It’s difficult to start a business and the tools to use in your profession are required to be effective and useful. Well, that effort just got a ton easier in the programming industry. There are some “hoops” to pass through and some fees that can be assessed if you exit the program early, but they are significantly less than the upfront costs to get started. A similar program was introduced last year Dreamspark and enhanced this year to offer High School students with a free programming software bundle. It used to only be fore College students. Now, that same concept has been extended and is introduced to small business and noobies that want to start programming. I wish I had this opportunity when I was first starting out. I bought Visual Basic 1.0 Standard at my University at the whopping student discount price of $500.00, upfront.

Get on board with this and make a name for yourself. It’s definitely worth it. The worst of it is, if you exit the program and pay a measly $100.00. That’s small potatoes compared to the $1000.00 price tag for the bundle just to get the software. It’s almost like a try before you buy shareware program, but you’re actually encouraged to develop production software. What do you have to lose, $100.00, but you have everything else to gain. WebsiteSpark may be your ticket to the big leagues and eventually a big fat check.

So some of the conditions are:

• Pay $100 to exit the participating program
• Membership can also last no more than three years, after which time Microsoft, of course, hopes you sign on as a Network Partner.
• You must roll-out a new application or website within 6 months of joining.
• If you hit the big times, the ride is over; but you may not care since would be living the fat life.

The sweet spot just hit by offering this now not to just College students, but now High School students. In the grades from 9 through 12. The “very small” catch is that the students must go through a few “small” hoops to get it.  I would highly advise that anyone in school from grade 9 to college look into this … it’s great. The students in High School will need to have the assistance of a school representative to make the requests, download the keys, and download the software for the student, but that’s a small price to pay for the really small price to start getting into programming.

The using statement and the referencing statement differ in that the using statement is a logical link and reference to the namespace library, this makes it so you can shorten your qualifications to objects. Instead of typeing System.Windows.Forms.Textbox. You place a using statement “using System.Windows.Forms” at the top of your page and you only have to now use the word Textbox to reference the object. These are also usually statements to libraries within your current namespace.

The References are registrations to libraries and dlls that are to be used outside your namespace.

Recently in a project, there were a number of projects that had change adding some ENUM references that were prominently used in the application. These errors made it immpossible to build the solution. In order to rid yourself of this error, you must resolve a conflict, or supply a reference or using statement.

First, check the statement where the error occurs. Make sure the namespace/library that the object refers to is available in the project. If you find the source cs file, look to see if the Namespace is different than where the object is being used. If they are different, then either fully qualify the namespace in front of the object, or add the “using <full namespace>;” statement at the top.

Try and compile the application, if you still have the error, then look in the current project (where the error occurs) References list and see if the assembly/library is there. It’s it isn’t, then add the new Reference by either locating the .NET object, COM object, project, or file.

When this has been added, try compiling again. If you still get the error, then you’ll have write some comments here and provide your code for me to be able to help you further.

Follow these steps to connect and use data on the User Web Control:

1. Create a new Web Control in your application project
2. Place two label and two textboxes on the control
3. Name the two controls txtUsername and txtAddress
4. In the code behind of the control add the following code (C#)private string username = String.Empty;
   private string password; = String.Empty;

public string Username {
get { return username; }
set { set username = value; }
}

public string Password{
get { return password; }
set { set password; = value; }
}

5. Close the control designer windows, saving all changes
6. Open the web page that will use the control
7. Drag and drop the new web control onto the web page canvas (if you already had the web control on your webpage and you added new interface elements (public functions or properties), you will likely need to remove the controls including the REGISTER statements at the top of the page so that the interface elements are reconnected to the page for you.
8. In the code behind the web page, make any references to the Tag name of the control (assuming “uc1″ in this case) using the following statements (C#).this.uc1.Username = “Your username”;
   this.uc1.Password{ = “Your password”;

This concludes the tutorial to add a simple web control and connect to it from the parent web page where it resides. This concept will help in many ways like, login pages, bread crumbs, contained lists, or other user interface lists.

To recreate the issue, follow these instructions:
* Create a new GridView control on your page
* Set the DataSoruce to an ObjectSource control (there is more work to do here, but won’t be explained here)
* Set the GridView height to 100px (arbitrary number), or resize it in height to be at least this number; again, this is a high arbitrary number for maximum visual effect. If it’s any smaller in height, you may not see the dramatic effect.
* Add ONE and only ONE row to the ObjectSource
* You will see that the GridView vertically aligns the row to the middle of the control.

