Mitch Wheat - Treat the cause, not the symptoms!

This event is happening tomorrow:

In this session, Greg will describe the improvements to reporting services coming in the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008 R2. Greg will explore general reporting enhancements, changes to report viewer, report builder and report manager, the introduction of map data, shared components and shared data sources.

• Venue: Level 15, 191 St Georges Terrace (Parmelia House, Fujitsu Office)
• Time:   5:30pm - 7:00pm
• Date:   Thurs, 22nd April 2010

To register for the session: http://www.sqlserver.org.au/Events/RegisterMeeting.aspx?EventId=463

ReSharper 5.0 is available for download as Release Candidate, with a release date in the near future.

What's New in ReSharper 5.0

1. Web Development. Extended toolset available to ASP.NET developers when working with markup files and web site infrastructure.
2. Project and Team. View, change and maintain project structure.
3. Support for Visual Studio 2010. Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 are also supported.
4. Code Analysis. This area incorporates several improvements, from "plainly" implementing a substantial pack of new code inspections to upgrading foreach and for loops to LINQ queries and letting you track how data values and method calls are passed through your code.
5. Performance optimizations in many areas, especially search for usages, navigation, and refactorings.
6. Improvements in localization, C# 4, VB 10, XAML, and ASP.NET support.
7. Fixes and improvements in VS2010 integration.

Other enhancements include extended IntelliSense, bookmarking, and native NUnit support.

Note: All ReSharper 4.5 new or upgrade purchases made since October 15, 2009 qualify for a free upgrade to ReSharper 5.0V

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group Thurs, April 8th where Jake Ginnivan will build an application from the ground up using VSTO. Microsoft Office offers a platform that provides many possibilities for application development using managed code. In this talk Jake will describe what VSTO is, why to choose it as a platform and how you can build a successful application from the ground up. In addition, he will cover the pitfalls of COM Interop, ways to avoid performance and memory issues, structuring your solution to enable it to be fully unit testable, the common extensibility areas of outlook, using WPF as your presentation platform within Outlook, deployment using ClickOnce, dealing with ClickOnce update issues and the patterns you can use to make it all fit together. To demonstrate these techniques, Jake has built an Outlook add-in using Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, which synchronises his Facebook events list into Outlook.

• TOPIC:  Developing Office Add-Ins with VSTO in Visual Studio 2010
• DATE:   Thursday, April 8th, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
• VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
• COST:   Free. All welcome

If you have a game from Bioware or EA (Such as Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age) and you are having trouble accessing the in-game downloadable content (you get the unhelpful message "you are not connected to the internet"), the tech support help is a bit hit and miss! Somehow, the manual is missing magic port numbers and tech support don’t tell you about it.

You must unblock ports 80 (TCP/UDP), 8000 (TCP), 8001 (UDP), 443 (TCP), and 18081 (TCP) to access the downloadable content.
[18081 isn't listed in the manual or on the website, but the game tries to contact an EA server on that port. 443 isn't listed either, but that's a regular https port and is most likely unblocked on most systems.]

If that doesn’t work for you, download and install WireShark, fire up the game and see what port accesses are being attempted.