khathu Ndouvhada

VS 2003 bug?

2008-05-14T20:34:30-05:00:00

I am currently building a reporting page for the finance department at work. I have been struggling with one of the web forms, I am able to make effective changes to the form from the Designer View , the Code View has been giving me strange vibes. When ever I edit the code, it looses its formating, the color coding vanishes. The only thing that stays the same are the comments.

My collegue thinks its a memory issue, I have never experienced such an issue before. I have restarted the IDE a couple of times, rebooted my machine to no avail.

Once the code loses its color scheme I have to revert the file via SVN to get it functional again. Strange stuff indeed!

The Iron fist

2008-05-14T20:22:53-05:00:00

In 2004 I discovered Visual Studio 2003 and the WebMatrix tool. Having avoided Classic ASP in the days of VB6, I could not wait to sink my fingers into the new tool. I found the IDE to be quite daunting at first but quickly brought myself to speed.

At about the same time, Photoshop also crashed landed into my newbie life. I found myself stuck between development and design. Eventually, I went for the whole deal, I wanted my apps to look slick and polished, so I hit the web and stuffed my 40Gig HD with tons of Photoshop tutorials.

The rest of the story is self explainatory, I got more paractice with graphics than code. When VS 2005 came out, I was quick to dump VS 2003 and MsAccess in favor of SQL express. I must admit, 2005 gave me more than I bargained for, I could do a lot with fewer lines of code! I was simply blown away!

With the numerous 2005 wizards, came lazyness. Yep, I became wizard centred and totally focused on VS controls whilst my code laid stale. This year, I made a decision to go back to the basics, write real code and create real apps. My decision has thrust me into the world of C#, SQL,Javascript, XML, XHTML and CSS.

With these tools at my finger tips, I am aiming for the wall. I am about to demolish the coder's block that been hanging around me for year. I am ready to code!!

Baby steps

2008-04-22T20:12:38-05:00:00

Hello World!

In 2000 I was a freshman at the most beautiful university campus in the world, UCT (The University of Cape Town). I was fresh out of school and extremely naive. Strange as it maybe, I had a crush on Hydraulics from a young age, this got me into all sorts of compromising situations.

When I got to varsity, IT was all over. The South African bubble was at its peak. Everybody wanted to be a programmer, and they were enrolling in droves. New institutions sprung up over night and most disappeared just as they had appeared.

The Transition

Towards the end of September, my class was introduced to the world of code and coders. It was a simple QBasic program that sounded like a police siren. That was the last coding class that I ever attended, over the next coming months and years, I got hooked to the PC. I found it fascinating, we started building web pages at Geocities, Brinkster, Angelfire and it felt good. We had not idea how the web worked, what drove it or where it was headed.

The turning point was almost a fluke; a friend accidentally clicked the "view source" IE menu and out came the little green men. Eureka! We had struck gold. It was big, we were excited about stuff.

This discovery has played a big role; I am where I am because of that defining moment. The people I know now, the fights I have had and the brain cells I have slaughter all stem from that moment.

Beep!