I finally made the ‘leap’ into the digital SLR world.  I sold my old friend, the Nikon Coolpix 5700, and bought one of these:

I was actually dead-set on buying a Canon Digital Rebel XT until the guy at the camera store introduced me to the Olympus Evolt E-500. Is this a better camera than the Digital Rebel XT? Probably not, but it seems to offer a lot more ‘bang for the buck’ than either the Digital Rebel or the Nikon D50, especially considering it got it with two lenses for nearly the same prices as the other brand’s single lens kits.

One thing is for sure: It’s going to be a while before you start seeing any worth-while pictures from me… I feel totally lost with this new camera!  Having no twist-n-flip LCD and live preview is something I already miss, but having ISO settings up to ISO1600 will be nice.

Stayed-tuned for some nice photos… I hope!

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.”