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Showing posts from 2009

Why we have to be more careful about what we read and more importantly what we write

In this day and age it is very uncommon to not use the internet to research or solve problems. Our reliance on printed reference books and even reference sites has dwindled massively. As developers, especially budding developers, we often just Google our problems, in fact I think most of our senior dev's often say to us "have you Googled it?" When asked about something. Now googling things of course has changed our industry, we can often solve problems or get good starting points within seconds. This on its own is not a bad thing, we google we get the results and we crack on. The problem however is when you pick the first item or a random article and use what someone else has written as FACT. The problem with our "Google" culture, this applys to more than programming, is that we often don't filter what we read. We suffer from fps, first page symdrom. If its on the first page of our results it has to be correct. Sadly though all too often the actual blogs or

TDD Masterclass in the UK

Roy Osherove is giving an hands-on TDD Masterclass in the UK, September 21-25. Roy is author of "The Art of Unit Testing" (http://www.artofunittesting.com/), a leading tdd & unit testing book; he maintains a blog at http://iserializable.com (which amoung other things has critiqued tests written by Microsoft for asp.net MVC - check out the testreviews category) and has recently been on the Scott Hanselman podcast (http://bit.ly/psgYO) where he educated Scott on best practices in Unit Testing techniques. For a further insight into Roy's style, be sure to also check out Roy's talk at the recent Norwegian Developer's Conference (http://bit.ly/NuJVa). Full Details here: http://bbits.co.uk/tddmasterclass bbits are holding a raffle for a free ticket for the event. To be eligible to win the ticket (worth £2395!) you MUST paste this text, including all links, into your blog and email Ian@bbits.co.uk with the url to the blog entry. The draw will be made on September 1s

FlickVimTube - An FCKEditor Plugin

First things first, ignore the random title for this post, it does have a meaning and it's the best I could up with ;) The other evening I was hitting some downtime and rather than carry on playing FarCry 2 I decided I'd write a quick FCKEditor plugin which I've been meaning to write for a while. By default the editor comes with functionality to insert flash files into your content which works well however I wanted to have a way to only insert online videos from Flickr, Vimeo or YouTube. To insert these I was having to manually go into source view, paste in the embed code etc. A chore and a heartache. So enough was enough and I banged together a quick plugin that would take a YouTube Embed URL and then insert the appropiate embed HTML for it. This was actually quite simple. I worked out there was four main steps, 1. Extract the video ID from the URL 2. Create suitable embed markup and insert into the editor 3. Create a preview video so you can ensure it works before click

Wasting Bandwidth One Image at a Time....

Content Management Systems are great, they allow the average Joe to have a great level of control over their website. Gone are the days of clients asking for static pages to be amended, we live in the database powered give the power of editing and updating content to the client Our clients get to use Rich Text Editors like FCKEditor. They look and feel just like Microsoft Word, they can play with text, upload images, resize them simply by dragging them and are very often really happy. However this often comes at a cost. Most RTE's by default simply resize images by sticking on the HTML img attributes height and width. As many people are aware this doesn't actually resize the image, it just simply tells the browser take this massive image and render it smaller. The end user still has to download the huge image, I have seen on some sites 2000px x 1200px images being downloaded and then only shown at 250px x 120px!, which can take a while to load dependant their internet connectio

Content Disposition in different browsers

Today I had to resolve an issue where in different browsers the filed dynamically generated download worked very differently / at all The setup, we had an xml file with a custom extension, say .mj, which was being served up by ASP. The HTTP Header had a content disposition header and a response type set. Response.AddHeader "Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=""our file.mj""" Response.ContentType = "text/xml" This worked fine in Internet Explorer, the file was downloaded as "our file.mj". However FireFox and Chrome acted very differently, in FireFox the file was downloaded as just "our", and Chrome as "our file.xml". In FireFox it appears that the issue is caused by having a space in the file name, this forum post by funkdaddu helped me on this, so by removing the space FireFox could now download the file as "ourfile.mj". Chrome however did not want to play ball. It was still insisting on

Looking for a URL using Linq and SiteMaps

I've been off sick from work with Man Flu but this afternoon I was getting bored of staying in bed for the second day so I got out my laptop just to have a play in between blowing my nose. I wanted to write a quick way of looking up the full url path for a page within a sitemap. The only bit of information I know is the key of the page. Now I knew that I could possibly make use of the IndexOf method. This expects a SiteMapNode of the value you are looking for and returns the index of the node, you then need to get the node out of your collection of nodes, example below. SiteMapNodeCollection nodes = SiteMap.RootNode.GetAllNodes(); int nodeIndex = nodes.IndexOf(new SiteMapNode(SiteMap.Provider, pagekey)); return nodes[nodeIndex].Url ?? String.Empty; Now that method does work, however it felt dead clunky, I was sure I could write a more .Net 3.5 shiny one line way of doing this using Linq. In fact it was dead easy. First I still needed to get all the nodes, SiteMap.RootNode.GetAllNod

Book Review: ASP.Net MVC 1.0 Quickly

So this month I again have the privaledge of writing another book review. This time in an area I have particular interest. ASP.Net MVC has recently been released and there are no end of books coming out of the market, one of these being Maarten Balliauw 's ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly. When the book arrived I first noted how it used the traditional orange Packt colour scheme with an interesting picture of a pair of glasses on the beach. This I preferred over the look of the last book I reviewed , however I am yet to work out the significance of the picture if there even is one? The book starts by saying that the book will take you through "the essential tasks" and "does not cover every single feature in detail". This is my opinion is not a bad thing. It is not a full reference book like ... but more of a rapid guide to get developers to start using MVC and know the basics preety much everything, you can then get the in depth knowledge as you go along. The book cov

