Jitbit Software Blog

ASP.NET Image Resizing - out of memory problem

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:50:00 +0000

Another post for ASP.NET developers reading this blog. If you think these posts do not belong here, please leave a comment, and I'll consider moving my development articles to a separate blog.

Any ASP.NET developer who tries to create "on-the-fly" image-thumbnails in his web-application, sooner or later faces this crappy annoying "out of memory" exception, that is thrown when you use Image.FromStream or Image.GetThumbnailImage. Sometimes it is thrown when working with big (>5Mb) images, sometimes it's thrown for all images.

Today we faced it in all three of our web-based projects - the ASP.NET forum application, the helpdesk software and the web-based CRM. I spent hours googling for a solution and found nothing. Actually I did found a million suggestions (and even an article claiming that this is a bug in GDI+) - one suggested using Graphics.DrawImage instead of Image.GetThumbnailImage, another suggested creating a temp file first and then load Image from it...

None worked.

Also I found it strange that the error was thrown only under an IIS server, the Visual Studio's built-in development server worked fine...

Anyway. GDI+ (that WinAPI thing that the .NET imaging classes rely on) appears to have some difficulties when working with images in memory, without an actual file. I found a solution, even though it seems more like black magic to me:

Rule 1: When using the Image.FromStream method keep the stream open for the lifetime of your Image.

Close the stream only after Disposing the image object. Yes, this might require some refactoring, but you really have no choice.

Image img = Image.FromStream(mystream, true, false);
//... some code
Image thumb = img.GetThumbnailImage(w, h, null, IntPtr.Zero);
//... some code
img.Dispose();
mystream.Close();

This will help you fight the exception when calling GetThumbnailImage. In case you really need to close that stream while continuing working with the image, consider using Image.Clone(), but I'm not sure this will help...

Rule 2: Important - set validateImageData to false when calling the FromStream method.

Even after fixing your code with "rule 1" you might still get the exception while calling FromStream on large images. This one I actually found on the Microsoft's website - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/831419... Anyway, here's the code:

//note the third parameter set to "false"!!!
Image img = Image.FromStream(mystream, true, false);

Another version of WYSIWYG BBCode editor

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:02:00 +0000

Our little freebie - WYSIWYG BBCode editor - has been updated to version 1.3 which now supports lists by utilizing the "[ul]" and "[li]" pseudo-tags. Grab it if you need it. If you don't - forgive us for this totally useless article. We've been really busy for the last two weeks, no time for a "real" blog post.

Get it here

Please welcome: Hide-Files

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:09:00 +0000

After three months of hard work we are happy to announce that we have finished the acquisition of Hides-Files - a great tool to hide files and folders on a Windows machine. This tool does not require any background services or drivers to hide files, works fine without administrator permissions and is fully compatible with both Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Please welcome the new version (2.0) and the new redesigned Hide-Files website that has been launched today.

Hide-Files - check it out.

New version of WYSIWYG BBCode Editor

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:30:00 +0000

Just a short note that our side-project - a free browser based WYSIWYG BBCode Editor has been updated to version 1.1. We've fixed some CSS stuff for the IE7 compatibility.

Macro Recorder: another trigger example - wait for pixel

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:48:00 +0000

Another example of "triggering" events with our Macro Recorder software using its "IF" statement. Below is a macro-script that makes Macro Recorder wait until a pixel at the given coordinates becomes white. Since Macro Recorder does not have a "wait for pixel" command, we have to use the IF statement:

LABEL : start
IF PIXEL COLOR EQUALS : 351 : 535 : 16777215
GOTO : end
ENDIF
DELAY : 2000
GOTO : start
LABEL : end
MESSAGE BOX : Woohoo, the pixel is white. Exiting...

This macro checks every 2 seconds, and if the pixel at the coordinates "351:535" becomes white, the macro exits. Simply save the above text as a plain-text file with a ".mcr" extension and load it into the Macro Recorder to test how it works (or simply select and copy-paste the text above straight into the Macro Recorder).

WYSIWYG BBCode editor

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:30:00 +0000

If you follow us at the Jitbit's Twitter account, you might already know that a couple of days ago I was searching for a WYSIWYG BBCode editor. I never found any. So we decided to build our own. Free and open-sourced.

