*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

One of the biggest challenges I see team members at work struggling with when trying to learn .Net is “how to get started”.  If you are a developer with lots of experience, coming into VS and .Net things are very different let’s face it.  For example, what’s the right way to setup a project?  What’s the difference between a solution and project?  Everyone knows about n-tiered architecture, but how do you pull it off in Visual Studio?  If you are using TFS how do you setup projects so they can be easily versioned?  How do you organize the name spaces of projects?

I put together this video cast which is about 30 minutes long which I hope addresses some of these questions.  It should serve as a good starting point as how to setup a project when starting out, things to think about like namespaces and how to name your projects.  I’ve built a lot of production apps over my time and what is in the video is all based on experience so if you know of an “easier / better” way please drop me a line.  In the future things like GAT (guidance automation toolkit) will provide an easier way to accomplish what I’ve outlined in the video.  If you haven’t looked at GAT, you should definitely do so. 

Watch The Video Cast

(this is a repost of a post that was lost due to data loss)

Last week was Tech Ed week.  Sorry I didn’t blog any entries on it.  I was still recovering from my web host loosing 2 months of my data.  It is hard to recover from a loss like that.  Not to mention  I spent ALL of my energy walking 11 miles a day riding the bus back and forth from the conference.  Everything you’ve read about the bus and traffic situation in regards to this year’s Tech Ed is absolutely true.  Enough of that though, let’s talk about the goods!

Now that Tech Ed is over, the raffles and drawings are being done by the vendors.  Everyone that went to Tech Ed and registered at every single vendor’s booth like I did should be checking their spam filters daily during this time just in case something gets caught.  That would be terrible to actually win and not know about it.  

Last night I learned that I was the Tuesday winner of the “Cingular Mobility Pack”.  This is a GREAT win because it includes all of the following hotness:

1. Cingular 8125 Pocket PC Phone (HTC Wizard, I-Mate K-Jam, etc) ($499.00)
2. Cingular 2125 Mobile 5 Smartphone  ($299)
3. Sierra Wirelss Aircard 860 PC Modem ($199)

Is this complete hotness or what!!!!!? Depending on how you rate the price of the 8125 phone, this is a $1000 or $1200 retail value.   For those “not in the know” let me explain the 8125 phone real quick.  First and foremost it is a Pocket PC with a sliding keyboard.  Allthough it is branded as the 8125 from Cingular it is in fact known as the HTC Wizard since HTC is the manufacturer.  It is also known as the I-Mate K-Jam, the QTec 9100 and so on.   The phone has WIFI, Bluetooth, full keyboard etc.  It is a beast of a phone and a great form factor.

The same phone in an I-Mate K-Jam unlocked version was being sold at a discounted price at Tech Ed for $630 so it isn’t a cheap device by any strech of the imagination.  When I went to the Cingular web site to grab the links I noticed they are running a special on the 8125 phone right now for $189.99.  But that is one of those sign up new plan deals, not if you just walk in and buy it.

The funny thing is I picked up an 8125 while at Tech Ed and as of Monday I’ve been enjoying Direct Push email on it after applying the new update.  I’ll be doing a post about the phone later to give you some more insight.

Quick FYI:  For my personal taste I liked the K-Jam phone better because of the keyboard.  But $630.. are you kidding me?  I was talking to Steve Riley about his K-Jam phone and his take on it was to get the QTec version of the “HTC Wizard” phone because the K-Jam comes with software that slows it down.  Anyway, now I have 2 8125’s and a 2125.  I’ll probably give the 2125 to my wife if she wants it.  Of course, one of the 8125’s is going on Ebay. 

Josh Holmes won an I-Mate K-Jam at one of the parties on Tuesday night and he proudly rubbed it in our face all week. So for Josh, back at you now buddy!!!!!!!!!!

Update 6/24/2006 8:56 AM
It turns out the wife doesn’t want the 2125 phone.  She wants to keep her Motorola phone that she has been using for almost 2 years now. Her unwillingness to change is my personal gain! So as it stands I think what I’m going to do is keep both the 8125 and the 2125 and simply swap them out when I need to.  For example if I go mountain biking, fishing, running, saving the whales, solving world peace and hunger or whatever I’ll just take the sim card out (another reason to have a GSM phone thank you very much Verizon) and put it into the smaller 2125. 

