What are the .NET Framework and Visual Basic .NET features that every VB developer should know?  I suggest the following as a starting list (in no particular order):

1. Object-oriented features:  classes, objects, constructors, inheritance, interfaces, polymorphism, methods, overloading
2. Shared (static) Classes and Methods
3. Converting data types and casting objects
4. Manipulating strings and using StringBuilder
5. Basic File I/O (open, read, write)
6. ADO.NET:  DataSet, *DataAdapter, *Command, and *DataReader classes
7. Basic XML processing (opening a file/stream and finding an element)
8. Exception handling / Try-Catch blocks
9. Difference between late binding and early binding (and the existence of Option Strict On)
10. Assemblies, referencing DLLs, and importing namespaces
11. Basic collections (lists, dictionaries, arrays)
12. Security fundamentals (CAS, authentication vs. authorization, validating input)
13. Basics of threading
14. Basics of garbage collection
15. Spitting out data and getting data back (varies with type of application of course)

Comment away!  Please don't just say C# (or Ruby)...  I'm not looking for yet another VB vs. C# debate.

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Last month I was looking for a tool to automatically announce posts on www.ardentdev.com and www.2signals.com at my weblogs.asp.net blog.  After a modest amount of searching I gave up on finding a tool that did exactly what I wanted.  Tonight I just threw together something simple.  It uses the .Text Simple Blog Service and the RSS.NET Class Library (with a few minor tweaks).  I point the tool at an RSS feed and select the posts I want to announce.  There is a little preview of the announcement HTML and an easy-to-acquire Announce button.  It's pretty simple at this point (a mere 80 lines of VB code including whitespace).

I'll gladly share the code if anyone cares.

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JavaScript is one of those technologies that you can use for years knowing only very little about it.  Do you know what the following <script> block will do?  Post your guess as a comment before you test it out!

<script>

(function()
{
  function A() { document.write(A) }

  A();
})()

</script>

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A regular "feature" we will have here at the Ardent Dev Blog is a series of "Tool I Love / Tool I Hate" posts (kind of like the "What's On Your Hard Drive" column in Queue magazine).  A new addition to my tool set is the Venkam JavaScript Debugger for Mozilla.  The latest version as of this post was 0.9.85, which would not install for FireFox 1.5.  The XPI (add-on package) was hard-coded to a max version of 1.1.  Fortunately add-on packages for Mozilla are just Zip files that you can extract and hack pretty easily.  Here is how I got Venkman to install with FireFox 1.5:

1. Downlowd Venkman 0.9.85.
2. Change file extension to .zip and unzip.
3. Open install.rdf with your favourite text editor.
4. Find <em:maxVersion>1.1</em:maxVersion> and change the maxVersion to 1.5 (or any arbitrary number higher than 1.5 - it might or might not work on future releases of FireFox).
5. Save your changes and close your text editor.
6. Rezip the files and change the file extension from .zip to .xpi.
7. Open the new XPI file in FireFox (using File | Open File menu or just drag-and-drop).

If you are a brave and trusting sort of individual, you can just download my modified XPI here: Modified venkman-0.9.85.xpi (209.03 KB).

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Welcome to The Ardent Dev Blog (http://www.ardentdev.com/blog).  I (Derek) am very lucky to be able to work with a top-notch group of development / IT professionals here at Ardent.  I figure it is time to share them a little bit with the rest of the world.  From this blog you will hear about the tools and technologies we work with (.NET, C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, NUnit, NAnt, etc.), our thoughts on software development process / methodology, and perhaps a little about what it is like to work for a small software company.

This blog will be a collective effort but will respect individual voices.  Every item will include the name of the author who posted it.  I hope you enjoy that format!

A unique feature of this blog is our Ask The Experts page.  Send in your technical questions and quandaries.  We will do our best to answer your question and post our response to this blog!

If you need more than just a single question answered via a blog, check out our mentoring, training, and consulting services including .NET Experts On Tap.

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