Now I'm happy to announce that the first version has arrived. We are releasing a browser-based WYSIWYG BBCode editor to the public. It's called "Jitbit WYSIWYG-BBCode v1.0" (no surprise here), it is totally free and licensed under BSD. Feel free to use it in your projects - both free and commercial.

A modification of this editor is used in Jitbit products - the forum software and the helpdesk ticket system.

You are welcome to download Jitbit WYSIWYG-BBCode here: http://www.jitbit.com/files/wysiwyg-bbcode.zip

Email support vs. Phone support #2

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 07:16:00 +0000

Today we had a phone call from a potential customer, who was trying to install our ASP.NET forum software and requested to speak to someone from the development team. John (that's not his real name) has refused to specify his questions by email, asking for an online skype/gtalk text-chat at least.

This is totally understandable. But is it possible to provide great support without any phone calls? Yes. And email support can be even better and faster.

This is my second article on this topic and this is the second time I strongly recommend reading a great blog post called Why would you want to call me? on the 37signals company blog.

To be honest and straightforward, here are some facts about email support at Jitbit Software and why we prefer it over phone support:

We do the support ourselves. We do not outsource it to some huge overseas call-center in Philippines. These call-centers, by the way, do nothing but log your request into some ticket system if your question is not present in their FAQ-trots.

Support is done by developers. If you send us a tricky question about Jitbit Helpdesk software you can be 100% sure that your question goes straight to the helpdesk developer. To the real guy who writes the code and designs the database. And we guarantee, that when he makes a break from his code-writing and database-designing, he will find some time to dig into your question and answer your email.

We may be in a different time zone with you. Which makes a phone call next to impossible. And the amount of time that we spend negotiating and scheduling the call - can be spent answering your question instead.

"All fixed, please download the latest version" - that is the best answer you can get for a feature-request or a bug-report. Is it possible by phone? No. Can you request a refund by phone? Yes. But can you actually get your refund by phone? No. A person who answers your call is definitely not the person who makes the decisions you need. More likely - it's a person who sends an email to the decision-maker, at best.

Jitbit acquires HidesFiles.com

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:07:00 +0000

Just a small note to announce that Jitbit Software is in the process of acquiring HidesFiles.com - a great tool to hide sensitive files and folders.

We are currently finalizing our agreements. A new improved version of the tool will be released within a month, fully integrated into the Jitbit family of products.

Jitbit Macro Recorder and locking a workstation

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 11:43:00 +0000

From time to time we receive support questions, asking if a macro, created with our Macro Recorder can run while the computer is locked.

The answer is "yes" and "no". It depends on a specific macro you recorded.

If your macro automates user actions, such as playing back recorded mouse movements, clicking some objects, sending recorded keystrokes or emulating user input in some other way - this macro won't work. Because even if the Macro Recorder will send mouse-moves and keyboard strokes to the computer, the computer won't respond, since all we have is a locked-screen.

But if your macro consists of system commands, like "delete file", or "shutdown computer", or "establish a VPN-connection", or "run a program" etc. etc. - this macro should run fine. You can create a scheduled task that launches such a macro (or an EXE-compiled macro, which is preferred to save performance), and the task should run even if computer is locked (having some user logged-in though).

ASP.NET Forms Authentication "Remember Me"

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:24:00 +0000

Another post for ASP.NET developers. By the way if you think these posts do not belong to this blog, please leave a comment, and I'll consider moving my development articles to a separate blog.

Today I needed to set up a "remember me" functionality for Jitbit HelpDesk and Jitbit CRM login pages. If you ever tried to achieve this using .NET's FormsAuthentication, you might have noticed that... it's just not working. Even if you pass the "createPersistentCookie" parameter value as "true" when initializing FormsAuthentication - the cookie still lives for a limited time only - the time specified as the Forms-Authentication timeout in "web.config". Then the cookie dies.

The only solution was to increase that timeout value in web.config. And it's not a very good idea because of the security reasons.

The solution is to set the authentication cookie timeout explicitly. See the code, which is pretty self-explaining:


private void Login(string userName, bool rememberMe)
{
    if (!rememberMe)
    {
        //just a regular forms-login
        FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(
            userName,
            rememberMe);
    }
    else
    {
        FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(
            userName,
            true,
            FormsAuthentication.FormsCookiePath);

        //now explicitly set
        //the forms-cookie timeout to 20 days
        Response.Cookies[FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName].Expires = 
            DateTime.Now.AddDays(20);
    }
}

Do you use Google Music Search?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:37:00 +0000

Do you use Google Music search? I know this feature has been there for a while, but I have just discovered it. When you search for some singer, Google will display a box above the results, that leads to the music-search. Like this:

But did you know that you can turn the music-search by adding "music:" in front of your query? Like this:

"music:u2"

This will force Google to look in his music indexes.

