Geekswithblogs.net

Starting in mid July, Microsoft will be selling Office by subscription. Including Office will be a security software program called Live One Care. The costs will be $70 a year. Even though Google has free web based programs that compete with Office, many students and teachers still prefer to use Office. This announcement is a win win and you can purchase the product at Circuit City. Technorati Tags: Office,Microsoft,Circuit City ...

You've probably read my earlier post about setting focus on a form element. All went well. Then, things went to the U.I. guy who went crazy with the TextBoxWatermarkExtender control and now none of your forms have focus on a form element any more :-( I guess the developers of the TextBoxWatermarkExtender didn't think of all the possible ways in which people would use the control - some people actually do want to keep the focus on a control to help their keyboard-loving users. Anyway, I set out to ...

It's been a while since i last posted anything. Now I'm getting back into the groove once again.

 

Here is a cool site i came across.

 http://goosh.org/

Its the unofficial google shell. Do a google search using a web command line.

 

A short post this time on a better known framework feature in .Net 2.0 +. A funny thing happened on the way to the demo today. I was preparing to demo some code to a group of developers and needed a function I had written back in the 10 .net days. This was a thin wrapper that allowed one to read configuration information out of the web or app config or a database. Being a careful programmer instead of just including the class and moving on to the demo even though I knew the code worked I thought ...

I've been playing with WPF a little bit, and quite frankly got a bit stuck, (Meh! Who'd have thought). The problem is as follows: I create a UserControl - we'll call it 'MyUserControl' (wouldn't want to break traditions now would we). In said user control I have a button, that when pressed will fire off a new thread. This new thread will (say) poll a file / service - whatever - every 10 seconds or so, and update a Label accordingly. When I close the app, if the app is polling, then the app won't ...

Interesting article from BBC news about ICANN thinking about relaxing the rules on domain names. Now, the way the article was worded it took me a second read to understand their point. “Domain Names” is a bad choice of term for the article, as we’ve all registered domain names at some point. But what they’re talking about is the extension. Currently its either .com, .net, .org, or some country (as the article points out, .tv wasn’t created for television-based sites…its actually the regional domain ...

A colleague of mine was planning on setting up a calendaring system for their department, and he was wondering if they took the trouble to set it up for their department if all the other departments would want to use it. All the different departments have their own flavor of the month in terms of langauges and frameworks. Some like PHP and Zend. Some like ASP.NET. Some like Python and Django. The list goes on. All of us have seen a department re-invent the wheel and do something another department ...

Ok, I admit, I didn't know what ThreadStatic was before today. I'm going to chalk it up to the fact that I don't deal (or, at least, hadn't dealt up until recently) with multi-threaded situations. This all came when, partially by the fact that I am not liking the conclusions I drew on this post, I have started to look more at a static method. While revisiting Udi & Ayende's examples, I took a deeper look and noticed that there might be problems with how their code might work in multi-threaded ...

So I haven't been blogging much lately, this is due to work, school, work work, then school, then work, oh ya, sometimes I have to eat and sleep also but that seems to be coming second to the others. Anyway, I have come across some suggestions on places to go that are 1) Delicious, for the sake of my pictures, they showcase 2) Deserts, and are very good if you perhaps want to go on 3) Dates with people, friends, girlfriends/boyfriends, etc. Hence the title of this blog entry. Previously on the day ...

You know that Fibonacci is not a fine wine or type of bread. Your Christmas list is a color-coded spreadsheet with sort capabilities on person, store, and price. The last party you attended was a slide deck check. Your MP3 player contains more .NET podcasts than music. The average shelf life of the books you purchase is 3 months. You have more email addresses than you have digits in your phone number. That's ok, because you have linked them all together with single sign-on from your smart phone. ...

A good portion of this week was spent recovering some documents that were deleted by a rogue console application (most likely my fault). I wrote a Console Application to combine some document libraries and I spent a good portion of a week testing it. However, I did not really think of enough scenarios, because it obviously did not move the documents properly. Some libraries were moved and others were not. At any rate I practiced my SQL Restoration skills and wrote another two console applications ...

