Last week, after a year and a half of almost constant Call of Duty and Halo gameplay, my Xbox 360 finally bit the dust. For a few weeks leading up to the 3 RRoD incident, when I would go to start a new Call of Duty: World at War Nazi Zombies match, it would freeze up and the screen would turn into a checkerboard. It took only about 4-5 matches of checkers before it had enough.

Luckily I was fooled into getting the Best Buy 2-year Product Replacement Plan (PRP) when I purchased the unit. This entitled me to an immediate full refund of the purchase price in the event of a failure rather than sending it off to Microsoft for a month.

Over 30 minutes after walking through my local Best Buy’s doors I had received my $350 refund and used it purchase a new Xbox 360 Pro at $250. I received the remaining $100 on a gift card.

The only issue was that I did not want to loose all of my data from my old Xbox so I hired the Geek Squad to work their Xbox 360 Data Transfer magic. (5 minutes of work for 1/2 hour in Geek Squad bucks, which equates to $29.99)

Today I am home playing my new Xbox 360 with all of the saved games and downloaded content (maps) in tact.

Calling the GetResponse() method on the HttpWebRequest class yields some interesting results. It determines that a status code of anything else but 200 (OK) is an exceptional case and throws a WebException exception.

The following code demonstrates how to return the status code even if the URL in the request is not OK.

HttpStatusCode httpStatusCode;
HttpWebRequest httpWebRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://invalidsitename.net/");
try
{
    using (HttpWebResponse httpWebResponse = (HttpWebResponse)httpWebRequest.GetResponse())
    {
        httpStatusCode = httpWebResponse.StatusCode; //OK
    }
}
catch (WebException webException)
{
    if (webException.Response != null)
    {
        HttpWebResponse httpWebExceptionResponse = (HttpWebResponse)webException.Response;
        httpStatusCode = httpWebExceptionResponse.StatusCode; //Something other than OK
    }
    else
    {
        throw webException; //Invalid host name
    }
}
return httpStatusCode;

Last month I completed the final exam in the .NET Framework 2.0 Web Developer series to achieve the MCPD. Check my About page to see a list of my current certifications.

This week I completed the second of two exams to achieve the MCTS: .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications certification. This is just one step toward the MCPD: EA certification. Check my About page to see a list of my current certifications.

Microsoft patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance has been released to MSDN!

http://www.microsoft.com/spg

Updated: SharePoint Guidance 1.0 – Nov 2008

Here are a few of the topics you will find inside:

Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging

Design tradeoffs for decisions many developers encounter, such as whether to use SharePoint lists or a database to store information

Implementation examples that are demonstrated in the Training Management application and in the QuickStarts

How to design a SharePoint application for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration

How to set up different environments including the development, build, test, staging, and production environments

How to manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading

Team-based intranet application development

You might also see my name, along with the names of a couple of others from Avanade, in the Authors and Contributors section. (Updated to refer to SharePoint Guidance 1.0 – Nov 2008)

Earlier this year I worked on a project with the Microsoft Solution Accelerator Team to develop what was released as the Service Level Dashboard for System Center Operations Manager 2007.

The dashboard is a report that is installed into Operations Manager 2007 and is used to display availability and performance metrics related to SLA thresholds set by the administrator.

Service Level Dashboard for System Center Operations Manager 2007

Download

I also recently noticed my name, along with the names of many others from Avanade, on the Acknowledgements page.

Last Saturday I was able to pass the 70-541 exam to earn the MCTS: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Application Development certification. Not only will I be working on my MCPD certification this year, but also the WSS/MOSS certifications. Check my About page to see a list of my current certifications.

I updated my Xbox Live gamertag tonight from “alex00110101″ to “NewGuid”, something a little more… globally… unique…

Appending binary to my name didn’t really gel with all of those non-technical folks out there. Hmmm… I guess they won’t be very familiar with the whole Guid concept either… oh well… at least it’s easier to tell people.

Recently, I have been doing a lot of ASP.NET development inside of SharePoint. Once area that I have found to be quite tricky, although not SharePoint-specific, is dynamic ASP.NET controls. In particular, managing postbacks when you have dynamic ASP.NET controls.

Here is a link to the source code for a Visual Studio 2008 solution, which demonstrates the use of dynamic cascading ASP.NET drop down lists that happen to query SharePoint.

Nichols.DynCascadingControls.SharePoint.zip

If you are not developing on a SharePoint box you can simply replace the SharePoint queries with some other data source such as a generic list.

Please provide comments if you have any feedback.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.