New Open Source Project - File Server Documenter

A new open source project has been started at CodePlex for the File Server Documenter.
From the project's home page:

File Server Documenter contains routines and a basic interface to scan a file server and produce raw documentation. Oriented towards a customer/technical support person rather than the server administrator. It can be considered an auditing tool, or just providing general information about what the file server is being used for.

The first release is really some very tactical tasks I've had over the past few years - starting with a single file console app that scanned a file server for Access databases (the original exe was called MDBDocumenter, in fact)

Learning DotNet

As an experienced developer, colleagues looking to get into the field often ask me how I "learned to program". I did take formal classes at junior college and university, and to some extent my experience was sort of vaguely finding my path into jobs that required me to pick up Access, and later Visual Basic, FoxPro, and start using it.

The other area that really filled in the gaps between theory and trial and error for me was an online education site called 'ZDU'. The site isn't around anymore, or at least not in the form it was then, but one of the authors/instructors, John Smiley, that taught in that format now accompanies his own books with internet classes through his website, http://www.johnsmiley.com.

I learned from him back on VB 5, then VB 6 (I still have a number of his spiral bound ZDU 'workbooks' on the shelf) Reading the abstracts of his current books, of course updated for .net 2.0, 3.0, etc. and expanded to VB.net and C#, it appears to follow a similar format that I highly recommend. Mr. Smiley takes you from the beginning of a fictional project, that gets built out chapter-by-chapter to a finished product at the end. I really like the format as it tends to follow how I develop applications in the real world. I highly recommend his books, and his internet classes, to someone looking to learn to program and wants to focus on the Microsoft Dot Net product.

Take a look at his classes or books

Snippet for launching an Click-Once application

While a less common deployment scenario, perhaps. This code will launch an application installed through Click-Once. (Notably, assuming it is already installed)

Dim runningProc As System.Diagnostics.Process
runningProc = New
System.Diagnostics.Process

'Do not receive an event when the process
exists
runningProc.EnableRaisingEvents = False

runningProc.Start("c:\Documents and Settings\" & UserName &
"\Start Menu\AppName.appref-ms")

What is an "Application Reference"?

Visual FoxPro Final Version

Per the attached article, Visual FoxPro has reached its end-of-life, and will be released as open source
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=361

I hadn't actually realized it wasn't already part of the dotnet, the latest version I touched was FoxPro 6. Then 8 and 9 were out so fast, I figured they were to catch up with .net 1.0/1 and .net 2.0, respectively. In fact, Visual FoxPro is still sitting out there in COM land. My prediction is that it will take the open source route, a movement there will build a DotNet interface, with FoxPro syntax, similar in paradigm to Fujitsu's COBOL.net or in that sense Microsoft's J#... it will not be a port of the language, rather layering another syntax on the dot net framework. which begs the question, was it the language features or syntax and semantics that was the strength?

I used to be hard pressed to see how FoxPro's tight data integration can be duplicated in dot net. Now with reading about LINQ, it seems like that is the direction of the entire dot net line.