We are going to have a windows service that will run a few workflow(WF) instances. I want to have configuration information to be stored in separate config files for each WF instance. I remembered that EntLib has helper classes to store custom objects configuration in separate custom configuration file, but finding good examples in Google wasn't easy(probably I didn't find good search keywords). The links that I finally found(more relevant to the task first) Tom Hollander 'post External configuration ...

You see a ton of charting components out there for .NET. Whenever you look into any magazine for developers in the developer space, you will see all sorts of advertisements for charting components of every kind. One of the main things these companies show is the new fancy and shiny charts as proof that they are the obvious choice in your applications that you want to build. As a developer, you might look at this chart and say, "Wow, this is new and this would look wonderful in my application". I ...

We are using asp.net Menu control and wanted to have some delay before sub-menu popup to avoid annoying popup, if user just move mouse through menu area. After some search on Google I found the solution submitted by yupinggang on the thread delaying the menu control. I've slightly modified it( put in a separate JS file,call initMenuMouseHoverInterceptors just in the same file,added handling of the case if no menu on the page etc.) Another possible solution- override PreRender in derived from Menu ...

I began the third and final day of JAOO Brisbane by arriving late. I had left my name tag at home so I had to go back for it. I was in time for Robert Martin's keynote Clean Code. Uncle Bob is well known for his enthusiastic, entertaining presentation style. I greatly enjoyed his talk, even though it was really just a back-to-basics on writing code. He did a tutorial on advanced design that I missed, but I'm sure it would have been excellent. Next was Jim Webber speaking about distributed programming ...

Install IIS, ASP.NET, .NET Framework 3.5, SQL Server 2005 Express /w Reporting Services, a Web Application, create the Web Application database, and Deploy Report files using a batch script... Possible? Yes!!! I often like to explore possibility and this was my challenge. So here's what I did... I knew I wanted to have a batch file to start the installation and get everything installed, but I wasn't quite sure how to accomplish such a feat. So after some Google searches I started to put the batch ...

While I was finishing up the "ESBSimpleSamples" project, I came across this strange error. On submitting a message to the ProcessItinerary Web service I got a 503 Service Unavailable error, and the event log showed the app pool had been shut down, with The identity of application pool, 'ESBAppPool' is invalid and error code 80070532. A quick Google suggested it was an issue with the BizTalk isolated account. I hadn't changed it at all and the service was fine a couple of days ago, but I checked the ...

I cannot believe that I am the first person ever to encounter the following error: MSB3095: Invalid argument. Illegal characters in path. [Update] As Tom pointed out in the comments, this issue is directly related to the encoding of my *.refresh file. Thanks Tom. I searched Google and other search engines with no success. I found "MSB3095: Invalid Argument", and I found "Illegal characters in path.", but never in the same place. I did not actually resolve the issue; I was able to work around it. ...

Last couple of days I made a terrible decision: reinstall my computer. So I reinstalled Windows (XP) three times in the last two days (the dvd with Visual Studio 2008, for some reason, kept killing my CPU) and finally I managed to install VS 2008 and start configuring th ASP.net project I am working on and kept reinstalling whatever I needed, on the flow. To my huge surprise I could no longer open the solution with Services. The exception message was really helpful : System.Runtime.InteropServi... ...

While I love Microsoft's developer products, adCenter (Microsoft's search advertising / pay per click) makes me want to hide in shame. See the email I received below. I completely understand the desire of AdCenter to educate the masses, but do you really need a Workshop to get your customers to understand your product? Much less, require them to PAY to attend? Sure you might be giving a 50% credit towards advertising, but why would I pay to attend? That's not the way to get customers to move from ...

To add to my frustrating time this week with my 1418 error when setting up Database Mirroring under SQL Server 2005. I was dogged by a continuous 'Service Unavailable' message when trying to load a ASP.NET page under IIS running under Windows 2003 R2. Typically 'Service Unavailable' is a nice catch all message that doesn't give anything away, and so it shouldn't as hackers learn about websites by generating exceptions. Diagnosing the real reason for the error is a case of reading the IIS error logs ...