My OEM 2GB MiniSD with SD Converter came in that I picked up from Digital Media off of Amazon for the low price of $40.  Not only is the price outsanding, but having the ability to convert the mini to a standard SD card is awesome. 

Last week I was in Boston, MA for Tech Ed. Roughly 10,000 – 15,000 IT professionals decended upon Boston to add to the already horrible traffic situation. It was my first time in Boston and I had a blast. I went to Cheers twice, Jullians, Avalon, Fenway Park and of course the Convention Center where I walked about 10 miles a day (no joke). Before I left for Boston I was trying to get an order re-filled for my contacts. My eyes are extremely sensitive to light and this is why I typically have a pair of sun shades on my head even in the heart of winter. I have been using 1-800-Contacts for several years now to get my contacts. The only *catch* using them is you have to have a valid prescription. Right before leaving for Tech Ed mine ran out. So I got an appointment, got a new prescription, called 1-800-Contacts and placed my order on a Wedensday before leaving on Sunday. Since I had already placed an order before they told me I would get priority shipping and my shipping costs would be waived. Great. It turns out USPS doesn’t give a damn about its 1-2 day express shipping. To them it means, 1-4 days. They just don’t care, litterally. Fed-ex will drive through swamps and face a huricance head on to get your package delivered in 1-2 days. To make a long story short I had to leave for Boston without contacts. I called 1-800 and they were going to ship me another order to Boston and I was to instruct my wife to refuse the package when it arrived to the house from our lazy friends at the postal service. Turns out there were problems with the shipping address. For some reason a major carrier has trouble finding a 25 story &#*#$^^*#$ing hotel! By this time it was middle of the week and I just said screw it, I’ll deal with it when I get back home. This morning I called into 1-800-Contacts. Side note here. Usually when you call a place like this you expect to be on hold. 9 times out of 10 when I call the phone rings and I get a rep immediately. No pressing this number for this, or dial this extension for that, just straight through to a sales rep. I sure wish the rest of the world would pay attention to this. Put your freaking sales people as the first line of defense! We have the same philosophy where I work, get a human on the phone with a client as soon as possible. Moving on. I knew I was going to have to explain this long story to the sales rep so being a great southern story teller with years of experience I began painting a verbal picture filled with southernisms. The gentleman on the other end said, “Mr. Elder I really appreciate you explaining that. It sounds like you’ve been through a lot with this. The first thing I am going to do is put a $10 credit on your account. You’ve been so patient, most people would be yelling and cursing at this point at me.” I then said, well, it isn’t your fault so what’s the point. The gentleman on the phone then created a new order and as shipping the contacts business overnight. So this little order has cost them 2 expedited shipping fees and $10.00. Now of course they aren’t making any money on this order, but it doesn’t matter, I’m a happy customer because the sales rep showed compassion and my problem was fixed in the most expedited manner it could have been. The $10 credit is just a bonus to this whole mix-up. The moral of the story is, it doesn’t matter if the business screws up. The real true test of a company is how they “fix” or “handle” the problem after something does get messed up.

For those that were following this blog you may have noticed something as of recent.  Primarily, where did all of the blog entries for this site go?  Well, let’s just say the web hosting company I am using is a complete IDIOT!  If you’ve been paying attention to this blog you would have noticed the last entry on this blog was in the middle of March.  In March, I had to swap database servers.  Not that I got an email or anything from these assholes telling me I needed to do so, my web site just stopped working one day.  It seems I am suppose to have the intuition to log into my control panel once a day to read what is going on.  Anyway, after making the necassary changes, I was back up and running.  I was running flawlessly for about 2 months.  Then one day, my web site went down again.  I contacted support and when it returned (not in timely fashion I might add), my data was gone!  I had lost months of entries, good ones too. 

After fighting with WebHost4Life for about a week, they finally admitted they screwed up and lost my data.  As a grand prize I get 3 years of free hosting with a company who lost months of my data.  Yeah…….

Why didn’t I blog earlier about this tragedy?  I couldn’t, I was too pissed and would have filled this entry with random bits of rage, four letter verbiage and comments about how the little guy gets screwed by the big guy.  I would have also commented on how companies don’t really care about their customers once they have your money. 

Over the next several weeks I’ll work on getting the older articles back onto the site.  The hard part isn’t re-writing them, but remembering what the hell I posted.