MS Visual Studio.Net 2010 Experience 2

I feel like a kid with a new toy :-)
I finally got the VB.Net and C# console working by making over 2 GB avialable to the VM.
I also got the VS.Net 2010 Training Kit that have labs and samples for all the key technologies: C# 4.0, VB.Net 10.0, MEF etc.

Anyone that want a copy can contact me: 076 824 3560. I'm base in Fishhoek, Cape Town. If you can bring 2 empty DVDs (dude its over 7 GB!) or a portable hard drive.

Weekly Source Code: FTP Connection To A FTP Server 2008/12/29

Chris Pels published a video on how to create an FTP connection to an FTP server using the FtpWebRequest class in .Net.

View the video here

MS Visual Studio.Net 2010 CPT Experience 1

After shutting down all the Services I still find the VM being extreamly show! Looking around under the settings I find that the VM only allocate 256MB RAM (that memory get take from the host machine) !! No that doesn't work, Windows doesn't run within 256MB of RAM (unless your running Windows 98 or something really old) I increased the memory to 1.8GB (leaving +- 2GB from my host) and wow the speed is now normal! :-)

Update:

Ok now it crash everytime I want to create a new VB.Net or C# console application. The only one that work fine is C++ (but I don't program in C++ that much - mainly C# and alittle of VB.Net)

Visual Studio.Net 2010 CPT Experience

I finally got to download MS Visual Studio.Net 2010 CPT - that is pre-beta (like 2 years) release of the next version of MS Visual Studio.Net scheduled for release sometime in 2010 (exact date unknown).

Yes bandwidth is expensive in SA but using Telkom ADSL, 4Mbps line, Openweb 10GB Local with Openbrowser and Opera web browser as my download manager I got to download all 7 GB on a Sunday afternoon/late evening!

The installation took awhile to un-compress all 11 files (700 MB each) and then to setup the VirtualPC (using Virtual PC 2007 SP1)

The installation went well but find that MS Visual Studio.Net IDE is very slow on my machine (Intel Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM) - I guess the only way is to stop some of the services (like MS SQL Server etc) that get started by the VM.

Also note that you need to change the date on the VM else the CPT will expire on 1 Jan 2009.

For more information visit:

http://tinyurl.com/GetCTP
http://tinyurl.com/VSFeedback
http://tinyurl.com/CTPActivation

Something for me to play with while Im in Uganda (ok just alittle - I still got work!)

Have fun! :-)

GizmoCall.com

Call directly from your web browser without installing any software... can call to a regular phone number (using cheap VOIP rates), to another Gizmo user or to a SIP number.

Use the embed Gimzocall plugin below.

Telkom doBroadband 384kbps vs Telkom 4Mbps

About a week ago we upgraded from Telkom do Broadband with a speed of 384kbps, cap of 1GB (yes ladies and gents bandwidth in SA get capped unless your willing to spend R1000-R2000 on uncapped) to 4Mbps with a cap of 3GB. The speed increase is incredible!

I reguraly watch Channel 9 to download a video normally took around 30+ minutes, it download in about 5 minutes.

Tomorrow I'm preparting for my Uganda trip, more about that in a future blog (yes I know, I told you that before but good things come to those who wait hey...)

Scott Hanselman Chat & Wikipedia Goes Mobile

I came back from Scott Hanselman's chat hosted by SA Developer .Net Group in South Africa, Cape Town.

The chat was held at Microsoft offices, Scott talked about the ASP.NET MVC framework
giving a very good demo on a new website: NerdDinner that you will notice still use the default ASP.NET MVC template. After lunch (good food like always!) there was a Q&A session and a discussion.

Next in the news: Wikipedia goes mobile! To try this later on my Samsung Omnia i900, Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro.

Weekly Source Code: Using MySQL Database with Visual C# 2008 Express Edition 15/12/2008

David Bolton that manage the C/C++/C# About.com website post a tutorial on how to use mySQL from MS Visual C# 2008 Express Edition.... The Express Edition is a free version of the Visual C# IDE (not the whole MS Visual Studio.Net suite)

See the tutorial here

VOIPBuster vs Skype - Phone Calls

Looking into VOIPBuster vs Skype for cheap VOIP calls expecially when I goto Uganda (more about that in a later post) I find that:

If you buy VOIPBuster credit you get 120 days free period where you can make free calls to countries unfortunatly for us Uganda or South Africa isn't :-( So nothing is going to be free.

Comparing the prices:

VOIP Buster:

0.060 EUR = R0.797024 (Landline)
0.170 EUR = R2.25728 (Mobile)

Skype:

Landline: R1.612
Mobile: R1.612

So VOIPBuster is cheaper for landline but Skype is cheaper for mobile.

See VOIPBuster Rates
See Skype Rates
To Convert EUR To ZAR

Black: Playstation 2 Game!

Yesterday I received my Black Playstation 2 game that I bought online from Take2
Black is a first person shooter and OBOY the game got good graphics and action packed!

I will write a review soon and also provide some videos.

Meanwhile back to work and looking forward to playing again....

O btw I ordered Hitman PS2 game aswell - its also a first person shooter!

My 27th Birthday

Yesterday, 8 December 2008 was my 27th birthday... beside that I was at work having a normal day I also ate alot of cake!

Last night my beautiful wife (Jolene De Villiers) took me out for dinner and a movie... we watched the new 007 movie: Quantum of Solace Alot of action but the ending was disappointing.

Today my Black Playstation 2 game arrived so having some fun tonight :-)

Scott Hanselman In South Africa!

Yes our favoarite super hero Scott Hanselman is coming to South Africa.
You need to RSVP

I'm going to the 17 December 2008 event.

See you there :-)

Update:

For those that aren't geeks, Scott Hanselman is a big .Net developer working for Microsoft in the USA... His one of the key players in the Microsoft .Net techonology. You can click on his name to read his bio, blog etc.

Weekly Source Code: Get Cents

Part of making changes to the Java currency to words code I pass in a double value parameter to the convert method (not a long) and add support for cents e.g. : $5.20 to equal "Five USD and Twenty cents".

An interesting problem I had was how do I get the cents part? e.g. $5.20 to get 20.

Firstly I had to format the number to round off to the last 2 digits so something like $5.2555 will not work. To do this in Java you can use the DecimalFormat class.

To get the cents I wrote:

double cents = new Double(new Double(number).doubleValue() - new Double(number).intValue()).doubleValue();
int iCents = (int) Math.round(cents * 100d);

The first line of code take the double value and subtract the integer value e.g. 5.20 - 5.0 = 0.20
The second line format the remaining value 0.20 to be an integer e.g. 20

Like always there are many ways in programming how this could be done and yes the above code works 100% since I wrote a very detail Unit test.