Paul Mendoza C# blog

Efficient Data Loading with Linq using DataLoadOptions

2008-08-01T13:27:00.001-07:00

For the last five months I've been working on a hobby project called Mangosteen Nation which is a website for XanGo distributors. I really wanted to use this project to look at some of the new things in ASP.NET and C# such as LINQ and it's been a great experience.

So here is a tip for efficiently grabbing data using LINQ in C# 3.0.

The way LINQ works from what I can tell is that lets say you write a query to get a user object from the database but then you want to access the comments for that user.

MangoData db = new MangoData();
Mangosteen.aspnet_Membership user = db.aspnet_Memberships.First(p=>p.UserId == UserId);
List commentsFromUser = user.Comments.ToList();

This will actually issue two queries to the database although it maintains the same connection. The reason is because it will only return the user object but none of the associated content in other tables. This is good for efficency as we don't need to see the other stuff in the other tables associated to the user but when we need to access that information, it will automatically make another query to the database. If you're not careful, you could end up with a lot of queries to the database that you're not aware of.

What you really want is for just one query to be executed so what we want is that when it returns the user object, it's filled with the comments for the user as well. But there other associations and those shouldn't be returned. So how do we handle this? We use the DataLoadOptions.

If we modify our code with the new System.Data.Linq.DataLoadOptions settings, we'll get the following

MangoData db = new MangoData();

DataLoadOptions dlo = new DataLoadOptions();
dlo.LoadWith(p=>p.Comments);
db.LoadOptions = dlo;

Mangosteen.aspnet_Membership user = db.aspnet_Memberships.First(p=>p.UserId == UserId);
List commentsFromUser = user.Comments.ToList();

The data load options are declaring that whenever an aspnet_Membership object is loaded that the comments should also be loaded as well. Then you can attach that to the database object of your choosing to have those settings applied.

Mangosteen Nation

2008-02-10T04:47:00.000-08:00

Chris Scripca and I just built a new website this last week for Mangosteen Nation which is a site selling XanGo. XanGo is a fruit health drink. We launched the first draft of it tonight. More feature rich versions will be coming in the next month.

Update: This is a closed release.

Summary of my BarCamp expierence

2007-08-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

I had a great weekend up in Palo Alto and San Fransisco this weekend. Got to meet a lot of really nice and smart people at BarCamp which was a great experience. You can't find a nicer group of people all trying to learn and help each other out.

Saturday I flew into San Jose and went straight BarCamp in Palo Alto. After wandering the streets of Palo Alto for a bit trying to get my bearings, I finally found another attendee, Adam Gottesfeld from Palomar Ventures. The green name badges everyone wore really helped to identify who was a part of BarCamp.

After all of the sessions for the day there was a party at the Blue Chalk Cafe where everyone was getting free drinks. They were also doing lightning round presentations of web applications on a big screen that people there were working on. It's always interesting to see the kinds of things the developers there are building.

I ended up staying the night at the Social Texts offices working on some development stuff and trying out Selenium, a web UI testing application. A couple of other guys were there as well working on stuff. One guy, Action Merchant, was building the Zoo Facebook application.

Sunday the sessions were longer and I attended two of the Facebook application sessions which were good. The last couple posts contain the notes from those sessions. I think those two sessions had the most people of any of the sessions that I attended of both days. There is a lot of interest in what people can do with Facebook apps and still remains a lot of confusion about how they'll actually fit into the business environment.

Facebook application creations at BarCamp session

2007-08-19T11:11:00.001-07:00

These are my quick notes of everything we talked about during the presentation.

For the most part it seems to be a shotgun style approach to the application development. Much of the discussion is with the creator of the Facebook app Zoo.

There was a question about the business sense of Facebook apps but what if this is like the web circa 1995. It's good to be there to shape what it becomes in the future and there will be business utility but we don't understand what it is yet but it will be come apparent in the future. When it does become apparent to everyone, the Facebook app creators will be well positioned.

One of the audience has been using Facebook like a Sharepoint site so that the 17 people at his company can communicate and share documents.

Graffiti is interesting because it's become a popular Facebook app but is similar to a child's game. It's a basic concept that people enjoy. I think part of it is that people want to modify or add their own unique mark on another person's profile.

One of the people here has a company that is working on about 20 applications, some of them are throw away apps but then some of them are more about productivity applications so that people can collaborate together. He hasn't launched any yet.