Using Google Reader to track your product on Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:07:00 +0000

Dennis Crane gave a great advice on how to track your product mentioned on Twitter:

Twitter has a great feature called "search feed" - a search-engine results page published as a feed. So simply add this feed to Google Reader (or any other feedreader):

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=product+name

and stay updated.

Calling ASP.NET Web Services from jQuery

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:32:00 +0000

Another post for ASP.NET developers reading this blog (if any).

I prefer compiling our web-projects to ASP.NET 2.0 rather than 3.5 basically because of all that stuff Visual Studio adds to the "Web.config" file. And the "Web.config" is often edited by our end-users, who might find it confusing to make their way through all these "configSections", "assemblies" and "httpHandlers" that look quite scary.

With the latest project we're working on (a CRM and contact management application) we decided to finally benefit from the MS AJAX framework that is built in to the .NET Framework 3.5.

But to optimize our code and keep it lightweight and fast, we've decided to use jQuery where possible, avoiding the bulky and clumsy MS AJAX's javascript.

So - how do you use jQuery to call a JSON ASP.NET web-service? Here it is. The code is self-explaining:

WebService code:


[WebService(Namespace = "http://mynamespace.org/")]
//the next line is important
[System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService]
public class MyWebService : System.Web.Services.WebService
{
    [WebMethod]
    public string HelloWorld(int a, string b)
    {
        return "Hello World";
    }
}

Now the client-side code. Note the JSON-serialized parameters passed with the "data" property:


$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url: "MyWebService.asmx/HelloWorld",
    data: '{a:1,b:"test"}',
    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
    dataType: "json",
    success: function(msg) {
        alert(msg.d);
    }
});

Sharing interesting posts from Google Reader on Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:12:00 +0000

Jitbit has a Twitter account for quite some time now, where I post my own twits along with the company official news, releases and blog announcements.

All the official stuff is published via Twitterfeed, a great service that automatically twits your RSS-entries to your Twitter account. We have a news feed, a blog and a release-log feed, and all of them are automatically published to Twitter whenever a new item appears. So if you have a blog or a newsfeed - Twitterfeed is a must-have tool for you.

Now, I've recently thought of an efficient way to "retwit" (share on Twitter) the interesting links I stumble on in my Google Reader. Usually, once you've found a great article to share you have to (1) click the article in Reader, (2) copy the link and (3) paste that link into your twitter along with the article title... But the best way would be to use the Google Reader's built-in "Shared items" feed.

As you might know, Google Reader offers public access to all your shared items. What is great is that these shared items are also available as an RSS-feed! So all you have to do is to simply "feed" that feed to Twitterfeed and that's it:

Why should I buy from a small software company?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:16:00 +0000

Imagine you've found an error in a product from some huge international software corporation, let's call it "MacroHard". I bet it has already happened to you a couple of times. Imagine you contact "MacroHard" to let them know about the error. Now think of the chances that this error would actually be fixed in a reasonable amount of time. The probability is close to zero, huh? Also think of the chances that MacroHard will contact you personally when it's fixed...

I'm not even mentioning feature-requests (instead of errors). You must have already guessed - forget about 'em.

Along with the company size, and brand recognition, and other "big" stuff you get when you buy from a massive corporation, you should always ask yourself - "how can I affect the product development or at least the error correction in it?"

Here's an example from earlier this week:

>>>

Wednesday (9:30 AM EST) — Customer:

"Hi there. I've downloaded the latest version of RSS Feed Creator, nice tool. But I need a feature that seems to be missing - or I was just too dumb to find it."

Wednesday (9:35 AM EST) — Alex (Jitbit):

"Hi. Thank you for the email. Can you specify what feature you miss exactly?"

Wednesday (10:30 AM EST) — Customer:

"Hi Alex. Thanks for the quick response. I want to remove the old outdated items from the feed, but the tool doesn't allow removing more than one item at a time."

Wednesday (12:45 PM EST) — Alex (Jitbit):

"Hi. Looked into this and it seems to be an easy task, we're adding this to our next version that will be out within 24 hours, please stay updated to our version-history RSS feed".