While working on an ASP.net application, we had a certain page where we wanted to conduct a search that takes about 30-45 seconds to complete. To desist from holding the page output for all that while this search took place, we decided to make it look more interactive for the user using some nifty AJAX. The following are the steps we took.. Started the search on page load on a separate thread using BeginInvoke() The IAsyncResult returned by BeginInvoke() was saved in a session variable. An AJAX timer ...

Right after Google Spreadsheets came out, I got a ton of downloads from a little class library I wrote for interacting with it over HTTP. Problem is, Google didn't provide a true API - the solution was to use HTTP to manually perform the gets and posts required to manage each spreadsheet. Now its much easier thanks to RSSBus! Here is a sample Google spreadsheet, it looks like this: A B C D 1 Name Hours Items IPM 2 Bingley 10 2 0.0033 3 Captain Carter 200 75360 6.28 4 Dawson 200 100000 8.3333 5 Colonel ...

ASP.NET related Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.Net MVC Part - 1 The Making of Blogo.NET Configuring & customizing the health monitoring system of ASP.NET Mobile Application related alcheMo - Technology (J2ME to BREW and iPhone porting solution) Mojax (Mobile Ajax application framework) - it provides access to device capabilities like Camera API, Location Services, Contacts and more. Android Weather Forecast - Google Weather API - Description Android Poor mans GPS - Cell (Tower) ID / Location ...

So here is something silly I was running up against. In the end its super simple, but its not obvious, and not easy to google for. I want to equip the new servers are are installing with a standard weekly reboot schedule. I created a batch file that launched shutdown.exe with some fancy parameters, and set this up as a scheduled task for each server. I created a special domain account called sa-scheduledreboot with normal user rights, and rights to access the share, and of course the famous "log ...

So it is almost 2 am in toronto and i am blogging. Let's see where to begin.. It was quite a crazy day. 8:30 am - Wake up 9:15 am - Co-op Meeting 10:30 am - Pick up the girl 10:45 am - Go back home and do the final checklist to make sure I don't forget anything that i packed 11:30 am - Started running around the city doing errands 1:00 pm - Lunch at Phuong Nam - #25 deluxe pho + vietnamese expresso with condensed milk + ice...soo good 1:30 pm - Go to workplace to pay a visit 2:20 pm - Back home to ...

I had an incredible time in Tulsa. Things were a bit rocky at first, because Google gave me some bad directions for Friday night, so I turned around about 4 times just to get the 11th street exist from highway 64. I was a little disappointed with the Doubletree Inn, so I'm sticking with Hampton Inn from now on. $20 for a burger and Ore Ida fries that I could make on my grill at home is insane. Some of the people were really nice at the hotel, but some were just flat out rude. When it was time to ...

Recently, after some analyzing some of the controllers I was building using ASP.NET MVC, I found that my controllers typically have the same pattern. They all have some dependencies injected into them through the constructor, each action calls a method on one of the dependencies (typically using the arguments of the and gets a result back), and depending on the result, an ActionResult is returned. Now, writing the tests wasn't tough. But, I dunno, I guess I'm REALLY lazy. So I started looking today ...

I just finished my presentation about consuming Google Maps at BarCampKC. Thanks to everybody who attended. We talked about the three different ways of using Google Maps in your applications or websites. Static Map Image API My Maps JavaScript API The slideshow is available via Google Docs or dowload the PPT The code is available for download here, make sure you change your api key ...

Ok I've visited this one before, but now I'm just a tad scared, because first I had the VS2003 .NET 1.1 bits working on the server, then I went through the whole IIS and VS2005 .NET 2.0 CR bits. Now this morning I got email from a user that one of the reports is pooting... argggg... And it's the infamous "Load Report Failed" error. I tried and of course, it poots on my system as well :( ... I tried the .NET 2.0 "Merge" version and wow... that sucker just flies .. cool! So back to Google and a bunch ...

