In recent years I have luckily been very successful with passing a few of Microsoft’s certification exams. Like many others when I first attempted certification I went out and acquired the typical textbooks and practice exams, spent several months reading and re-reading, and took the practice exams to the point that I didn’t even have [...]

Often times you need to be able to search through XML snippets using case insensitivity. You may want to handle variations in user typing or just different system configuration setups (you may not have total control over the XML creation). On my venture to find the best case agnostic XML parsing in .NET, I came [...]

This article shows you how to start CMD at a designated directory

Being Microsoft Gold Partners we have a strong push to keep ourselves abreast with the latest Microsoft technology offerings. One way we prove our expertise of a given knowledge domain is by taking Microsoft Certification exams. We use Prometric to schedule our Microsoft tests with our local testing center – ICC’s Professional Development Institute (PDI). [...]

SQL Server 2008 now makes it easier than ever to index your stored content. Many businesses are using SQL Server to save important documents and be able to retrieve them based upon their content. Unfortunately, certain file formats are tougher to index than others due to how their files are physically structured or encoded. In [...]

Although extensions have been available for visual studio for quite a while, the addition of the extension manager in visual studio 2010 has made it easier to install and keep your extensions up-to-date.

The manager makes it much easier to see what extensions are available and allows easy access to detailed information about each extension. It [...]

We just began working with the new MVC 2 framework that is now included in Visual Studio 2010. MVC 2 leverages .NET 4.0 and is a commonly used design pattern in other developer communities.
To deploy MVC 2 applications, you just right click on your visual studio project and click “Publish”.

A wizard pops open [...]

Using Logging Application Block provided by Enterprise Library is a common way of logging exceptions in .NET applications.  It’s easy to setup and to use.  One problem I had a while ago was that it worked while on my development PC, but stopped working once it’s deployed.
What I was doing was to use it to [...]

In web application development, we should always think about returning some kind of message to users when an exception is raised in the program.  Sometimes, it can be very specific, while in other cases it can be generic.  A common thought is to capture and possibly handle exceptions where they are raised, re-throw exceptions or [...]

Microsoft Device Emulator is a great tool for testing your mobile web applications without utilizing any real mobile device.  Because it can use the same network that your computer is on, you can use it to test your mobile web applications hosted on development computers or test servers before the applications are published to the internet.  [...]