One interesting note, apparently Facebook time is 100X internet time. I don't know what that means though.

For a lot of the Facebook development, we want to figure out if the massive amount of early development that we saw at the beginning when the application development tools came out is going to stick. A lot of the people doing it are just trying to learn something and they aren't so concerned at this point about making money. The money will come at some point. You know, step 1: steal socks, step 3: profit. I believe traffic will be moved to other sites through the applications instead of the applications being businesses themselves.

There was one question about possible collaboration between working together on applications or maybe making the applications collaborate together. There is more value in using a set of apps.

There is an IRC channel where a lot of the Facebook users hang out that would be a good way to promote or get help on development.

irc.freenode.nut #facebook

There is also a meetup group in Silicon Valley that also does hack-a-thons every few weeks. There is a Facebook group for the Facebook groups.

Some of the Facebook applications have been open sourced but it's not too big because initially Facebook application developers were getting bought out after only a week of work. So many of the developers thought that maybe they should try to get bought out as well.

How are people finding applications? It seems some people are finding them through news feeds but also some people want to do something specific so they search for the applications. I've found all my apps by my friend's news feeds.

What are the downsides of Facebook applications? The types of information appearing in a news feed is becoming somewhat spammy. Things like someone biting another person as a zombie with an app isn't really going to help others keep track of what is going on in those people's real lives. The news feed only contains so much and a bunch of Facebook only actions are going to clutter the feed.

There was a big discussion lately online on this topic that iLike and many of the popular applications use the spammy tactics for posting to the Facebook news feed. Facebook will kick the application if it spams the news feed without user interaction but even with user interaction, it's still can be annoying to see.

The Facebook photos application was really successful because you could tag your friends in photos. Even though only 1/3rd of people in the Facebook community had added photos, most of the Facebook community had been tagged in a photo.

How do you choose which language to use? PHP is what Facebook supports first and is also what Facebook was written in. Everything should work best in PHP.
What is the ecommerce model for applications? Some of the apps are having people fill out surveys and as a reward they give the user digital rewards on Facebook.

Another thing is affiliate links from Amazon and another that works with iTunes.

How do you design a succesful API and why is it so awesome for Facebook? Facebook hasn't given out any contact information through their API. So it hasn't given out any email addresses or screen names which is good for privacy. But they're giving out all of the other information such as the networks the user is a part of.

What categories of apps are people doing in the room? Comparing photos, business productivity, dating, web presence, a sorting tool by looking at a friends list for scheduling events, professional networking.

Are people working on business productivity and professional networking applications?

Why are we developing for Facebook? Facebook is one of the only sites large enough with an API good enough so that we can actually develop awesome customized features for.

Many of the questions at the forums for developers at Facebook have better answers often.

Best suggestion? Hang out with people that do Facebook apps. Get in the wiki and the IRC.

How many people actually use Facebook to track their friends in this room? Maybe 25% of people raised their hands.

Business productivity apps? The definition of friend on Facebook is very loose so it's hard to categorize friends as coworkers as well. As a result, there are some applications potentials there but people aren't going to Facebook yet to do work.

Companies like Google with Google Docs are probably much better positioned to build the productivity apps than a 1 man team. One guy spent weeks building a complex documents app and it didn't take off. So now he's building a simple photo rating app or something similar.

Facebook presentation 1 at BarCamp

2007-08-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

I was here at BarCampBlock all last night with a couple other guys. I was working on some ShareFlo stuff, one guy was working on the Zoo Facebook application that he wrote and I'm not sure what it was the other guy was working on. But it's been awesome to be surrounded by this much creativity. The people at this event are incredibly passionate about creating startups and building cool things.

I'm currently in a Facebook applications session with a recent Harvard graduate Jeff Gibb discussing some Facebook applications he's built. He built a simple little app last week where a person could pick a picture of an dinosaur and he sent the app to his brother. Since then, more than 500 people are now using the appliation.

But someone in the discussion just raised a good point that we need to know who is accessing our Facebook app. So what he has done is embed a Google Anlytics HTML so that he can get a sense of where the users are coming from. But getting engagement metrics on a Facebook app is difficult and is something that might need to be built by the application builder themselves.

One problem is the TOS for a Facebook app says that you can't run advertisements in your Facebook app. So how do you make money off of it? I think the only way it is beneficial to a company is if the Facebook app isn't pushing ads but is an advertisement itself. Sites like HotOrNot and other companies are using Facebook apps as traffic generating tools.

