Bilal Haidar [MVP, MCT] Official Blog

I have passed this morning the Designing and Developing Web Applications by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework exam with a score of 950/1000. Having received my MCTS certification few months ago, I am now a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) in Web Development. I welcome any help needed by any of you who is willing to get the MCTS ...

I have successfully upgraded my website from CS 2.0 Beta 3 to CS 2.1 SP2. I had several problems at first, but thanks to Webhost4life.com support and Rick Reszler I was able to upgrade the site. Thanks again Rick and special thanks to Rob Howard with his instance reply and help!! Regards

For the second consecutive day, Lebanon, my beloved country, is under the Israeli bombing and attack!!!   Civilians are being killed more than 50 up till now, most of our main roads and bridges have been destroyed. This morning I woke up on the sounds of the bombs hitting our airport in Beirut, since I do live beside the ...

   Microsoft released a new utility to password-protect your folder. This is the description from the Microsoft site: Microsoft Private Folder 1.0 is a useful tool for you to protect your private data when your friends, colleagues, kids or other people share your PC or account. With this tool, you will get one password ...

I read a nice article this morning, wanted to share with you, it is an old and every day article I guess. The article is titled: Parameter passing in C#. It explains in details the different parameter types we have in C#. So I will be just summarizing the ideas mentioned there! In .NET we have mainly two types: reference types and value types. ...

I have been in Athens-Greece for around 2 days in a business trip for  my company CCC. Things are going fine here, enjoying the beautiful Greece!!! I will be soon back in Beirut!! Regards

I wanted to share with you those awesome pictures from my country, Lebanon. Hope you will enjoy them! I invite you all to spend some time here in Lebanon and visit most of its lovely sites we have here!! Enjoy:                               ...

I had been always wondering how can I add the Server Objects & Events dropdownlist to my projects that I work on. I was browsing on the ASP.NET forums and found out this thread: http://forums.asp.net/thread/1276007.aspx In that thread, an ASP.NET team member says: ''the Server Objects & Events dropdown in the .aspx editor only applies ...

I have delivered tonight a new session out of the Community Night Sessions at the Microsoft Office - Beirut Central District, that are helped by the LebDev.NET user group and sponsorship of Microsoft. The session was about Localization in ASP.NET 2.0, you can download both the powerpoint and the code by visiting the LebDev user group website: ...

I would like to wish all the world's Christians, and mainly our brothers and sisters, the Lebanese Christians, having their Easter this week, a Happy Easter, with the hope and wish of having more peace and wealth all over our beloved country Lebanon.   Thank you.

I have always misunderstood the difference between NULL and DBNULL until recently while I was working on ASP.NET web application, and was talking to a Webservice and I found an exception coming from one of the web methods inside the Webservice which is using the SqlCommand.ExecuteScalar() method. What happens when the ExecuteScalar() method is ...

Hello: You might be asking where I have been all this time. Well, I have been away a bit from posting, first for getting some sickness which I am over it by now and second, I was working on a community website for Microsoft in the area of Middle East. The website is www.devconnect.net, it is a Microsoft Development Community site. I invite you ...

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all the Lebanese and especially our Marronite brothers in Lebanon and in the whole world a happy fasting. May fasting be in all aspects in life, not only in food, but fasting from verything evil and bad. Best Regards,  

Great new for developers: MSDN magazine is now available for download as a .CHM file. Visit the MSDN Magazine Area and check all the downloads. Hope that helps, Regards

I have just finished upgrading my website to CS 2.0 Beta 3. I have also played around a bit with CS files and created a Custom Link, to show how easy it is to work with a CS website. Although it is not yet a CMS, however, it could be used now for a community site very easily, specially that adding new links and sections is not a tough thing ...

Hello: I came across http://www.Squeet.com, which is a nice online utility to subscribe to blogs online. The nice thing about that tool, is that, all the new posts added by bloggers that you have subscribed to, will be sent to your inbox. Also, I have been using the JetBrains Omea Rss Reader, I just exported my feeds, and imported them to Squeet ...

Hi: I would like to welcome you all to  my official blog, which is now hosted on my own hosting account. I installed the CommunityServer 1.1 locally, then uploaded the files and the database to my hosting account at WebHost4Life.com. I used the FoggyValley theme for  my Blog, which can be downloaded from here. I also used the Single ...

I spent the whole day working on my dream. It is taking lots of time, but at least, there is something making me happy these days !! Keep an eye here!! Regards

Here I am announcing the start of the Lebanese and Personal Dream. Keep an eye on this Blog, to know more about the Dream.   Regards

My colleague Dave Wanta published his new informative website about System.Net.Mail, the new namspace for email-related issues in ASP.NET 2.0 check at: http://www.systemnetmail.com/ Regards