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I've just finished installing MediaWiki 1.8.2 (the same wiki engine that powers Wikipedia) on my machine at work. MediaWiki requires three things to be present on the machine prior to installing: A web server, A database server and the PHP engine. In my case that meant that I had to install Apache Http Server 2.2.3, MySQL 5.0.27 Community Server and PHP 5.2.0 - all from scratch. The point of this post is that I was surprised at how easy it was to obtain and install these 4 (counting MediaWiki) pieces...
Just bumped into another one of ASP.Net's annoying quirks. When setting the NavigateUrl property of an <asp:image>, ASP.Net automatically "HTMLEncodes" the value assigned. So if you'd try to pass a query string in the url, like so: <asp:image id="imgExample" runat="server" navigateurl = "example.jpg?foo=bar&a... /> you'll end up with something like this on the client side: <img id="imgExample" src="example.jpg?foo=b...
A while back I ranted about ASP.Net's CustomValidator behaving badly - When the control it is set to validate is empty, CustomValidator will (surprisingly) perform no validation. Now I've learned that the good people at Microsoft have resolved this issue, but only in ASP.Net 2.0. The CustomValidator now has a new property called ValidateEmptyText. As the name implies, when this property is set to true empty controls will be validated by the CustomValidator. Too bad this solution is only implemented...
For years I've been living with the unsettling feeling that there's something mysteriously wrong with ASP.Net's CustomValidator control. Every time I made the courageous decision to tackle this elusive control and try to harness it for my use, something would go wrong. Something I couldn't quite put my finger on until now. I've just discovered the terrible secret behind the CustomValidator control: it doesn't fire if the control to be validated has an empty value. Here it is, in black on white, from...
How many times a day do you click the Windows Explorer shortcut in your Quick Launch toolbar and then navigate to the folder where you do most of your work? Here's a tip from the wonderful Windows Annoyances website that saves me the trouble of navigating the same path over and over again - I "Force Explorer to Start With the Folder You Want". Make me mad to think why Microsoft fail to provide easy documentation of explore.exe's command line options...
Who knew the old Notepad.exe still had secrets hiding among its modest codebase? Try this: Open a new text file with Notepad. On the first line type .LOG (in capital letters). Save the file and exit Notepad. Now, every time you open the file in Notepad, it will be opened on the last line and a time stamp will appended to it just before that. The file is effectively a poor man's journal. How neat is that? :) via Gadgetopia...
With Gliffy around, who needs Microsoft Visio anyhow? Credit to digg
...and for the old Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer and for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 and for UltraEdit and EditPlus (!) SQL Prompt is a freeware from Red Gate Software. It's a stand-alone app that sniffs the text you type into your IDE and beautifies and auto-completes it as you go. I've tried it and I recommened it. It's a memory hog though. It's taking up over 30MB of RAM on my machine even though it only has to store 4 DB schemas right now. Thanks go to Shahar for the referral. His blog...
Just ran into a bit of nastiness with the SqlParameter class in .Net 2.0. The scenario: I have a DateTime with a value of '05/30/2006 23:59:59.999' (that's 999 milliseconds). When I save it to a (Microsoft SQL Server 2005) DB using a stored procedure invoked by SqlHelper.ExecuteNonQuery(), the value surprisingly changes to '05/31/2006 00:00:00.000'. A bit of step-by-step debugging led me to the culprit. When the DateTime is stored in a SqlParameter to be passed to SqlHelper.ExecuteNonQuery(), the...
I've been messing around with an ASP.Net 2.0 Wizard Server Control, trying to customize a FinishNavigationTemplate. I followed the instructions in the the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Documentation page for FinishNavigationTemplate (ms-help link here) which said: The FinishNavigationTemplate object that is contained in the FinishNavigationTemplate property must contain two IButtonControl controls, one with its CommandName property set to "MoveFinish" and the other with its CommandName property set...
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