There is a great opportunity to use Facebook to give away almost a sample of your site.

The first version of the Facebook API was designed for a user to access their data from a third party site. There is always the question for a Facebook app developer is trying to figure out how much to give away.

Chris Messina is talking about how he enjoys using Twitter because it interacts with the outside world and when he was at Magnolia and allowed people to create a Magnolia account within the Facebook app. When the account was created, the data was being pumped out of Facebook. When they finally "grow up and move into the real world" they can go onto a new site or maybe move onto Magnolia.

Facebook has kind of like their own Javascript because of security issues. The reason you're limited in what you can use in Javascript is so that you don't mess with the rest of the page. Facebooks HTML formatting is actually called FTML. Even just creating a clock took a long time because you can't autoplay a flash easily.

Someone just brought up an interesting point that the security problems in Flash are bigger than the ones in Javascript but I can see why Javascript was locked down so much. MySpace was once taken down for a day or two because of a person that created a Javascript hack so the additional security is warranted. Later I'd like to see the sandbox environment improved.

The privacy discussion just came up that installing all these Facebook applications can be a major security issue. No one is sure if Facebook is thinking of privacy of a users data much when it comes to an application. Keeping all those check boxes checked can be a privacy issue for people.

If you're interested in more information about Facebook development, go to Meetup.com for the Facebook developers group.

BarCamp Evening

2007-08-18T22:19:00.000-07:00

It's late at night at BarCampBlock and the party is over. The party was after all the sessions at the Blue Chalk Cafe in down town Palo Alto. I got up this morning at 3AM and it's been none stop but a lot of fun today

I attended some really good discussions today and learned about a couple of new tools that I think I'll be using in the next few days for sure. One was what the last post was about. The other tool was GreaseMonkey which was a tool for manipulating the display and function of an existing website.

Tomorrow there are even more sessions. I'm not sure on what yet. Some of the people are staying over night in the SocialText offices. It's a pretty big office with not much in it so I'm wondering what they use the room for normally.

Oh, cool, Robert Scoble is here...

BarCamp: Session on Selenium by Nelz

2007-08-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

It's lunch now today at BarCamp. I've met a bunch of great people and been in two really awesome sessions so far. The second session I went to was Nelz's session on Selenium which is a tool for Firefox for testing a website. As I was sitting through the presentation I took down some notes and I'll just drop them below. Forgive me for the errors.

Selenium <-- AKA: a cure to mercury poisoning.

Runs across OS's and browser.
Uses Javascript and iFrames to embed a test into your browser. Drives your app. Interact with JS to emulate user actions.
It can control starting the browser and closing it. AUTOMATED TESTING!
Selenium IDE

Has debugging
Easy selection of on page elements
Recording and playback of the tests. Just start the recording, step through the pages and then save the recording. The script of the steps can then be passed onto other developers easily or other people with Selenium to do the test themselves.
Saves tests off in multiple formats such as Ruby, PHP...

Shortcomings of IDE

Firefox only

The recorded session can be played in any browser.

Sometimes thrown off by AJAX events.

No one does RAILs at this presentation.
Tests can be handed off to other people so that they can run the test themselves to see the issue as well. Great for showing the problem.

A script of the test can be exported as Java, C#, HTML, Python, Ruby so that Selenium Remote Control can run the script as part of the main tests.

Doesn't to browser version testing.
"Click and Wait" can have a wait time set for it.
J-Meter can be used for performance testing.
Fitness is another testing tool.
Look into Floyd for testing browser tests. It speaks to the browser via the browser API.

Javascript has limitations because of the security.

PostgreSQL SQL function definition tables

2007-06-03T17:39:00.000-07:00

Last night I was creating a code generator using Code Smith that would create C# functions for every database function in a schema but I needed a SQL statement that would get me the definition of the function. It wasn't obvious how to retrieve the parameters and the return type for the already existing functions that were in the database. At first I thought I would be able to find a column in the database that had the DDL and parse it out for the values I needed but no such column existed.

So here is what I discovered. When a database function is being added, PostgreSQL parses out the database function parameters, return type, namespace, name of the function and body and inserts them into some tables and columns. When the parse of the parameters is done, the parameter names are placed in one column surrounded on the ends by brackets and the parameter types are placed in another column. When the parameter types are stored, they are stored as their numerical representations instead of the names like "integer" and "numeric". Below is a list of some of the fairly commonly used types and their numbers.

