15, 2006 09:00 45minutes   
• Session: What are Reporting Services and why consider then?   
• Presenter: Richard O.
4. March 16, 2006 09:00 45minutes   
• Session: What is BizTalk and why consider it?                              
• Presenter: Garret

Location: BB&D Video Conference Room (Johannesburg) with feed in BB&D Video Conference Room (Cape Town)

Other planned sessions for March include:

• What is Connected Services Framework and why use it?
• An interactive tour of VS2005 IDE and Debugger.

Consider the two code extracts below:
catch (Exception ex)
{
throw;
}

catch (Exception ex)
{
throw ex;
}

The difference between the two snippets is that the second example will reset the stack trace and it will appear that the exception originates with in the try block. This makes debugging difficult. For most instances where you want to rethrow an exception use throw. Our recommendation is to use Microsoft Enterprise Library Exception Handling Block, as it gives you a great deal of flexibility to consume, rethrow and wrap exception based on externally configurable policies.
This applies to VB.NET (Throw) and C# (throw).

Ernst Marais
BB&D MTU

Here is my experience of installing Vista Beta 1.

 

Virtual PC is a no go.

1. You need to manually format your VHD.  The Vista install can partition the disk but the format does not work and you are stuck.
2. After painfully typing in the Product Code fifty times are told the disk and the machine name are all you need to capture.  Sit back and wait for Vista to install.  Not long after this it crashes with a cannot find TAPI error.
3. Give up with VPC
4. Read on the net that if you actually do get it to work it runs like a dog.  S3 Tri is clearly not Direct X 9 compliant and so there are heaps of interoperability layers.  So just forget VPC.

 

Find a hard disk with a free partition and off you go.

 

This went pretty much without a hitch.

It spends allot of time telling you that it is installing critical components and you should not restart.

 

So far I have managed to get the machine on the domain, and they now have the XP Professional look and feel for Corporate Domain users as well.

 

Regards

Peter Scheffel

The presentation and demonstration from the July saArchitect session, Microsoft Enterprise Libraries, a worthwhile open source initiative, can be downloaded at:
http://www.drp.co.za/default.asp?id=media/content_editorials

Enterprise Library Version 1.1 can be downloaded from:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/