There's an old joke about a math professor who, after filling three blackboards with completely unintelligible equations, announces to his class, "Proving all these equations will be left as a student excercise."

You might feel that way after reading and trying to repeat the instructions on page 377, Set company name and version information. The problem with following step-by-step instructions is that if any step is missed or misinterpreted, you can find yourself completely confused.

In my "Beyond the Book" segment for the first chapter of the book (click here to read it again), I mentioned that, "If you browse through the .NET files in Notepad, you get a feeling for what kind of information is actually in them and this gives you a better overall understanding of how .NET works." The chapter on deployment is a good example.

There's a good example of this problem in the book starting on page 377!

Steps 1 and 2 on page 377 and 378 are very similar and both start with ...

1 - Select the Lucky deployment project in Solution Explorer.

So far, so good.

Then, Step 2 asks you to "Open the Properties window, and ..." By this time, you're probably up to speed and you smoothly right click the project in Solution Explorer and select Properties just like you have done for Forms, Components and so forth. But the resulting dialog window doesn't have the Author, Manufacturer, or other fields the rest of the instructions are about. So, you might decide to select the Project menu and select Properties from that. Nope. Same dialog. In fact, this is the more specific instruction for Step 2 on page 378, so at least that works!

The problem is that there are both Properties and Properties Pages for Projects ... and they're not the same thing at all. (Properties Pages, the unfamiliar choice you have been seeing, is not available for Forms, Components, and other things that we have seen so far. But it is what you are shown for Projects.

Unless you remember to click F4 or select the View menu - which clearly shows you the choices.