1043 char varying
21 smallint
1114 timestamp
23 integer
1700 numeric
20 bigint
25 text
1082 date
16 bool
869 inet
2279 trigger
1790 set of refcursor

If you want to look at a list of all of the functions for a schema, the following SQL query will return the data needed. This SQL query was mainly derived from looking at EMS.

SELECT p.proname AS name, p.oid, p.proargtypes AS args, ds.description , p.prorettype AS rettype,
p.proretset, p.probin, p.proisstrict AS strict, p.prosrc AS body, l.lanname AS lang,
u.usename, p.prosecdef, p.provolatile, p.proisagg, n.nspname, proargnames, p.proargmodes, p.proallargtypes
FROM pg_proc p
LEFT OUTER JOIN pg_description ds ON ds.objoid = p.oid
INNER JOIN pg_namespace n ON p.pronamespace = n.oid
INNER JOIN pg_language l ON l.oid = p.prolang
LEFT OUTER JOIN pg_user u ON u.usesysid = p.proowner
WHERE n.nspname = 'public'
ORDER BY p.proname, n.nspname

"nspname" is the schema name that the functions will be pulled from. The parameters list that has the integer type definitions will be in the "args" column and the parameter names will be in the "proargnames" column. The "body" column contains the body of the function.

I will try to post the Code Smith template that I created for generating the C# classes soon.

Growth of Twitter Response

2007-05-08T18:42:00.000-07:00

Kottke wrote an interesting post today analyzing the growth of Twitter versus Blogger and had some graphs that I thought were interesting.

From the graphs, Blogger has had an amazingly stable growth rate since it's time of inception. I'm really amazed how how consistent their growth has been in the number of messages that are posted with it. (I use blogger as well for my blog.)

For Twitter, it's growth in messages sent was massive over the last few months. Although it's far easier to send a message via Twitter because they're smaller than blog posts, it looks like a lot of people that are signing up for the Twitter service are sticking with it right now. I'm fairly skeptical when it comes to the success of mobile applications like Twitter so I'm surprised at it's level of growth it has been able to achieve. I also wonder what their revenue model is.

Microsoft, Yahoo and Silverlight

2007-05-04T19:53:00.000-07:00

I think Microsoft needs a web success in order to push Silverlight and a massive way to really test and develop it's usage. Having a bunch of Yahoo! applications using Silverlight would be a big help to them and it's already an impressive looking technology but with the backing of the Yahoo! web developers it could be even better. I'm not sure how many Yahoo! web developers use .NET though.

CSS 2 collapse property and how to not use it

2007-04-30T22:59:00.000-07:00

I'm not an expert in using CSS but I can get around for the most part but the other day I needed to hide a section of a document with some Javascript and CSS. My problem was that when I'd use the property

visibility: hidden;

The content that was inside the hidden div tag would disappear but would still take up space on the screen. So then I found the CSS 2 collapse tag for use with tables.

visibility: collapse;

But the problem with this is that it's not supported in IE6 and that it also requires using tables. The nice thing about the collapse property is that it hides the content inside the tag but also causes the space that the content used to take up to disappear.

But to get around this and have a tag hide it's contents and not take up space on a page, use

visibility: hidden;
display: none;

To show the tag again, use

visibility: visible;
display: inline;

Extending the Windows Vista trial to 120 days from 30 days

2007-01-27T21:14:00.000-08:00

Windows Vista is the .NET developers platform. It supports .NET from the start and in the coming years I believe Windows Vista will be what causes many developers to start switching development from the standards Windows API's over to .NET and it's libraries as the install base grows.

With that though, I'm sure there are still many developers that just haven't got around to upgrading to Vista so Coding Horror had this great post on how to extend the Windows Vista trial to 120 days which is 90 days more than the original trial allows. I don't actually know if this was intentional by Microsoft and this will be fixed with a patch later but hopefully this remains a feature.

No hacks required. This is an official, supported operation directly from Microsoft.
To extend the grace period another 30 days, simply start a command prompt as Administrator, and issue this command:
slmgr -rearm
Reboot for the change to take effect, and voila, you have 30 more days. You can only extend three times, so the total grace period for a Vista evaluation is 120 days. You do, however, need to be careful that you've installed the correct edition of Vista. At the end of that 120 day grace period, you'll have to pony up a license fee for the edition of Vista you've installed.

