SyntaxHighlighter Build Test Page
Kennydust
Thoughts from a C# Developer
11-20 of 23

  • Facebook Connect -- for the iPhone

    Wednesday, March 18, 2009
    Facebook is stretching their limits of their social reach beyond the web, and onto your iphone. Now, custom apps can be facebook aware, and allow for iphone owners to log-in to facebook, leveraging the facebook connect service. For those of you who are not familiar with facebook connect, the original offering was web based only; conceived sometime last year and it allowed any web site to have some user integration with facebook, while allowing access to it's social features via it's API and proprietary markup language. Now with an iPhone offering, it gives the user more reason to stay on the very popular social
    Filed under | 0 comments »

  • Commenting with Facebook's standalone widget

    Monday, February 23, 2009
    Last week, Facebook released it's new Comment Box social widget which allows a developer to add threaded comment functionality to any site they want. It literally took me less than 5 minutes to slap it all together; and maybe if I didn't read stop to read all the itty bitty details, it probably would of taken me half that time. I must say, I'm pretty impressed -- it integrates well with my own site, and it looks slick. Facebook's widget allows allows for anonymous comments, so you don't necessarily need to be facebook user in order to submit your 2 cents. So wow, I'm
    Filed under | 0 comments »

  • Validation Application Block

    Wednesday, February 18, 2009
    How many hours during the day do you sit around and write validation code?  Way to many to count, if I'm reading your mind. Validation is pretty common it's in usage that it occurred to me that I needed some sort of compact way of encapsulating rules and business logic. So on my train ride home, I thought to myself -- "Gee, I guess I could create validation attributes, and decorate my properties!" I really thought I was brilliant, and somewhat innovative, but lo and behold, I get home and discover there's already an application block written for just that
    Filed under | 0 comments »

  • So you want to want HTTP Modules and Handlers working with Vista and IIS7, huh?

    Monday, February 16, 2009
    HTTP Handlers and modules are necessary components for any given web app. While it's conceivable that a developer may never develop a Handler/Module ever, there may be legacy handlers/modules that may exist or third party applications that requires to use them. More information on Handlers and Modules here. So recently, I ran into an issue where all of my old .ashx and custom handlers blew up when running under IIS. I had upgraded to Vista from XP and being that the web application was dependant upon alot of Handler calls, this proved to be the latest challenge in the life
    Filed under | 0 comments »

  • Dancing around with XQuery and SQL Server - Part 1

    Thursday, February 12, 2009
    What's XQuery? It's a language backed by the W3C to standardize querying XML. Why XQuery? Microsoft started offering support for it in SQL Server 2000 and in SQL Server 2005, extended it with more support with the introduction of the XML data type column. It's fast, it's compact, and you don't need to add 10 million trivial columns. You just add one XML column and stick raw XML in there. It's that easy, a caveman can do it. Here's more information about Microsoft and XQuery. So what's the bad news? It's yet another language to learn and the syntax is
    Filed under | 2 comments »

  • StringDictionary will lower your keys (and your expectations)

    Monday, February 02, 2009
    I needed to store a collection of key/value strings, so I turned to a familiar class I've used in the past: System.Collections.Specialized.StringDictionary. It's pretty straightforward to use, you construct it, then add your items one at a time. However, I ran into some pretty odd behavior where all the keys I injected came back out lower cased.. and subsequently, blew up into a nice error screen because some of the underlining code was dependant on specifically cased key strings. According to microsoft: The key is handled in a case-insensitive manner; it is translated to lowercase before it is used with
    Filed under | 0 comments »

  • Preventing TinyMCE from stripping embed tags from rich media code.

    Friday, December 12, 2008
    For those who have never used the TinyMCE WYSIWYG pluggin, it's one of the industry's best kept secret; add this pluggin to your website, and you've got an instant Microsoft Word-like interface that supports pretty much all the different browsers and it's variations. Some of the things I've taken advantage of include creating custom toolbar buttons and leveraging their compressor paradigm to keep the scripts lightweight. Pretty neat indeed. Now with that said, I've come across one issue which wasn't very clear initially on how to solve, because it had long been a bug since it's predecessor versions; I was
    Filed under | 0 comments »

  • Remote Server Administrator Tools (RSAT) for Vista

    Monday, November 10, 2008
    I am moving to Vista. Reluctantly at first, but I've found this operating system to be quite feature rich and powerful; and so far I see no reason why to uninstall it (6 weeks and counting). It was probably the exposure to the volume of apple commercials that convinced me that Microsoft and Vista were the plague -- and as a developer I should do everything to avoid it. With that said, I've dev'd primarily on my XP instance in the past, and one of the tools that I need on occasion is the handy remote desktops application available only in
    Filed under | 0 comments »

  • Initialization failure: WMI provider and SQL Server 2005

    Sunday, November 09, 2008
    Ever open up the SQL Server Configuration Manager and receive this message? I have; and an initial google search bring up a bevy of solutions. Unfortunately, the first several offerings did not solve my problem -- which prompted me to dig a little deeper. Apparently, I had corrupted my WMI repository somewhere along the line; and after some reading, the WMI can be corrupted after multiple restores of a database... which I'm definitely guilty of. So the solution? rebuild the WMI. Piece of cake, right? Luckily, I stumbled across this blog link which detail these instructions (which can be batched
    Filed under | 0 comments »

  • AssertExtraSocks()

    Friday, November 07, 2008
    A word of advice to anyone traveling for more than a day -- pack extra socks. I made above the mistake and walked out of my house with just the one pair on my feet. The Microsoft PDC conference was slated for 4 days; and lets just say by the third day -- my feet were pretty smelly. It also didn't help that I stayed in the ghetto with no Target, Foot Locker or anything else in sight; I had to block out an hour on day 3 to find something quickly. 3 Day old pair:   New Socks:
    Filed under | 0 comments »

Archives