To fix the issue, do this:
* remove the Height value in the property

By default, there is no Height value so the problem doesn’t present itself. In my situation, I placed a GridView on my form inside of a Panel with a Vertical scroll on so I can scroll through the gridview rows. There are, I’m sure, other ways to accomplish this, but it was all that was required for the project.

When adding 5 or more rows to the GridView ObjectSource the rows were their optimal height and top-aligned. However, if I add 5 or less rows, the rows are expanded in height and are spread evenly across the height of the GridView. Especially when there is only one row … the row will show in the middle of the GridView vertically. I want it to be top-aligned. I tried everhthing, I changed properties, I added CSS styles and alignment attributes, but nothing changed the effect.

It dawned on me that the rows were expanding to fill the vertical height of the GridView. I checked the Height property and it was set to 88px (bolded to show that it wasn’t the default value). I changed it to 1px (again bolded, so I knew it wasn’t the default) and the problem went away. But knowing this wasn’t the default, I could possibly run in to other problems. I then assumed that a NULL Height value was the default. I erased any value in the Height property, tried it again, and it worked. I have thus left it at this value.

Lesson learned, when I created the control in the first place, I resized the GridView to fill the expanse of the Panel in it’s width and height. The Height property was set and the grid was trying to fill the height of the control automatically. An undesireable effect.

You may want this effect to exist, but just know it happens so it’s done on purpose and not by accident.

Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.BatchParser, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91′ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

I found an MSDN article that recommends downloading the 64 bit SMO assembly.

Here is the Microsoft MSDN article that talks about SQL Server connectivity for both 2005 and backward compatibility.

• Feature Pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2005

I had to close all applications, especially Visual Studio and then installed the following application.

• X64 Package (SQLServer2005_XMO_x64.msi) – 14675 KB

My system info is:

• OS Name – Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Home Premium
• Version – 6.0.6001 Service Pack 1 Build 6001
• System Type – x64-based PC
• Processor – AMD Turion(tm) X2 Dual-Core Mobile RM-70, 2000 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)

The installation took care of updating and using the latest SMO objects in the project. No removing of Assemblies or references was needed. Worked like a charm.

Problem: The pencil glyph icon in edit mode wouldn’t go away. Here’s the situation and the solution.

Solution: If the property Virtual is set to false the glyph will go away, period.

Even after doing this, a call to the EndEdit() function wasn’t required to make the glyph go away even though other people say that it’s required. Test it though to make sure. Suffice it to say that if you’re still having a problem after setting the Virtual property, then it’s something with the grid property settings or the programmatic overrides you’re doing. But this setting worked for me.

Any additional comments or concerns about this?

Row associated with the currency manager's position cannot be made invisible.

The solution is to put the following command somewhere at the top of your routine before accessing the grid rows (C# code).

<DataGridView>.CurrentCell = null

Hope this helps.

The .NET infrastructure is very flexible and is easier to use than people think. Here are the steps that I went through to get everything working and connected. Because I program in C# this tutorial is presented in that language. This is an outline of the process and steps to accomplish this tutorial. It helps to keep the ideas in check and that there are no missing subjects.

1. Install MySQL v5.0
2. Install Visual Studio (use the express editions if you don’t have full versions)
3. Install the MySQL 5.0 .NET Data Connector v5.2 (for example mysql-connector-net-5.2.1.zip) or other connector of your programming choice.
4. Start building a database
   1. A nice application to use is ModelRight 3 community edition
   2. Create two tables and add some fields and join one of the tables to the other in a parent-child relationship
   3. Generate (engineer) the database to MySQL
5. Open Visual Studio
6. Go to the Server Explorer, right-click on Data Connections
7. Click Add Connection
8. Change the datasource to MySQL Database and make sure the Data provider is .NET Framerwork Data Provider for MySQL and click OK
9. Login to the server with the following:
   1. Server name: localhost
   2. User name: root
   3. Password: the initial password you gave when setting up MySQL
   4. Database name: This is the name of the database you will attach to. It’s possible you haven’t set one up yet, see the Building a MySQL Database below.
10. Create a website application using Visual Studio (File | New | Website)
11. Pick ASP.NET Web Site (or ASP.NET AJAX-Enabled Web Site) if you have the .NET AJAX Toolkit installed.
12. Add the connection string to Web.Config
13. Update App_Code data layer classes to use the schema of the database
14. Add an Object Data Connection to the web page with the following settings
15. Put a DataGridView on the screen and connect it to the Object Data Connection object with these settings
16. Run the application

The C# Code

Version vrs = Environment.Version;
Console.Write("Version: {0}.{1}.{2}", vrs.Major, vrs.Minor, vrs.Revision);

Nice. Hope that helps you too, cause it took a little bit to sift through a lot of “mud blogs” to find it.