Recently I've been bitten by having to deploy minor upgrades of a .NET application I developed, by uninstalling and reinstalling on the client's PC. This is bad for two reasons: For the next minor change I am going to have to build a setup project, make sure it works, and package it into an MSI file I had to physically go to the client's machines and fiddle around with install/uninstall My aim is to have a system that I don't have to get involved in as much. I wonder what you guys & gals, my readers, use for deploying and (more importantly) patching...

I love documentation about as much as the next person, or perhaps a litle bit less. I choose to use a wiki (the always-improving Flexwiki) for my documentation because I can easily edit it and also integrate it into my apps via a "help" pane and the wiki's "print" view. I do sacrifice some nice formatting (I've been using Word for years and know how to get the document looking just right), though, and my boss insists on documentation in Word or PDF format for saving to a file share. So the route I take to get a PDF is: Open the...

Tuesday's Melbourne SQL User Group meeting was packed full of people to hear Kalen Delaney speak about metadata in SQL Server 2000 and the upcoming SQL Server 2005 (the release formerly known as "Yukon"). I hadn't been to a monthly group for 3 months so it was good to get back into it and I admit I was expecting big things from Kalen, expecially knowing she's the author of "Inside SQL Server 2000", which is still recommended as one of the better books on SQL Server 2000 (even 5 years after the book was released). Kalen didn't disappoint with her knowledge and...

Hooray! I passed my first MS exam, “070-306: Developing and Implementing Windows-Based Applications with Visual Basic.NET and Visual Studio.NET”, last Thursday. I'm not sure what I'm allowed/not allowed to reveal as each exam has an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), but one thing that threw me at first was that the exam had less questions than I expected, which meant I could get less wrong! The exam is part of my quest to become an MCSD, which I have written previously about here. I just got sent an e-mail congratulating me on becoming an MCP, another inviting me to take a certification survey about the...