January 11th, 2010
I’m currently studying for the Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0—Application Development Foundation (70-536) exam, using the Microsoft Press Training Kit and I am appalled at the number of errors, both editorial and technical, in this book. There are whole paragraphs that have been taken out of one chapter and used as a place holder in another chapter then never changed, at one stage I was very confused when the book was talking about two different classes that seemed to do the same thing, only to find that they were the same class, it’s name had just be written wrong in places, arrggg.
The problem I find is when I’m not sure about something in the book, I don’t know whether my understanding is wrong or the book is wrong, so I went hunting for a list of known errors and sure enough, Microsoft already know about them, in fact there are so many they created 4 knowledge base pages for them! When combining these in a Word document it ended up being 90+ pages, that’s really bad.
If you have this book or think about getting it, here are the official list of updates from Microsoft:
MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0—Application Development Foundation comments and corrections Part 1
MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0—Application Development Foundation Comments and Corrections Part 2
MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0—Application Development Foundation Comments and Corrections Part 3
MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0—Application Development Foundation Comments and Corrections Part 4
Perhaps it’s time to reprint the book?
December 19th, 2009
I’ve made a couple of updates to phreplace and created a new version 2.0.24 which is available here. The changes include:
- Handling an exception that occurs in the vbscript Regex object when using a badly formed regular expression (e.g. reader.(\w)+\(reader.GetOrdinal\(”(\w)+”)); – note I forgot to escape the last parenthesis).
- Added Write to Log option (which defaults to off) to write some debugging log events to a ‘phreplace.log’ file in the same folder as the ‘phreplace.dll’ library. This should help identify the issue for a user where the latest version of phreplace just doesn’t open (no error – no nothing).
- Not a change but rather a note: Tried to understand the vbscript Regex object’s handling of ‘.’. Apparently it matches a new line (\n) but not a carriage return (\r) which is why doing a replace all with ^(.+)$ was acting strange, try this instead ^([^\r\n]+)$.
December 13th, 2009
Finally the new version of phdesign.com.au is live. Based on wordpress this site will hopefully be more active than it has been in the past. There are still areas to complete such as the portfolio section, but that shouldn’t be too far away. Now that I won’t be spending as much time on this site’s development perhaps I can focus more on phreplace, although I should spend some more time studying for my MCPD exams.
