Denham McCall's Blog

Vertical ticker in tooltip

2010-10-01T21:14:00.000+01:00

One of the features I was working on recently was to allow a user to be able to hover over a status label and to show a tooltip. So I ended up using the popular jquery.tooltip plugin Fairly straight forward. But as we all know this evolved to become a little more complex...

The issue with the tooltip was the data being displayed in the tooltip was quite lengthy and therefore the tooltip's stretched off the page. So an idea was to show a fixed height tooltip and as the user hovered over the status the tooltip data would start to scroll upwards, and repeat when it reached the end of the list.

After searching around a bit I discovered Tadas Juozapaitis's excellent jquery.ticker plugin. So I then tried fruitlessly to get them to work together. Eventually I then decided to alter the tooltip code, and inject some of the ticker code within it so that I could force the two to work together.

The result was this. Here is the hybrid plugin

The tooltip now scrolls through the list contained within the tooltip and then continues from the beginning again when it reaches the end.

This plugin is really just a hybrid, so thanks to the excellent work done by JÃ¶rn Zaefferer (tooltip) and Tadas Juozapaitis (vTicker). Thanks guys!

Blogger-droid

2010-07-30T18:01:00.001+01:00

Just installed Blogger-droid off the android market place.

So this is a test. :)

Published with Blogger-droid v1.4.8

AOP (Aspect Orientated Programming) with Sprint.Net

2010-01-14T16:15:00.000Z

Sprint.Net provides very good documentation regarding Aspect Orientated Programming (Aop). It's really a very nice way of separating logging, transaction and performance monitoring functionality from your code.

I would suggest anyone who's interested to read this article

Removing duplicate files from iTunes library

2010-01-02T18:35:00.000Z

Found this tool Dupe Eliminator 9.2 which you can get for free if you use trialpay to purchase stuff from argos and many other providers.

Webcontrol being serialized by ASP.NET but not added to Session state

2009-12-22T12:09:00.000Z

I had an issue where I had a property on a webcontrol that was being added to the session state (StateService). The property object was marked as serializable. But for some reason ASP.NET was trying to add the webcontrol to the session by serializing it and a serialization exception was being thrown.

After quite a bit of investigation I found this very useful article.

In conclusion, on one of my child properties there was an event which was being assigned to an event handler within the page load of the webcontrol. Applying the workaround mentioned in the article solved my problem.

Invalid ViewState... ScriptResource.axd and Performance issues of late

2009-12-01T09:44:00.000Z

I've been looking recently into performance issues we were experiencing on one of our websites. This meant delving back into IIS application pools, running red-gate memory profiler and generally having a blast ;)

The code base is part legacy code, which has not been extended correctly. The memory profiling highlighted one key factor which I think is vital, and is stressed in multiple performance articles scattered across the web.

Be careful with session state, if it's too big your system is going to suffer

The code base has allot of complex objects which in turn have complex children, these are placed into session state and hang around eating up the w3wp.exe memory. All the session objects are run in-proc which is necessary because the objects have components that cannot be serialized, so extracting the session state to an out of proce provider was not an option.

We ended up increasing the memory on the server, to buy us sometime to reduce the complexity of the session objects and find alternative methods of clearing the session state periodically.

Another issue on the same server was we were seeing allot of Invalid ViewState error messages in the application event log. I read this article which pointed my focus in the right direction.

Basically the DOCTYPE's on my website pages were set to use strict XHTML, and the ScriptResource.axd which contains all client side AJAX javascript was being incorrectly parsed by the browser. Therefore when sent back to the server the viewstate was invalid, and so we got the error.

The solution was to change the browser to use the HTML DOCTYPE. This however messed up the display of the website, which I'm currently looking into now.

_PublishedWebsites missing when using MSBuild

2009-11-19T11:46:00.002Z

Had some issues with msbuild this morning. The build was successful but when I looked into the drop location, there was no folder _PublishedWebsites only a list of all the bin dll's.

This was the most useful link I found which explains how to change your projects csproj file in order to force msbuild to create and dump website files and folders into the drop locations _PublishedWebsites directory. (Basically so that msbuild knows the project is a web application)

All you need to do is in the csproj file is to include this line:

<Import 
Project="
    $(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\
    Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\
    WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" 
Condition="" />

Vista wireless internet connection not working

2009-11-18T21:31:00.000Z

I noticed periodically that my wireless connection to the internet was being dropped on my Windows Vista laptop, which only would work again after a restart.