Tonight I traveled for 3 hours (roughly 300 kms) to attend the DevEast meeting in Moncton, NB. And in my mind it was worth it. In the most unusual place I've ever sat and listened to a presentation, I joined 8 others at AJs Pizza Place to listen to Derek Hatchard run through two presentations that's he's planning to give at DevTeach Toronto next week. Leveraging the Amazon Platform Covered the various types of services that Amazon has made available. Derek talked about S3 (Simple Storage Service) ...

Introduction So I find myself working in a BizTalk world these days. So most of what I am dealing with is WCF, SOA, bus, etc. related. However, there are times when I need to write an assembly that BizTalk can use to communicate with the outside world. The best way for BizTalk to interact with my assembly is with XmlDocuments that conform to an strongly typed XSD generated schema. After a bit of research across many sites, several colleagues interacting with one another over this issue, and finally ...

Sometimes I receive non-specific questions from my blog Contact form. For example: Please let me know how can i install a proxy server software on my local computer. Do you know any particular software to run and test the web service over a proxy server. I am trying to call a web method over a proxy server which doesn't require any user name and password.I am using the same codes which given in your web site.But I am not getting any response back from the server after calling the http response.Please ...

If you want to concatenate (append to end) a string to a field in SQL, there is a very easy and simple update statement for that: Update [tableName] Set [myField] = [myField] + 'whatever' Where [id] = 1 The + operator works fine for strings, as long as the field is varchar or nvarchar data type. If it is text or ntext, you cannot use the + operator to join strings, and you will get the follow sql error: "Invalid operator for data type. Operator equals add, type equals text" Which is pretty annoying. ...

I am working with a form in InfoPath 2003 using a bunch of filters and the current() row tag in a repeating table. The problem is when I use Rich Text Fields it does not render the HTML correctly. I am seeing tags for divs and breaks. When I try to do a string.replace and pass in the C# break equivalent of \n it removes the tags and adds no breaks in the Rich Text field. I am not sure if many people are using InfoPath 2003 still for development or if anyone is using it in MOSS. If you are you know ...

This is an ASP.Net error I got while converting a .Net Remoting app from 1.1 to 2.0, and it puzzled me for a while. The conversion had gone fine and everything built and deployed without a problem, but the unit tests I'd written were failing to find the remote service. IIS was being used as the host for a handful of wellknown objects, so I tried browsing to the WSDL and this was the error. Check on Google and you'll see there aren't any relevant hits, so obviously something strange in the setup of ...

Let's say you have a custom WPF control called SearchTextBox. It has a textbox and a button labeled "search". Simple enough, you reuse it in your application when you want to provide search. Then one day, you decide you need this control needs to be bindable. So you expose a public property Text and map it to textSearch just like you would in WinForms. Well, that doesn't work, so you google around and stumble upon Dependency Properties and learn how to create your own (VS snippet shortcut propdb) ...

Here we are again cussing at Crystal Reports. Actually things between me and CR have been amazingly good for quite a while. I knew there was a problem coming though... I'm doing way too many weird things. I have to move these two web apps, and in doing so, they're moving to a bright, shiny, spanking new virtual server. Not sure what spanking has to do with new, but I'll let it pass. I figured there'd be some bumps in the road and of course the first one was that the new server had no clue what Crystal ...

A while back, I posted something I shouldn't have. It was a mistake. Don't bother looking for it, since I already removed it. I wouldn't even bring it up now, since it's a little embarrassing, but the whole story makes for an interesting lesson in internet propagation. A few weeks ago, a buddy of mine sent me something via email. I found it interesting, so I posted it in my blog. Other people saw it and also found it interesting... and, you guessed it, posted it in their blogs. People I work with ...

This week I had a couple meetings with employers on the theme of recruitment. Personally, I am a fan of training and grooming rookies in a self proclaimed IT shortage as I spoke about in a previous post. For my client, hiring a rookie is not an option (in their opinion). They have had 1 open position for 1 year; now a 2nd position has opened. The first open position has been posted numerous times in the employers format with little success. When I look at job postings, I typically see this format ...

