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(kit­teh codez: ./;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;)

Time to start C# famil­i­ar­isa­tion, this long week­end is the week­end to start. My guide is the book: “Pro C# 2008 and the .Net 3.5 Plat­form” writ­ten by Andrew Troel­son

Hav­ing last been semi-professional in Java about 10 years ago, there are many sim­il­ar­it­ies. But lots of new plat­form learn­ings. Unix shell, paths and com­mands are dif­fi­cult things to dump.

Just ensur­ing I under­stand the fun­da­ment­als before I jump into the deep end of the BCL and other .Net goodness

So, some new things:

• using the Visual Stu­dio Com­mand Prompt to pre-setup paths
• @*.rsp files for input to csc.exe (to replace com­mand lines)
• Con­sole.* and Envir­on­ment.* for command-line/console style apps; along with return values
• Escape char­ac­ters vs. @”sss” ver­batim strings
• Narrowing/Widening data­types at com­pile time (short/ints)
• out, ref, params (leave params as last argument)
• oper­ator over­load­ing (sans gen­er­ics), arrays, simple objects, enums’
• structs on the stack, vs ref­er­enced types on heap
• Nul­lable types (using ? at the end of the type declar­a­tion, ?? as default over­ride if value is null)
• Objects, default constructors
• con­structor chain­ing using this. keyword
• Encap­su­la­tion using prop­er­ties (auto get­ters and set­ters, or Accessors and Mutators)
• par­tials (one class across mul­tiple *.cs files)
• class dia­grams; same 3 base things of OO pro­gram­ming (encap­su­la­tion, inher­it­ance and poly­morph­ism)
• base class construction
• nes­ted classes
• vir­tual, over­ride in poly­morph­ism; as keyword + null test in polymorphism
• SEH. Struc­tured excep­tion handling
• The heap, gen­er­a­tions as a method of mark­ing objects as “more likely to stick around” in System.GC
• Final­ize. Final­ize when unman­aged (ie: Pin­voke) objects
• Dis­pose. call Dis­pose on an object that imple­ments IDispos­able (if x is IDisposable…)

New fea­ture of Visual Stu­dio 2008, LOLCAT edi­tion. CATROSPECSHUN OV UR CLASSEZ

Install Win­dows Server 2008, SQLServer2005 into Vir­tual PC 2007

• My pre­vi­ous applic­a­tion devel­op­ment plat­form exper­i­ence is LAMP, so this Win­dows Server 2008 stuff is going to be fun!
• Install­a­tion to a fresh Vir­tu­alPC took less than 15 minutes.
• Only 6 updates required post install of Win­dows Server 2008 Enterprise
• Added Applic­a­tion Server, Web Server (IIS), File Ser­vices as installed applications
  • FTP added because I under­stand that stuff
• Installed Vir­tu­alPC extensions
• Recon­fig­ur­ated net­work­ing for home network
• Installing SQLServer2005 (as most external hosters are using this revision)
  • Too many ques­tions for a mere mor­tal. Its like recom­pil­ing MySQL!
  • Going for a base level SQLServer as possible
  • Apply SP update to SQLServer2005
• Launch SQLServer Man­age­ment Studio
• All Seems Well
• Time to Backup the VM

Next sub-project: Win­dows Mobile 6 Pro­fes­sional SDK

• Some of the Ima­gine Cup final­ists use the Win­dows Mobile 6 SDK, so grabbing that and eval­u­at­ing their entries
• Installed; have to wait for the .zip files so I can cor­rectly unzip with dir­ect­or­ies. Oops
• (on hold)
• (restar­ted at 8:00pm)
• OK, sub­mis­sions reviewed, includ­ing in-the Mobile emu­lator (w00tage!). Karo has my data

ASP.NET/Database. Exactly how easy is it? Can I do it without RTFM?

• Move VM over to sep­ar­ate machine
• Launched OK!
• Hmm, adding a user, set­ting up non-Windows authen­tic­a­tion (ie: no Act­ive­Dir­ect­ory) requires check­ing on super-special™ check­box. Done and run­ning. Can cre­ate a table, add columns and records.
• I declare a suc­cess­ful day

As my Microsoft job sub­tlety changes at the begin­ning of July, it is self-development time!

Next year involves more cycles devoted to devel­op­ment ‘themes’. A change that I am

Fol­low­ing sage twit­ter advice from Christy Dena, the diary is locked and loaded. Every Monday and Fri­day are hard alloc­ated to self-development.

Self-development relies on self-control.

To aid the tem­pa­tion of twit­ter, email, rss feeds, wee­war, TV, cats and gen­eral out­side inter­rup­tions: I am a stick­ler for not mis­ap­pro­pri­at­ing this 40% time. Secondly, there will be a blog/wiki post that will detail the daily activ­it­ies. 40% time full transparency.

The gen­eral themes:

• Win­dows Server 2008 as Web Development/Web Host backend
• SQLServer 2005/8 as datastore
• C#
• ASP.NET
• HTML/Ajax/Silverlight
• DLR; Iron­Py­thon and IronRuby