Thursday (10:30 AM EST) — Customer:

"Hello. We've downloaded the latest version, all OK. I think we'll be ordering some licenses later on today."

Thursday (02:09 PM EST):

"New Order for 2 licenses of Jitbit RSS Feed Creator"

<<<

Let's see a massive international software corporation do that.

I'm just a biker

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:24:00 +0000

This is totally "off-topic" for this blog, but please find 90 seconds of your time to watch these two videos. And please take longer to look for us, bikers, on the road.

Windows 7

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 09 May 2009 08:21:00 +0000

Just a small note that we are currently testing Jitbit tools (Macro Recorder, Network Configuration Switcher, AutoText, RSS Feed Creator and others) under Windows 7 Release Candidate, Which can be downloaded here by the way.

My 2 cents on Windows 7: It rocks. The install was a breeze (even though I have a VAIO-notebook with a ton of customized hardware) and the whole thing is much faster than Vista. Love the new taskbar and the ability to "pin" programs to it.

Tech support bits #2: saying "No" to your customer

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:44:00 +0000

Continuing the "tech support thoughts": Don't be afraid to say "no" to a customer.

A software developer gets a question if his product has a "feature", that he knows is absent. "How can I answer 'no' to my customer?" - he thinks - "Maybe I should add this 'feature' to my next version? But I have no time to do this right now, so I'll leave this for the weekend..." Sounds familiar? A day passes, a week, and the developer still has no time to implement the new feature. The customer question remains unanswered. And it's getting more and more awkward each day, pushing this question from being answered even more.

Learn to say "No". Don't be afraid to.

"No, but we'll consider adding it". "No, and I'm afraid it never will have it". It's better than no answer at all.

PS. Inspired by a question from our customer: "can your web-based helpdesk software do billing for our technicians?"

Dream home-office

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:26:00 +0000

I always considered myself a pro in setting up a home office, but this guy is incredible

More pictures here.

Google launches "Google Ventures"

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:41:00 +0000

Google has launched Google Ventures - a fund that "seeks to discover and grow great companies".

ASP.NET: mixing OutputCache with Server.Transfer

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:14:00 +0000

If there's any ASP.NET developers reading this blog, here's a small tip for you guys.

If you want to optimize your page performance by using the "@OutputCache" directive you might notice that the caching does not work when you perform a "Server.Transfer" operation to that "cached" page.

It's a really long story why this happens... But to work that out just replace the "Server.Transfer" calls with the "Server.Execute" calls. Important: remember to pass the "Response.Output" to this method (NOT some custom text-writer, exactly "Response.Output"):


//this does not work
Server.Transfer("MyCachedPage.aspx");

//this works. Note the "Response.Output"
Server.Execute("MyCachedPage.aspx", Response.Output);

Bring Down IE6

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:14:00 +0000

A campaign by Brirish ".NET magazine": bring down IE6. "IE6 is the next Netscape 4" - so true.

Jitbit Helpdesk - hosted version

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:33:00 +0000

We are happy to announce the beta launch of the hosted version of our Helpdesk Software. We will take care of the installation, hosting and maintenance of your helpdesk for under $30 a month.

The hosted helpdesk will, of course, stay completely free during the beta stage. All beta-testers are eligible for a free 6-month run after the final release. Please apply for a beta test using the links above.

Slumdog Millionaire

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:19:00 +0000

Went to see Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" while I was in London. Here' my two cents: not bad. Really not bad. A must see.

Danny's techniques to move a spectator to tears are trite and transparent at a first glance. IF it was fiction. It is not. That's actually the way things were/are in Mumbai, as far as I know (we cooperate with some outsourcing partners in India).

I personally always liked Danny Boyle for "Trainspotting", "The Beach" and "28 days later" (one of the best horror movies I've seen), and I was so afraid to be kinda "biased", that I kept searching for the reasons, what's bad in "Slumdog"... Until I relaxed and realized that the movie is actually quite good.

Two questions bother me though: first - would it earn a 2009-best-picture if it was an Indian movie by Indian director/producers? And second - why all the "bad guys" are hindu, and all the "good guys" are muslims?

ACH payments

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 09:06:00 +0000

Just a quick note to let our customers know that our e-commerce provider, Plimus, has added the ACH (also known as "e-checks") payment method, so now Jitbit Software accepts ACH for US-based customers.