Click here to hear the Unit Test song by Tim O’Day.  As you might expect by his last name, it’s an Irish song

If you’re upgrading a lot of web projects from Visual Studio .NET 2003 to Visual Studio .NET 2005, you’ll want to be sure to install this latest update to the Web Project Conversion Wizard.

One of the annoying features of VisualStudio.NET 2003 is that it isn’t very easy to deploy a web project to a hosted web server via FTP.  Even if you use VS.NET’s Copy Project utility, it’s pretty much an ‘all or nothing’ tool.  What happens when you only want to post a few files?  Most of use end-up using some third-party FTP tool which is annoying.

Anyway, your prayers have been answered by Bobby DeRosa who spent the time solving this FTP problem by creating the Web Deployer Add-in for Visual Studio 2003 (for C# projects.)  It integrates nicely with VS.NET and allows you file-by-file control of what you want to upload. 

Because Bobby is such a nice guy, he also made a VB.NET flavor of this tool as well

Note to self:  Do not add a reference to the assembly System.Data.SqlClient in a VisualStudio.NET 2005 project, it is only necessary to have a reference to System.Data.  If you reference both assemblies, you get this error in VisualStudio:

'SqlConnection' is ambiguous in the namespace 'System.Data.SqlClient'.

Why does this happen? According to Kevin Yu’s response in the Google microsoft.public.dotnet.framework newsgroup:

“The System.Data.SqlClient assembly under the PublicAssemblies is used by VS.NET IDE internally. It is a party of the IDE and only the product team knows the difference between this and the one under GAC.

This System.DataSqlClient is not intended to be called from the user code. Usage of this assembly is not supported and might lead to unexpected results.

So if you need to connect to SQL Server in your code. Please reference the System.Data assembly under GAC as MSDN refers to. It includes the namespace of System.Data.SqlClient.”

One of my favorite words in the English language is “free”   If you’re interested in learning more about the Agile Development, you be happy to learn that the book “Essential Skills for Agile Development” is available online… for free!

In today’s programming world, it seems like any article you read that is six months old or older is no longer relevant.  However, I recently found a very interesting article written in 2003 that addresses the topic of off-shoring developer jobs… and it discusses some things that we, as developers in the good ol’ US of A, can do about it:

Achieving Reuse in ASP.NET – Part1: Barriers to Reuse by Scott Bellware

It wasn’t until recently that I jumped on the Test Driven Development (TDD) bandwagon, as the article discusses, and I wish I would’ve done it sooner.  Making my code a bit more reusable still seems like something I could use a lot of work on as well.  I spend way too much time re-inventing the programmer wheel!