The Length of a Number stored as String in Excel

It's always LEN(X)-1, where X is the cell reference. We need to subtract 1 for the preceding apostrophe!

The Annoying Numbers Stored As Text Error in Excel

Typically in Excel, if we design a worksheet with a number stored as text, then we have made a conscious decision to do so. Consequently it is very annoying to see this error every time we see a number stored as text.

A valid use case would be a product or part number, which may be preceded by zeros, or a telephone number with the same convention. Alternatively we may be considering permutations of ones and zeros in which case preceding zeros are valid informational content.

To get rid of these errors:

File
Options
Formulas
Error Checking Rules - Deselect "Numbers formatted as text or preceded by apostrophe"

Job done.

General Knowledge on Networking

Any Windows programming bod should have an up to date, working knowledge of common networking commands.  Here are a few of the basic ones.

nslookup - queries the Domain Name System for domain name and IP address mapping for a DNS record

whois - protocol to get ownership information for a given domain. Communication is done using TCP and whois servers listen on TCP port 43. The protocol is all in ASCII.

Visual Studio Community 2015

Visual Studio Community 2015 comes with a host of interesting feature including lots of third-party tools. These include:

1. PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio
2. Android SDK
3. Joyent Node.js
4. Python tools for Visual Studio (November 2015, PTVS)
5. CLang with Microsoft Codegen (to make it easier to develop cross platform code that works on Windows and other OSs)
6. C#/.NET (Xamarin)

Note: it also comes with a Windows 10 SDK.