You just have to press windows + r, then type cmd in the little box that appears there and BOOM! There you have the black screen... xD

I had the same issue; The only way to solve it was to set cookieless="False" in order to add the web reference then set it back to AutoDetect. If you find a better solution, please let me know!

I see your point, and I do agree that certification courses are a very good learning tool, but relying on the premise of "an honest candidate" is what bothers me. Sadly, I've met both excellent and terrible developers with and without certifications and/or degrees, which makes me consider those, at the least, misleading. Still, it is true that some recruiters do believe in them, so, as you said, why not get it if you can? Plus I consider myself fairly honest... In my case, when I took into consideration getting certified on .Net, it was a matter of money. You've in fact made me wonder if I should get certified - Now that I can afford it, I think I'll put my neurons back to work on it! Thanks Juanfer for lighting that spark in my mind again!

I must say that earning the certificate has nothing to do with knowledge. Testking type of prep is the easiest and safest way to pass, but, once you have the title, you are suposed to perform at a level that certainly isn't at the reach of those that passed just with TestKing. So, IMHO, if you need the certification, go the Testking way. THEN, if you want/need to really know what you're doing, go to the library and/or get some experience. I think the training kit books are excellent. Codeproject is better. I've been into .Net development for over 6 years, and most of what I know I owe it to Codeproject. Finally, may I add that the best developers I've worked with have no M$ certification :P

Hi, I'm loading an XML file generated by SQL Server 2005 and trying to locate certain nodes: Dim d As New Xml.XmlDocument d.Load(path) If I use the following: Dim lst As Xml.XmlNodeList = d.SelectNodes("//COLUMN") then "lst" contains 0 nodes, If I use this one instead: Dim lst As Xml.XmlNodeList = d.GetElementsByTagName("COLUMN") then "lst" is correctly filled. Am I missing something important on XPath, XML...???? Or is it a VB.Net issue? I don't think it's a .Net problem, because that very same code works on other xml files (with different tags).

I strongly dislike the create-and-then-initialize usage; as a general rule, I always leave the object in a well-known usable state after a new, so I support the initialization-as-sinonym-for-creation point of view. Actually, when I have the authority to set coding standards in the team I require that one of the tests the class must pass be a call to each of it's methods right after object creation to verify there are no internal state management issues unsolved. If your object requires a multi step initialization, which means it's a state-based class, I write another class that handles the creation (and the rest of it's state management, for that matter) of the "complex" one, in a way that that the "main app" code doesn't have to know "everything about everything". Te complexity is hidden in the "creator". In pattern language, that's called inversion of control (IoC). That's what the Factory pattern's "Create" methods are used generally for, instead of the "a = New A" approach. It hides the complexities associated to object creation. When an object instance has not-so-trivial-to-manage dependencies (memory, device or whatever they are) call the specialist. That's where we could get talking about Dependency Injection, but that's another story. So, even if your dependencies are trivial, call the specialist. I still haven't found a situation where that approach hasn't fit for me, so I keep applying the rule. I think any help to isolate and hide complexity from code structure must be the first issue from a developer point of view -from an analyst's it is to perform whatever task it's supposed to!). Also, that "constructor" class is the perfect place to comment the whole tricky part of the initialization, actually it should be the only place where any comment on it should appear. Of course, all this is just my opinion, although I think it's an informed one :) "I disagree with your every single word, but I'll defend to death your right to say them." - Voltaire

I was once asked to block certain pages (read: porn) to all the users in a factory (1200+) because they were absorving a large amount of bandwidth, **except** for the 6 executives' computers. Those had full free access to anything. After performing the task, logs showed a decrease in 4% to the amount of hits to those pages. That is, those who where so worried that their employees lost time watching porn where the ones actually causing the trouble! No more comments :P

IMHO, wiring the whole model into the controler and then the controler into the view, is more like the Model-View-Presenter pattern; basically, what you're doing is proxying the model in order (usually) to change some attribute's representation to make it easier/simpler/more logical for the view to represent it. So the view and the controller are interdependent, and the controller depends on the model. the model is isolated, but the view and the controller aren't. In MVC, as I understand it, the controller is in charge of handling the state management issues attatched to the diferent environments, like web based apps and desktop apps, and maybe some particularities of the model, like the way it handles the view's requests: Event based vs. method based. Also, the controler should handle the type conversions in orther to pass parameters from the view into the model. In that case, the controller wires the events that trigger state change in the model, but the view directly pulls the attribute's values from the model. Anyway, I should say that I've been looking at those two patterns for a while, and still haven't made up my mind as to exactly what to call each one of the situations I described. Maybe you'll get more from Martin Fowler's article at http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaDev/uiArchs.html[^] than I did. If you ever manage to cleary state what is MVC and MVP, please make me know! i dissagree with your every single word, but I'll defend to death your right to say them. --Voltaire

I think MAL is most apropiate; it translates as "Evil","Wrong" or "Pain" in Spanish... :P