After googling around a bit, the common problem seemed to be that Vista try’s to manage your power and one of the features is it will turn off the wireless adapter to save precious power.

So here are some simple steps to disable this feature, and allow yourself to freely browse the internet wirelessly from your vista PC.

Select start -> Control Panel -> Network and Sharing Centre
Then under tasks on the left click Manage Network Connections
Right click your wirless network connection, and select properties. (Click continue to ensure you allow Vista permission to continue)
Click configure, then click the Power Management tab
Untick Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power

Disable the Microsoft Application Error Reporting (DW20.exe)

2009-11-18T12:49:00.000Z

Hi

We have a web application that writes to a network path, and to cut a long story short that path changed because of a hardware failure. This however brought up some strange behaviour...

On the machine that hosts the web application that is trying to write to the network share, we noticed it started to run very slowly. After looking at the task manager we found a few instances of DW20.exe hogging the memory.

Google told me that DW20.exe was actually Microsofts error reporting process. I then found this very useful link which tells you how to disable it.

After killing the DW20.exe processes however the machine had then run out of disk space??? I ran windirstat on the machine to see where all the space had gone. Turns out it had been used by some .dmp files in windows\temp directory. These files were generated also by DW20.exe.

So in summary I'm not so sure why Microsoft's error reporting tool would use so much memory and create dump files that big, however my solution was to disable the error reporting, and kill all the DW20.exe processes and delete the .dmp files.

Inversion of Control (Ioc) alternative to spring

2009-11-12T17:08:00.000Z

Came across this dependency injection framework called Winter4.Net which claims to be quick and lightweight.

I've messed around with it a bit today and it is very easy to use.

Check it out here: http://www.winter4.net/

Reading files into byte[]

2009-11-10T14:24:00.001Z

Thought I'd share this: http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/readbinary.html

Some cool JS stuff from google

2009-11-06T16:27:00.000Z

Google has open sourced some of their internal tools for JavaScript development, which they are calling "Closure".

You can find more details here

I particularly like their compression tool Closure Compiler

Getting Toad 9.7.2.5 to work on x64 XP machine

2009-11-05T12:36:00.000Z

Once you've installed Toad into C:\Program Files (x86)\, then copy the entire Quest Software directory from C:\Program Files (x86)\Quest Software to C:\Program Files\Quest Software

Lastly create a desktop short cut to C:\Program Files\Quest Software\Toad for Oracle\toad.exe

Toad should then work correctly.

How to get ASP.NET 2.0 app on an x64 development machine to work with Oracle 10.2.0.2 32 bit client

2009-11-05T12:30:00.002Z

I had a problem where I got a new machine. My previous workstation was XP 32bit OS, and my new machine was XP 64bit. I had installed the 32bit client, and the ODP.NET data access components, but was still getting the error:

ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified

Even though the tnsnames.ora and sqlnet.ora files were 100% correct. I then came upon these two URL's:

1.http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/dotnet/col/odt_faq.html (search for ORA-12154)
2.http://joeydotnet.com/blog/archive/2007/01/24/19.aspx

After that I create a metalink oracle account and my manager authorised it. I then download this patch:

10.2.0.1.0 Patch 6 (10.2.0.1.6P) 32-Bit Patch 5059238. URL: http://updates.oracle.com/ARULink/PatchDetails/process_form?patch_num=5239698

After unzipping it I made a backup of C:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\bin and then copied the patch files (p5059238_10201_WINNT\5059238\files\bin) into the bin folder and overwrote the dll's already in the client bin folder

Then fired up VS 2008 and executed my web app locally and it all worked.

Let's hope this helps some others.

Remember classes used in a workflow must be marked as Serializable

2009-10-30T09:47:00.002Z

Silly mistake but I got this error the other day:

Event A on interface type B for instance id C cannot be delivered

This post reminded me to mark classes as serializable.

It's been a while

2009-10-29T11:01:00.000Z

I've not used this blog for sometime now. Been busy working to hard. and I've just not had the time to add anything recently.

