MCTS .NET 2.0 Web-based Client Development – 70-528 – Objectives List Part 4

This is the fourth post (first, second, third) in another collection of posts that have links to the different objectives covered in the 70-528 exam. There is also a series on ASP.NET 3.5 exam 70-562 (here)

Tracing, configuring, and deploying applications

• Use a Web setup project to deploy a Web application to a target server.
  • Create a Web setup project.
  • Web Pages and Projects
  • What's New in Web Projects
  • Configure deployment properties for a Web setup project.
  • Build, Configuration Properties, Deployment Project Properties Dialog Box 
  • Install a Web application on a target server.
• Copy a Web application to a target server by using the Copy Web tool.
• Precompile a Web application by using the Publish Web utility.
• Optimize and troubleshoot a Web application.
• Customize event-level analysis by using the ASP.NET health-monitoring API.
• ASP.NET Health Monitoring Overview
• Configuring ASP.NET Health Monitoring
• Buffering ASP.NET Health Monitoring Events
• Using WMI to Deliver ASP.NET Health Monitoring Events
• Walkthrough: Listening for WMI Events in ASP.NET Health Monitoring
• Extending ASP.NET Health Monitoring
• Implementing Custom ASP.NET Health Monitoring Events and Providers
• Securing ASP.NET Health Monitoring
• System.Web.Management
• System.Management
• System.Management.Instrumentation
• HealthMonitoringSection
• healthMonitoring Element (ASP.NET Settings Schema)
• Use performance counters to track the execution of an application.
• How to: Create Performance Counter Categories, Category and Counter Management
• How to: Create Custom Performance Counters.
• How to: View the ASP.NET Performance Counters Available on Your Computer
• Developing High-Performance ASP.NET Applications
• Troubleshoot a Web application by using ASP.NET tracing.
• ASP.NET Tracing Overview
• Application-Level ASP.NET Tracing Overview
• How to: Enable Tracing for an ASP.NET Page
• How to: Enable Tracing for an ASP.NET Application
• Writing Custom ASP.NET Trace Messages
• How to: View ASP.NET Trace Information with the Trace Viewer
• Reading ASP.NET Trace Information
• Walkthrough: Integrating ASP.NET Tracing with System.Diagnostics Tracing
• System.Web.TraceContext 
• Optimize performance by using the ASP.NET Cache object.
• ASP.NET Caching Overview
• What's New in ASP.NET Caching
• Caching ASP.NET Pages
• Caching Application Data
• Caching Multiple Versions of a Page
• Caching Portions of an ASP.NET Page
• Dynamically Updating Portions of a Cached Page
• Caching in ASP.NET with the SqlCacheDependency Class
• Cache Configuration in ASP.NET
• System.Web.Caching
• HttpCachePolicy
• HttpCacheability
• @ OutputCache
• Caching Application Data
• How to: Add Items to the Cache.
• How to: Retrieve Values of Cached Items.
• CacheItemPriority 
• AggregateCacheDependency
• How to: Cache Page Output with File Dependencies

You can also find some information on preparing for your exams here and here, in the actual exam for 70-528. Also errata for the MS Press training kit

Upcoming talks

I will be doing a couple of talks in the upcoming months. I am scheduled to do 3 talks in Ireland in March and 1 talk in Scotland in May.

So in Ireland its the following.

When	Where	What
29-March-2010	Derry MTUG	Visual Studio 2010 Overview
30-March-2010	Dublin MTUG	Dynamic User controls, creating a data bound wizard with the AJAX control toolkit and data bound user controls
31-March-2010	Cork MTUG	Dynamic User controls, creating a data bound wizard with the AJAX control toolkit and data bound user controls

And in Scotland, I am talking at Developer Days 2010 which is on 08-May-2010 in Scotland. The difference here is that my talk was decided by a voting procedure to be included in the conference. This is a pretty cool model as it means that the attendees decide what they want to hear. So at that conference, I will be giving a talk on Defensive Programming 101.

You can register for Developer Days Scotland 2010 here and get the full agenda here.

Fixing Error MSB4019 when trying to load a dbproj

I recently re-installed my Visual Studio 2008 including Visual Studio Database Edition. I opened a project from TFS that included some database project (.dbproj) files. As the solution loaded I got some errors relating to the dbproj

The imported project "C:\Program Files(x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets " was not found. Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

The issue in this case was that the version of my Visual Studio Database Edition was not the same as the one that had created the database projects. The fix for this was to install the GDR 2 for Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition. Thankfully quite simple.

The SSD Experience

My new laptop arrived at work on Friday, a shiny new HP Elite Book 8530w. A nice new Centrino vPro and 4 gigs of RAM to play with. Its a quite capable machine for development.

So the stuff now is to get the machine upgraded to a better spec as I will be doing a lot of SharePoint 2010 development. So the RAM has been ordered and I ordered a new Intel X-25M SSD 160 gigabyte disk.

I installed the new drive and paved the machine with Windows 7 Enterprise x64. Once the machine had been setup it was time to get the installs of SQL Server and Visual Studio running. This is what usually takes all the time. The install time for Visual Studio 2008 service pack 1 can take 90 minutes.

 

I installed SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition x64 and it took about 10 minutes, the service pack install took another 5. I then copied the ISO file for Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition for Developers to the hard disk from our local NAS and mounted it and began the install. I choose the custom install and didn’t install Visual C++ or SQL Server Express edition but all the other tools were installed. It took a total of 4 minutes to install Visual Studio 2008. Four minutes!!! I was on twitter when I began the install and tweeted when it was finished. You can see from the timestamps how long there was between the tweets. Installing SP1 took 8 minutes in total.

The response time for the disk is very very quick. Opening VS2010 or VS2008 takes a couple of seconds from the initial click to being able to open a solution file. General build times are down. To quote my colleague Glenn Henriksen, everything just seems snappier.

Talk about an increased developer experience. When you do something and compile, build, there is so little lag that you can continue just where you left off. The performance boost is simply outstanding. Coding Horror has a nice blog post on it

Looking at the Windows Experience Index (WEI) scores for the new machine, I clocked a 5.9 with the slowest component, the memory dictating the score. The SSD scored a scary 7.8 and it definitely shows it.

If you want to see the biggest bang for your buck, upgrade you primary disk to SSD and you won’t know yourself afterwards. The only downside, is going back to anything else, you will be wondering why you are waiting!