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April 2006 Entries

Big hits with Web Services? What's your take?


Alright - so here is an easy question for today...What web services does everyone find useful and logical in a corporate environment?

Por ejemplo, I developed a simple ADSI Web Service for my team a few back and my superior seemed to at least think it was a good concept. I'm sure a lot of this is industry specific, but this service allowed all applications on our team to have a single point of failure for our ADSI logic. (I should mention many of our apps use AD for auth against local tables, or grab other OU type information) This occurred shortly after they migrated directory services from 2k to 2k3, and exchange (at least by default) didn't provide directory services any longer. This way, if a change like occurs we can make the change in one spot and wallah (or maybe not at all, per serverless bind)So what have been the big web service hits in your organization? I'd love to hear some!

posted @ Wednesday, April 26, 2006 5:25 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Web Services ]


“We are not physical beings who may have a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.”


This is one of the great quotes from the Marc Allen Interview conducted by Steve Pavlina. Marc Allen is the self dubbed "lazy millionare" He has a few books out, and is the president & co-founder of a successful publishing company. Here is what got my attention, he takes every Monday off, and usually arrives in the office at 1 PM

I highly suggest you take 5 min out of your day to read this if only for the excellent quotes.

posted @ Tuesday, April 25, 2006 12:10 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Misc ]


Sorry MPAA!


"As a result, Euclid Discoveries says a full-length movie that requires 700 megabytes of storage when compressed using MPEG-4 would use just 50 megabytes when compressed with EuclidVision"

Thanks EE newsletter

posted @ Tuesday, April 18, 2006 12:31 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Misc ]


Where did Designer.CS go?


Alright so…on my latest project I decided to use .NET 2.0. Things were going great, until I ran into the following scenario (if you googled to here, skip my rant and just go to the solution…it’s down there somewhere)

…I had a user created control. This control consisted of 4 dependant drop down lists and a submit button, all of which are AJAX based utilizing Jason Diamond’s library generating of a DB2 backend. Neat-0. I wanted to trigger an event on my main page (default.aspx) when the submit button was clicked on my user-created control (AjaxDropDownMenu.ascx) Here is where the .Net 2.0 challenges began. First off, if I added the following to my user control code…

//code

Protected System.Web.Ui.WebControls.Button = new System.Web.Ui.WebControls.Button();

(Actually, since this was an anthem button that isn’t correct, but for the purposes of this post we’ll leave it be…)

//end code

Alright – so that error made sense….uhmm…mostly. VS.NET 2k5 uses partial classes. So an error (forgive me, I don't have the exact error I'm not on my coding machine...) stating that this declaration makes sense because it's declared somewhere else. The problem with that is that the declaration is nowhere to be found. A little googling makes it seem like VS.NET 2k5 should create a FileName.Designer.cs file for each ASPX file...However, VS.NET 2k5 does not do this...The Web Application Projects add-on however, does. The trouble with this is, it's only really convenient if you started your web application with this application already installed(Update: ScottGU has a guide for converting existing sites!). ScottGU has an excellent explanation here However, this entire thing really leaves something to be desired for me, but that's really only because I started coding 25% of this project without this "Add-on" My main question is...If I don't have the "Add-on" how on earth am I supposed to modify the protection level of a control (change it from protected to public, for example)

What I ended up doing was simply creating my button() programmatically. Sheesh.

Oh, one more thing. If you've already coded a bit in VS.NET 2k5, and you figure hey - I'll just go install the Web Application Projects add-on and be good to go...you have another thing coming. It will not create the FileName.Designer.cs files for you if the files have already been created. (Is there a way to manually add these? If there is - I certainly haven't stumbled across it) I believe you must create a "Web Application Project" (read:not web site) within VS.NET 2k5 for these files to get generated.

This link from ScottGU should answer most of your questions if youre experiencing this challenge, as my boss would say.

posted @ Monday, April 17, 2006 11:11 PM | Feedback (3) | Filed Under [ C# VS.NET 2005 ]


Thinking like a genius?


http://www.studygs.net/genius.htm

posted @ Friday, April 14, 2006 5:05 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ Misc ]


Oracle UTC to Standard Time format and back


Ever have to work with a DB that stores time in UTC format?

Yes, it's a tad annoying at first. The PL/SQL functions below may be handy when you've got a DB side UTC field.

CREATE OR REPLACE
function convert_utc_date (utc_in in number) return date is
begin
    return new_time(to_date('1970-01-01 12:00:00 AM','yyyy-mm-dd hh:mi:ss am')+(utc_in/(60*60*24)),'EST','GMT');
 -- ex: select to_char(convert_utc_date(1133776800+(60*60*2)),'yyyy-mm-dd hh:mi:ss')a from dual;
end;

CREATE OR REPLACE
function convert_date_utc (date_in varchar2) return number is
begin
    return (new_time(to_date(date_in,'DD-MON-YY HH:MI AM'),'GMT','CDT')- to_date('01-01-1970','mm-dd-yyyy'))*86400;
 -- ex:  select to_char(convert_date_utc('05-DEC-05 12:00 AM'))a from dual;
end;
/

You may have to adjust for your time zone (ex 1 “60*60*2“)

posted @ Friday, April 14, 2006 3:34 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Oracle PL/SQL ]


Anthem Ajax Library


So I drudged through a bunch of different Ajax libraries freely available on the web.  I'm a bit reluctant to build any apps w/atlas naturally since it's not out yet.  (On a side note, I couldn't really find any useful Atlas articles on the web - anyone got any?)  Initially, I played with Michael Schwarz's  (I needed to build some dependant drop down lists)  However, this library was a bit lacking in one important area.  ViewState.  I couldn't access the ElementID.SelectedValue property as you normally would with a .NET control.  The search continued...and ended with  Anthem.Net

This library does everything that Michael's library does, while preserving ViewState.  Also seems to have a good amount of sourceforge.net directly

 

posted @ Friday, April 14, 2006 3:14 PM | Feedback (4) | Filed Under [ Ajax ]


Adding events to dynamically created controls


Adding events to dynamically created controls sounds like it might be tricky but it's actually pretty straightforward.

System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button btn = new System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button()
btn.Click += new System.EventHandler(button_Click);
protected void button_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//Call whatever methods you please
}

posted @ Friday, April 14, 2006 1:55 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ C# ]