Thanks to Jackie Johnson, I was able to fix my issue with Adobe Acrobat closing. I had checked the FLEXnet Licensing Service and tried to start it. It kept giving an "Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified." error. Google gave me Jackie Johnson and problem fixed. I had made some changes to my registry and disabled few software using a third-party registry editor/manager and had forgot about what I did. So, a not to self is - don't disable software in the registry... Below is a copy of ...

I was here in Seattle a few years ago and I remember my wife and I driving around for HOURS looking for a place to eat...and finding nothing...and going back to our hotel and ordering pizza. I have two similar stories to add, and let this be a warning to you if you travel to Seattle and like late-night snacks/eating. Wednesday Night This was the EMP party night, and after coming back to the hotel and hanging out with the gang in the lobby for a bit, I called it a night...well, I intended to. What ...

I was trying to create an MDX drillthrough this morning in my SSAS 2005 cube, and I got this error: Errors from the SQL query module: The attribute 'Applicant Name' in the dimension 'Dim Candidate' is outside the granularity of the measure group 'Fact Requisitions' and cannot be returned as a column. I only got one result from Google for that error message and it wasn't helpful at all. After trying a million different things with partitions and actions and whatnot, I finally figured out the problem: ...

In this post I would like to share my experiences with the new communitar I found few days ago - next application I found with help of friend of mine Chris Koenig - called just Digsby. What this communicator is so special? I would like to explain this in next few lines of my post. However, at the begging let me back few years back and introduce some problems I had with my previous communicators. Gadu Gadu It is really simple application, but one serious bug I am ecountering is conctact list synchronization. ...

This past Saturday we noticed our internet connection was acting up a bit. We could get to Google and search but no result links would load. I could get to the My Yahoo logon page but not to my work sites I really wanted to use (of course). I haven't been one to complain about Comcast's internet service; it has been good for me for over three years now. However this story from Slashdot helped explain Saturdays debacle and some other random slow downs over the past few months. I can say that I don't ...

Well, I'm a huge fan to OpenDNS, say it helps me load my pages faster, prevents phishing site from opening, and makes my life go e-to-o-to-aha! Well, it was recent that I figured Google owned Orkut, "an online community designed to make your social life more active and stimulating" is categorized tasteless which in definition from OpenDNS are "Sites that contain information on such subjects as mutilation, torture, horror, or the grotesque". This happens when you block Adult content category for the ...

My preferred structure is for each project to have a root in the depot, then each branch to have a root within the project. So as the codebase matures you end up with: \\depot \ProjectX \MAIN \source \R1 \source \R2 \source \ProjectY \MAIN \source etc. Nothing revolutionary there, but it gives some context for the examples. Branching the Codeline There are four steps to creating and populating a branch from the main codeline: Create a branch view Create a master workspace (client view) for the branch ...

So, I may not be entirely up on my un-couth Japanese sayings, but one thing is for sure, IL code, to the average developer (Read: Me) might as well be written in the same Romaji thats in the title. That is, it's hard to make heads or tails of, and since you most likely never, or only rarely look at it, you get very little opportunity to actually study it. I've been the same way for the past few years, acknowledging that IL exists, and just like that ugly friend, I don't actually acknowledge there ...

Introduction In this post I would like to share my experiences about creating and maintaining a web site for a Wroclaw .NET User Group and platforms that can use to create such web site. Hope that some of my thoughts will be useful for someone who is active member of any community group. I am a leader of Wroclaw .NET User Group since November last year. Since then Wroclaw .NET User Group grows quite quickly and we have more and more needs and expectations how our web site should look like. Currently ...

So here is a question why would you want to add your Meta Tags via code? Kinda silly right? Cause if you were a great developer you probably have a whole list of meta tags you have created for your portfolio of web sites right? Well if you are the developer who has those templates you most likely will stop reading here and think this mikedopp character is kinda wierd or is one of those "because you can" type people. I know I am adding much too much fluff to this whole entry and spending too much ...