That's about to change!

Personally I'd like to keep this blog updated at least once a day. The info I'll publish will be about software development, using agile methods, and anything else that I think may be interesting.

Hopefully within a few months this blog may become a useful reference for myself and more importantly to others who find my posts interesting, so please feel free to leave comments.

Until next time...

Outlook inbox spamed to many messages

2009-02-24T11:10:00.003Z

Left log4net smtpappender on when I went on leave for a week. Unfortunately the system went wrong and I now have a couple of GIG's of data being downloaded into my inbox, which through Outlook is incredibly slow.

I set-up a rule to move the problem messages into deleted items, and I've also changed the "Connected to Microsoft Exchange" to only download headers. This seems to have sped up the influx of messages into my inbox, so that I can eventually delete them.

Very frustrating. Not sure if there is any other way to stop Outlook from downloading to much data. Any comments would be appreciated.

Free subversion hosting

2008-12-08T21:02:00.002Z

Found this cool website that allows you host up to 5 svn repositories, and supports xp agile project management.

The site is http://www.xp-dev.com

Convert XML to a DataSet and visa versa in C#

2008-11-27T17:12:00.004Z

Simple... but for my own reference:

/// 
/// Convert the xml string into a DataSet object
/// 
/// The xml string to convert
/// The DataSet instance
public DataSet ConvertXmlToDataSet(string xml)
{
using (StringReader reader = new StringReader(xml))
{
using (XmlTextReader xmlReader = new XmlTextReader(reader))
{
DataSet dataSet = new DataSet();
dataSet.ReadXml(xmlReader);
return dataSet;
}
}
}

/// 
/// Converts a DataSet into an xml string representation
/// 
/// The DataSet to convert
/// The xml string representation of the DataSet
public string ConvertDataSetToXml(DataSet dataSet)
{
using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter())
{
using (XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(writer))
{
dataSet.WriteXml(xmlTextWriter);
return writer.ToString();
}
}
}

JQuery and ASP.NET Ajax ready and pageLoad Solution

2008-11-07T10:44:00.002Z

I had a problem the other day with the JQuery ready function not firing on an Aspc post back. I found this useful article

The problem seems to be that the jQuery ready function is not called on an async postback. The pageLoad() ASP.NET ajax method is called however.

It seems that ASP.NET ajax and jQuery don’t get along together when it comes to the DOM load event, and ASP.NET ajax takes preference to the jQuery ready function.

So in short replace all jQuery: $(document).ready() instances in your code with function pageLoad(). This I think is a more elegant solution then intercepting the end_request event and altering the master page.

Generic function to obtain data from a DataRow

2008-11-05T14:16:00.004Z

Sometimes it may be useful to have one generic function that can parse data from a DataRow column into the type you require.

For example: Perhaps you have an Employee object with the properties Id, Name and Salary, of types int, string and decimal.

Here is an example of some code to populate a list of Employee objects using a generic function.

public void LoadData()
{
IList employees = new List();
DataTable result = // Get data from SP
foreach (DataRow row in result.Rows)
{
Employee employee = new Employee();
employee.Id = GetColumnData<int>("EMP_ID", row, null);
employee.Name = GetColumnData<string>("EMP_NAME", row, "Unknown");
employee.Salary = GetColumnData<decimal>("EMP_SALARY", row, null);
employees.Add(employee);
}
}

/// 
/// Gets data from a column checks it can convert it correctly if no data or invalid casting the default
/// value is returned
/// 
/// The type of data to convert too
/// The name of the column in the row
/// The row containing the data
/// The default value
/// The data or the default value
public static T GetColumnData<T>(string columnName, DataRow row, object defaultValue)
{
if (row.Table.Columns.Contains(columnName) && row[columnName] != DBNull.Value)
{
string value = row[columnName].ToString();
TypeConverter converter = TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(typeof(T));
object result = converter.ConvertFromString(value);
try
{
return (T)result;
}
catch (InvalidCastException)
{
return (T)defaultValue;
}
}
else
{
return (T)defaultValue;
}
}

TryParse functionality on Generic objects

2008-11-03T17:22:00.003Z

John Liu has a nice code snippet on implementing the TryParse functionality on generic objects.

