Visual Studio vs mIRC

I’m doing some ASP.NET development in Visual Studio 2005 at the moment, and I’ve spent the last half hour beating my head against the wall because of an obscure error message: ASP.NET Development Server failed to start listening on port 1651. Error message: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted. …

Windows Vista: first impressions

Two weeks ago I went off to a Microsoft event in Reading: “Ready for a New Day: Microsoft’s Launch of Exchange, Office and Vista”. That was quite interesting, and I came away thinking that there are enough useful features to justify an upgrade. They gave me a freebie copy of Windows Vista and Office 2007 …

Upgrading to Visual Studio 2005

Today I got my copy of Visual Studio 2005 through the post, so I’ve been having a play with that, by upgrading some of my VB.NET 2003 projects. Unfortunately, I got a rather confusing error message from them, and I couldn’t find much info on the web, so I’m documenting it here for other people’s …

Event Viewer problems

I’m currently spending an exciting Friday night in the office. Specifically, I’ve been fixing a Windows 2000 PC that’s been running extremely slowly for the past few days. I’ve got that problem solved now (I’m just sticking around to do general maintenance on it), and I thought it was worth documenting here, in case anyone …

70-165: Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 Programming

Introduction I recently decided to become a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), starting with the VB 5 exam. I passed it with a score of 898/1000, which I’m pleased about. I can tell you what I did to prepare for this exam, although I can’t guarantee that the same thing will work for you. I should …