Geeze – nearly 3 years of working in .NET and I just noticed this today – ’cause I went looking for it.

For the super curious (and this hardly satisifes anything beyond that), how do you know when you are using a system type vs. a “keyword“? It’s easy with VB’s Integer (keyword), or C#s int vs. Int32, but what about String and System.String?

But now I see it….

Note the text color of the System types vs. the text color of the language keywords. Subtle. Not earth shattering, but still interesting. In a why is the sky blue kind of way…

Jackie Goldstein points out this important reminder.

What’s changing:

Extended Phase (through March 2008)

• [Still have] Standard support offerings include Premier Support, paid telephone and online incident support, and free online self-help tools.
• Critical Updates will be available for a fee.
• Free telephone and online incident support will no longer be available.
  

Don’t throw out those old MSDN Library DVDs!!! (Though the online support won’t go away for 3 more years.)

As I’m digging further into my C# for VB6 programmers talk that I am preparing for Code Camp and also DevConnections, I noticed something funny – that case-sensitive C# doesn’t seem to care if you use String or string – while it cares plenty if you try to use “Int” or “Bool”, etc. 

I realized though that it is really because string is the C# type and System.String is the .NET type, so they both are okay. So byte/Byte are both okay but you can’t get away with int/Int32 or bool/Boolean. The funny thing is that when I am coding in VB, I try to use the framework types. I always use Int32, never Integer. But I was trying to be a cool C# coder, so I was using the C# types instead. Go figure! Actually in VB, Integer is more work than Int32, but in C# int is faster than Int32. So that’s probably my good excuse, eh? Anyway, these seem like silly things, but definitely will make a VB coder stop and think for a minute which is why I’m doing my best to try to save them a few steps!

This talk is almost just as easily C# for VB.NET programmers, except that since there were syntax changes from VB6 to VB.NET, I will be incorporating the VB6 perspective as well.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Kathleen says:

Let’s take a trip down memory lane to look at how you’re using tracing today. That’s easy – you aren’t using it. You aren’t using it because even though you can’t articulate what’s wrong (and maybe can’t articulate what tracing is) you’re primordial self still recoils in revulsion at the ugly 1.0 implementation. Let me force you to face the ugliness and remind you what tracing looks like today.

She’s so right. If you looked at the charts from my certification tests they are way to the right for everything except for tracing. It’s a wonder that I even passed the test because my tracing knowledge is so poor. It’s embarrassing.

So since I will be (speaking) at DevConnections, I am going to absolutely attend kathleen’s sessions on this topic where she will drill in to it.

I’m also considering attending Devscovery so I can sit in on many debugging sessions  by John Robbins and of course learn about some ASP.NET internals from Jeff Prosise and some .NET internals from Jeff Richter.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I learned about Comment Tasks during Deborah Kuratas eye-opening “Best Kept Secrets” talk at VSLive last month. She also has a whole book filled with these goodies. It was really funny to hear people keep going “what? I didn’t know you could do that!”. I also did this a number of times.

One of the things I liked a lot was comment tasks. But the reason I liked them was because I am now using them to make sure I can quickly get to code during demos. Deborah used the feature that way also.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Well, it almost came to fisticuffs at the Web Services Edge conference when I asked Thom Robbins, who is the New England Developer Evengelist for Microsoft, if he could come to Vermont.NET and give us the wonderful Visual Studio 2005 overview presentation that I was watching Doug Turnure, the Atlanta area D.E., do during one of the workshops.

The battle was because, well, as we all now, Vermont is a really nice place to visit! Especially in May. Doug said “I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” (His wife loves Vermont) But I guess Thom won since Vermont *is* his territory and I haven’t had him speak at the group in a while.

When we started the user group I probably could have filled up 2 years of our schedule just from inviting Russ Fustino (back when he was ours – boo hoo hoo), Joe Stagner and Thom who are always very happy to come to Burlington. It’s too bad that the MSDN events are not coming here any more, but those are expensive to put on, whereas it’s not a big deal for those guys to buzz up here (they don’t mind the drive in their nice cars) and do an overnight or visit clients.

I guess we’ll have to find some other excuse for Doug to come to Vermont.

http://www.AcehAid.org

If you have been following the saga of Rob Howard trying to get to Vermont for our 6pm meeting where he was our INETA speaker… Rob was stuck in Chicago waiting for a flight that kept being delayed and delayed. We finally decided he should turn around and go back to Dallas. I think we made the right call!

Boo hoo

Rob Howard’s flight from Chicago was delayed again so as there was no point in him arriving very late and then flying out tomorrow morning, I sent him home to Texas and 85 degree weather.

After a quick concensus of those who rsvp’d, many people said they weren’t going to come now (no star, icchy weather, and half of Vermont has some bug anyway – but they *were* going to come if Rob had made it…) so we have cancelled the Vermont.NET meeting.

Rob and I are both very sorry.

Based on the current United schedule, we will start the meeting at 6pm and Rob should arrive at about 7pm with Roman Rehak.

The first hour of the meeting will have the usual “what’s going on” and then I will facilitate a free for all .NET Q&A until Rob arrives.

http://www.AcehAid.org

(responding to some emails and phone calls) really – here’s why

flight 7960 is en route. It left Burlington one hour late and will arrive in Chicago only 25 minutes late.

It is the same plane, it arrives at gate E2 and Rob’s flight departs from E2.

I think they said 3:30 because they did not know when the Burlington flight was leaving (there were computer problems).

Hang in there. Let’s give it some more time to shake out.

http://www.AcehAid.org