Using JavaScript or C# to calculate feet and inches to metres and visa versa

2008-10-31T15:07:00.010Z

Here are some code snippets for JavaScript and C# that show how to convert from say for example 26' 5" into metres 8.05m. The snippets also show converting metres to foot and inches.;

HTML:

<input id="feet" type="text" onkeyup="calculate 'feet')" /> '
<input id="inches" type="text" onkeyup="calculate('inches')" /> "
<input id="metres" type="text" onkeyup="calculate('metres')" />

JavaScript:

<script type="text/javascript">
function calculate(src) {
switch (src) {
case feetCtrl:
calculateFeetAndInchesToMetres();
break;
case inchesCtrl:
calculateFeetAndInchesToMetres();
break;
case metresCtrl:
calculateMetresToFeetAndInches();
break;
}
}

function calculateFeetAndInchesToMetres() {
var feet = $get("feet").value;
var inches = $get("inches").value;
var totalInches = feet * 12;
totalInches = totalInches + (inches * 1);
var cm = totalInches * 2.54;
var metres = cm / 100;
$get("metres").value = metres.toFixed(2);
}

function calculateMetresToFeetAndInches() {
var metres = $get("metres").value;
var metreInches = metres * 39.370078740157477;
$get("feet").value = Math.floor(metreInches / 12);
$get("inches").value = Math.floor(metreInches % 12);
}
</script>

Same functionality in C#

/// 
/// Gets the feet and inches representation of a metric value
/// 
/// The metres to use
/// The correct display string
public static string GetFeetAndInches(double metres)
{
Hashtable values = GetFeetAndInchesValues(metres);
double feet = (double)values["Feet"];
int inches = (int)values["Inches"];
StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
string feetText = feet.ToString();
string[] data = feetText.Split('.');
if (data.Length > 0)
{
feetText = data[0];
}
result.Append(feetText);
result.Append("'");
if (inches > 0)
{
result.Append(" ");
result.Append(inches);
result.Append("\"");
}

return result.ToString();
}

/// 
/// Gets the feet and inches of a metric value
/// 
/// The metres to use
/// An array of feet, inches
public static Hashtable GetFeetAndInchesValues(double metres)
{
Hashtable result = new Hashtable();
double metreInches = metres * MetreToInchesRatio;
double feet = metreInches / 12;
int inches = Convert.ToInt32(metreInches % 12);
result.Add("Feet", feet);
result.Add("Inches", inches);

return result;
}

/// 
/// Gets the metre equivalent of feet and inches combination
/// 
/// The foot value
/// The inches value
/// The metre value
public static double GetMetresFromFeetAndInches(double feet, int inches)
{
// Sourced from: http://sg.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070403095853AA3FKJZ
double totalInches = feet * 12;
totalInches += inches;
double cm = totalInches * 2.54;
double metres = cm / 100;

return metres;
}

Got this error: syntax error. _getAbbrMonthIndex using auto complete extender

2008-10-08T15:51:00.000+01:00

All the solutions I searched for suggested there was an error with my JavaScript or code. They were right!

My problem rose because I had a control on a page which had a script manager proxy control and a bunch of autocompleteextender control's, these extender controls used a scriptpath that pointed to a static web method (page method) on the page that retrieved the nessacary data.

The error arose becuase I was adding to my script manager proxy class a reference to the same page method programtically in the page load method. Anyway removing the programatic inclusion to the script manager solved the problem.

Thought this may help others debug any similar scenarios.

Export to Excel using ASP.NET

2008-10-01T12:46:00.007+01:00

I wanted to create a very simple excel export, from an asp.net 2.0 web application, that would take data and display it somewhat like this:

I used the following C# code. Which can be place within a LinkButton, or Button click event handler:

byte[] data = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("Column 1 Column 2
Data 1 Data 2
Data 3 Data 4
");
Response.Clear();
Response.ClearHeaders();
Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel";
Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "filename=test.xls");
Response.BinaryWrite(data);
Response.End();

Column 1	Column 2
Data 1	Data 2
Data 3	Data 4

As you can see I've used an HTML table as the source of the data. You can also style this and Excel will display it correctly using any CSS you provide.

The name of the file is also set to "test.xls" using the header content-disposition.