I will definitely be trying this in the next week or so. Now all I need to do is find a link for the download of Windows Vista trial.

Beating Google search engine results like Paul Mendoza!

2007-01-27T00:24:00.000-08:00

Lately I've become interested with where I rank on Google for searches. For a long time, I was interested with one particular metric and it was the search for "C# blog" and whether or not I was on the first page. For Google I sit right at the top of the second or sometimes the bottom of the first page. I really don't know what changes this on such a daily basis although I think it's based on which server is serving the content to me.

But I've come across some handy sites and things you should try for your blog or website if you're interested in this as well.

Google PageRank

First, find out what your website's Google Pagerank is. Google PageRank is how Google identifies how important your page is. I'm actually sure that there are decimals for this value but it's on a 1 - 10 scale, 10 being the most popular. My blog rates about a 5 as well as FilePhantom.com but they're linked to by other websites.

Links

Google rates your site's importance based on how many people are linking to it.

For my blog though, anytime I make a comment anyplace on the internet, I always make sure to include a link back to my website. I don't actually know if Google has technology do differentiate a comment link and a non-comment link but I always make sure to link back to my blog. I'm hoping that this has some sort of impact on my Google rating.

Google Webmaster Sitemaps

Google Webmaster sitemaps tool is a great tool to analyze the performance of a site in Google in depth down to the level of seeing where dead links are in a site, page performance, queries people use when they find your page and a whole bunch more. I found this about two weeks ago and I find myself checking it far too often trying to figure out why someone found my site one way and not another way.

Finally....

Write on topics that people are searching for the most

If I find I'm getting a bunch of traffic for a particular blog post, I try to write another blog post on that same topic but with a different twist. Content is king and this strategy generally seems to work for me.

So what works for you?

Example.com for developers

2007-01-25T20:42:00.000-08:00

I was reading through some of .NET Slave's old posts and he had a post on domain names that are used while developing sites that are used as fillers. Apparently Example.com is a reserved domain name for developers such that going to the website http://www.example.com results in a page that says it's a development page. I suggest you check out his blog post for more information on this cool Internet feature.

AJAX for the masses

2007-01-24T13:54:00.000-08:00

The simpler something is to do for developers, the more developers that will pickup the skills to do it. We have reached a point I believe in which it has become incredibly simple for the majority of web programmers to quickly design complex AJAX features for pages quickly and easily.

AJAX has been relatively difficult for most web developers to create. Either you need to learn a totally new language to have good support like Ruby on Rails which really is a whole framework in and of itself or you need to know how to program in JavaScript as well as whatever backend coding you do. Finding an advanced JavaScript coder that is also skilled with the backend coding that is required to implement AJAX features if often difficult if nearly impossible for most companies to find.

But with the release of Microsoft’s AJAX toolset yesterday, a programmer working on a web application now doesn’t need to know any JavaScript in order to get the AJAX features working quickly in their existing applications. What this means is that in the coming months, many websites that don’t had the budgets to do R&D into AJAX like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have will now be able to easily and quickly upgrade their existing ASP.NET applications to use many new AJAX technologies without having to hire AJAX experts.

As a result of this ease of use, Microsoft’s investment in AJAX may have been the best technology investment they have made in a while. In order to use Microsoft’s AJAX libraries, the web application must run on IIS using ASP.NET pages. IIS has to run on a Windows machine and as a result, developers are going to want to use Microsoft’s ASP.NET technologies which in turn are going to sell more and more of their Windows Server machines.

At this point from what I’ve seen, no other web development framework offers the level of AJAX support that ASP.NET now offers and none of them probably will for at least six months while they try to catch up to it’s features. While most frameworks do offer some good but basic level of support for simple AJAX page features, almost none offer the number of features that the new Microsoft AJAX Control Toolkit offers. The result of using these new tools is clean code that lacks massive amounts of messy JavaScript to do the types of features which used to take pages of code which can now be accomplished in just a couple lines of code with the Microsoft AJAX tools. This is highly appealing to developers building large and small websites.

In the coming years, if Microsoft includes a tighter integration of their AJAX solutions into their ASP.NET web solutions, this could be as big of an advancement as HTML was to websites.

