Being a father and a chance to update the plan once again

My wife is pregnant and I expect to become a father this September. So it's a great chance to update the plan for 2010 once again.

Seems I had a long list for the tools/frameworks I want to be proficient in last time, but becoming a father (and a good father) is a more important thing. So sorry, some of you can wait for next year.

Here is the updated list of tools/frameworks I want to be proficient in this year:

• TeamCity
• ASP.NET MVC
• ExtJS
• MSBuild
• NHibernate
• Castle ActiveRecord
• Castle Windsor

Plan for 2010 (updated)

The plan I made here seems not clear, so after a few days, I decided to update the plan for 2010. And here is my plan for 2010:

Be proficient in these tools/frameworks

• TeamCity
• WPF
• Silverlight
• ASP.NET MVC
• ExtJS
• MSBuild
• NHibernate
• Castle stack (ActiveRecord, MonoRails, Windsor)

Read these books

• ExtJS in Action (Manning)
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests (Addison Wesley)
• Inside the Microsoft Visual Studio Build Engine (Microsoft Press)
• Illustrated WPF (Apress)
• Pro Silverlight 3 in C# (Apress)
• Continuous Integration in .NET (Manning)

Sleep and when you wake up, your sound will back

Seems it's strange but it's the solution I tried and it worked when my PC (with Windows 7 Ultimate x64) cannot play any sounds. Of course I tested my speakers, my headphone, re-plugged speakers and headphone, reinstalled sound card driver, but all of them didn't help.

But it doesn't mean you need to go to sleep, then wake up. It means you need to put your PC into Sleep mode then when you wake it up, the sound will back.

HTH if you have same problem.

renderTo vs. applyTo

When I started to use ExtJS, I was confused what is different between Ext.Component's 'renderTo' and 'applyTo' configuration option. And I think it's the same problem with other developers who have just started to work with ExtJS. Here is my understanding about 'renderTo' and 'applyTo':

• renderTo: The place where the component will be rendered (it's usually a DIV)
• applyTo: It's usually a DIV also. But more than that, it defines the UI structure of the component (example: header, body,... of the Window)

Hope that help for new guys have just started with ExtJS :-)