Google SiteMap Generator + Input validation failed Error

Since Google release their Google Site Map Generator I have been using it on my web server for the sites that I manage. Setting it up and getting it running was fine and I haven't had a problem, that was until this week. This week I noticed that as I was only letting the generator update the sitemap from actual URL hits quite often a few of my sites aren't hit for a day at a time which was resulting in empty sitemaps. This then causes Google WebMaster Tools to whinge at you which isn't a good thing. So I decided to update my settings to include parsing my IIS Log Files in the hope it would use previous days ones and not generate blank files. This is where I hit a road block. When ever I changed a setting and clicked save the generator would be really useful and tell me that "Input Validation Failed" and to basically sort myself out. I was confused to say the least as everything was fine, no field was highlighted as being erroneous so I ended up giving up and leav

Book Review: C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming

So last month Packt Publishing contacted me regarding sending me a promotional copy of C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming to review. This is the first time I have been asked to do a book review and decided to take them up on the offer. Now I have been using ASP.Net for around three years now but I've never had to or decided to look into writing multi-threaded apps so the fact that this book was aimed at beginners meant that I was an ideal target audience for this book. Packt shortly sent me the book and upon first looking at it thought it looked a bit ugly! I know you can't tell a book by its cover but this cover did put me off, the green and picture didn't do it for me but alas I carried on anyway. The book is organised into several chapters and is example driven. What I mean by this is that it doesn't give you bags of theory and then an example, it takes the approach of you following along the code examples and then it has gaps explaining bits and pieces. More o

MVC Snippets: must be a reference type in order to use it as parameter 'TModel' in the generic type or method 'System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl'

Recently I have been playing with ASP.NET MVC , in particular I have been building myself a new website. I thought it might be good to post any peculiar things / lessons I learn during this build. Tonight I stumbled across one of these lessons. When you strongly type a view or partial view the type must be a reference type. Otherwise this means you get a HttpCompilation Error: "your data type" must be a reference type in order to use it as parameter 'TModel' in the generic type or method 'System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl '. Initially I couldn't figure out what this meant as I was passing my type through, it existed etc. However it was then I realised I had declared my type as a struct not a class. If you are unsure of the difference between a class and a struct I recommend looking it up, the gist of it is that a class is a reference type and a struct isn't. As a struct isn't a reference type you can save memory due to it not having to allocate additi

Open Hack Day 2009

Well today registration for Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2009 opened, and with much excitement I signed up hoping for a place. The previous Hack Day was really great fun even though my "hack team" failed to finish our project. This year I'm hoping to do something a lot simpler but as enjoyable. Here's open I get a place ;)

Parsing an XML Boolean

Today I came across a situation where I was taking a value from an XML file which is a boolean. Now being me I knew that someone would either use 1 or true to indicate this boolean value, I for example always use 1 and 0 but I know people that prefer the "proper" way of saying true or false, especially if you don't have an XSD handy. The XML itself is fine however once I had loaded this XML file into my .Net application I needed to parse the value as a boolean. This is where I hit a roadblock. Bool.Parse will only parse "true" or "false" string values not "1" or "0". A quick explore through various sources led me to find XmlConvert .ToBoolean(), which is part of System.XML. XmlConvert allows you to convert from XML Data Types to .Net Data Types and in the case of Boolean can convert 1 to true. This saved me loads of time so I thought I'd post it up here for others to find and hopefully enjoy.

Where's all my battery gone? / Windows 7 Hardware Interupts

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So I got the Windows 7 Beta as soon as it came out and installed it on my laptop to give it proper "real world" testing, not a VM or a machine I use rarely. I chose to do this as it means I can give Microsoft proper feedback and if it all goes wrong I can simply reinstall Vista clean and restore data from the previous night I have to say I really like windows 7, the UI changes do work for me, I like some of the new features and on the whole I'm happy with it. But this post isn't going to be about my last two weeks of running Windows 7, I'm already writing that post and need to finish it when I'm happy I've gave a real world usage. This post is about how since I've installed Windows 7 my battery life sucks. Now this isn't a rant, instead I want to highlight how I found out that something was wrong with my install. So when I started using Windows 7 I noticed that my system kept slowing down, I soon fired up Task Manager and found that AVG antivirus,

Visual Studio Welcome Screen

Today a colleague noticed that whilst he was debugging his web application random requests were being made to Microsoft, these requests were also returning a HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently header, and apart from being annoying was causing him a few issues. From experience I soon realised that these requests were being made by the Visual Studio Welcome Screen. By default even if you don't use the welcome screen, Visual Studio keeps the Start Page News Channel RSS Feed up to date, the default in every 60 minutes. If you aren't using the welcome screen then its probably worth disabling the RSS feeds auto download content functionality, not only will this stop you seeing random requests, if you even notice them, but if you are working on a mobile and pay per KB save you some bandwidth. To disable the auto content update simply: goto Tools > Options, click the Show All Settings checkbox, then under the Environment leaf find Startup. Once here simply untick the "download cont