Did you know? ASP.NET AJAX was released

2007-01-23T21:28:00.000-08:00

I feel like I was just spammed on my RSS reader about the release today of ASP.NET AJAX. The screenshot on the left is a picture from Google Reader of some of the feed titles. Since I subscribe to a pretty large number of .NET developers and apparently ASP.NET developers, today was pretty eventful for them I guess. I looked over the release though and it doesn't really seem like anything new has been added to the release between the last version and the new release version that makes me think there is anything that special going on.

I've actually been very happy so far with the ASP.NET AJAX libraries that were in beta so for the last few months as I've had almost no issues with them at all. If you haven't had a chance to try the ASP.NET AJAX libraries, I highly recommend you try it out. It's incredibly simple compared to some others that are on there and if you're actually creating your own JavaScript, the new libraries and tools are incredibly simple to use in comparison. Now, it's not incredibly simple to setup and integrate but it's leaps and bounds beyond manually doing it with JavaScript.

Here is a neat little suggestion for you when you're starting to work with it. Just put your ScriptManager control that every AJAX using page needs in the Master Page for your site. That way you don't have to declare it on every page. Although this may incure a slight overhead to the page, it's probably minimal.

And if you want an awesome sample, David Barkol posted a great little sample site that he made using the new ASP.NET AJAX extensions. It's a very good sample site for the types of things you can do quickly with ASP.NET AJAX and he gives out the code for it as well.

Shipping isn't enough

2007-01-22T21:09:00.000-08:00

I have been working a little bit recently on the new version of File Phantom but I've been working way way way more on the currently released version but I'm not creating bug fixes for it or creating patches. I'm working on marketing or better documentation or the website for the product or refining the payment system to handle the transactions better or any number of mundane, back end tasks that no one is going to be awesomely impressed with but it's a part of the process of launching code. When I started building File Phantom, I did it because I thought it would be a cool programming project to work on. I do very little programming for File Phantom compared to what I used to do. It's all part of what it takes to create a product and ship it and then support it.

Coding Horror has a great post on shipping code. He writes...

A smart software developer knows that there's no point in writing code if it's code that nobody will see, code that nobody will use, code that nobody will ultimately benefit from. Why build a permanently vacant house?
A smart software developer realizes that their job is far more than writing code and shipping it; their job is to build software that people will actually want to use. That encompasses coding, sure, but it also includes a whole host of holistic, non-coding activities that are critical to the overall success of the software. Things like documentation, interaction design, cultivating user community, all the way up to the product vision itself. If you get that stuff wrong, it won't matter what kind of code you've written.
If, like Rich Skrenta, you want to work on software that people want to use, realize that it's part of your job to make that software worth using.

But if you don't have good code, the rest is all for nothing.

Flickr success from Tara Hunt

2007-01-22T20:55:00.000-08:00

If you don't read Tara Hunt's blog and you're building some sort of web application or trying to figure out how to market one, you're really missing out. She's probably one of the premier bloggers on Web 2.0. She wrote an awesome article today on Flickr and their success that you should check out as well.

This is a website. A website. A mere tool!

But is it?

Flickr has mojo. They have alot of it. In fact, the site oozes it…but it isn’t really the layout or much of anything to do with the programming…that’s just a part of it. It’s everything that goes into it. When I started to use Flickr in early 2005, I could feel the “soul” of the site instantly.

Read the rest

Long default document lists really slow IIS for default pages

2007-01-22T20:46:00.001-08:00

I find this to be amazing. I never realized that IIS worked like how Thomas Deml describes but I'm going to be making sure my web applications are optimized tonight probably for this.

IIS will read the default document list and check file for file if the document exists in the physical directory of your site or vdir. IIS executes the document as soon as it finds the first match. You can imagine that this is pretty expensive. In the above case, supposing default.htm is the only default document that exists in your sites root directory, IIS would check five times until it finds default.htm. And this happens for every request!

Read the blog post

File Phantom is finally on Bits Du Jour

2007-01-21T23:27:00.000-08:00

File Phantom is on Bits Du Jour right now with only 22 hours and 22 minutes left on the sale for the software which is selling for the highly discounted price of $15.98. For about the last month, maybe more, even before we were launching the product back in December, our goal was to get File Phantom on Bits Du Jour and I'm very glad that we've finally got the product on the website.

If you haven't had a chance to check out File Phantom, there is a demo on the File Phantom website that can be downloaded but make sure that if you like the product you buy it today otherwise you will need to pay the full price later for it which is normally $39.95.

53 CSS Techniques You can't live without

2007-01-21T15:28:00.000-08:00

Smashing Magazine blog just created this awesome list of 53 CSS techniques that looks like it will come in quite handy later on.

Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time - of course, if you are able to find them in time. Below you’ll find a list of techniques we , as web-architects, really couldn’t live without. They are essential and they indeed make our life easier. Let’s take a look at 53 CSS-based techniques you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites.

1. CSS Based Navigation

2. Navigation Matrix Reloaded

3. CSS Tabs
Read the rest....

Refresh ATLAS AJAX UpdatePanel via Javascript

2007-01-21T15:06:00.000-08:00

I just saw this excellent little post by Raj Kaimal on how to refresh an Microsoft AJAX (formerly ATLAS) UpdatePanel by using JavaScript. If you use Microsoft AJAX, this is a great blog to subscribe to. Raj Kaimal has some really useful advice on implementing Microsoft AJAX features.

At some point if you're working with the UpdatePanel, you're going to want to do this. I once needed to do a bunch of processing on a server and I wanted the page to check the server every couple of seconds to see if the actions had been completed yet but I didn't want to reload the entire page each time so I used something like this.

I have seen this asked a couple of times in the newsgroups hence this post. A simple way of refreshing an UpdatePanel using JavaScript is to add a HiddenField to the page, change its value using JS and then have the HiddenField raise a postback event...

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IE Developer Toolbar beta 3 released

2007-01-21T14:50:00.000-08:00

I've been using the Firefox developer tools called Aardvark Firefox extension for the last six months while doing HTML coding and I've found it extremely useful for analyzing a page I've created of the pages of other developers.

It sounds like IE may have created another tool that might be more useful to HTML and CSS coders though for their browser which I'm very excited about. It's called the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar and it's in it's third beta. It's still in beta and it's not stable yet so it probably shouldn't be installed for production use but it's something to be aware of.

The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding Web pages. These features enable you to:

Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS Web feed links.
Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.

The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.

This Beta 3 version of the toolbar contains functionality and stability enhancements over previous versions, including:
Style Tracer: Right mouse click on a style value for an element and select Style Tracer to find the style rule that is effecting that value.
CSS Selector Matches: View a report of all style rules set and how many times they are used on the current page.
View Source: View the formatted and syntax colored source of the original page, currently rendered page, element or element with the styles that are effecting it.

Download here

OOXML standard has problems with date the year 1900

2007-01-19T22:59:00.000-08:00

Microsoft released a 6,000 page standard for their new Office XML format, also known as OOXML. From what I’ve read about the process to get it approved, it’s going to take about six months and that’s rushed. So the standard which they are releasing in their software will be approved months after their product actually ships.

And now get this! The standard has some problems with it that I think should have been fixed before it was released to the approval process. One example is the year 1900 and leap years as O'Reily writes on his blog. Can this actually get through the approval process? I’m curious what happens if it doesn’t make it through the approval process? Will Microsoft modify any of it in order to get it to comply with the requirements for approval? What would that mean for the versions of Office they have already released to the market?

There is a good summary of what some of the issues with it are right now here.

On the leap year issue, I think this was also something the Joel on Software worked on at Microsoft as a manager on Excel. He even met with Bill Gates on the topic and it was the hardest question Bill Gates could ask Joel. It's actually a pretty entertaining read.

Finding beta testers

2007-01-19T22:46:00.000-08:00

MyMicroISV has some great tips today on getting people to test your software beta. I experienced some issues with this when I was developing File Phantom during it’s beta period but I found many of my beta testers in my circle of friends and online contacts. This isn't always the best way to find beta testers though because friends and family aren't always the target market for the product you may be building. It could have been for File Phantom so I was glad they were testing it and I received a lot of really good feedback from those that were able to beta test.

Be sure that if someone does beta test your software and finds a bug that's good, make sure that when you finally release the product to at least give them a free copy of your software because hopefully they'll tell others about what you've built and will also beta test it again later.

My favorite point that he makes is the following.

Make getting the beta as painless as possible. That means no registration form, no required email, no hoops to jump through. Your beta is competing for attention against a thousand others. Beta testers are doing you a huge favor - you owe them, not the other way around.

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