NJimmy

How to test mail delivery during development without a real SMTP server

2011-05-17T16:50:00.001+02:00

Ever wanted an easy way to test how mails look like when sent from your application without using a real SMTP server?

Using a real server might possible include setting up security, you never know if your mails are stuck in spam filters and you are always scared that you sent it to real people by accident. Windows 7 for example does not include a SMTP service.

The answer is smtp4dev. This is a lightweight service that sits in the system tray and catches all mail sent to localhost without delivering them. The received messages can quickly be viewed and inspected.

How to evolve as a developer

2011-03-13T18:16:00.004+01:00

I'm pretty competitive and I recently found out that a college of mine is very active on Stack Overflow so I decided to start "chasing" him. It took about a month to gain 800 points which got me over 1.000 and made me the among the top 300 contributers for some of those weeks. I wasn't really reaching for any particular score but I had to have some reachable goal and 1.000 seemed like a nice figure.

During this adventure it hit me what a perfect way of gaining knowledge this is. To give a good answer takes thinking, researching and not to forget, good communication skills. I learned a lot from this and got a lot of great feedback from fellow developers.

So my advise is that you should pick a topic (tag on Stack Overflow) that you want to learn more about and start asking, reading and answering questions.

My next tag will be jQuery Mobile.

See you on Stack Overflow!

How to make diff/merge in Visual Studio about 10 times better

2011-03-10T15:36:00.001+01:00

If you’re on a tight budget this could also be done with WinMerge.

jsFiddle – Not just an editor

2011-02-10T20:55:00.002+01:00

I got a sudden urge to gain some reputation on Stack Overflow and went looking for questions with a bounty when I found this particularly interesting one - Loosing hover when animating with jQuery (without moving mouse).
The author of the question had made a fiddle so there was no effort in trying to reproduce the problem which is often a time consuming business.
I made my own fork and started hacking away. After a while I came up with a solution and saved my fork. The solution might not be the prettiest you seen but what’s pretty is how jsFiddle worked as a playground that everyone can use with only a browser. Combined with Stack Overflow this is pretty powerful stuff for getting help from the community.
In the time of writing I haven’t got any feedback on my answer but I’m happy nevertheless for finding such a useful tool.

How to find nested controls in ASP.Net Webforms

2011-02-10T14:13:00.001+01:00

I made a little helper class to find all controls of a certain type on a page or within any control that can contain other controls.

Please use it with care since it could be quite heavy on a page with thousands of control. Do not pass the entire page unless absolutely necessary.

/// <summary>

/// Finds all controls of type T stores them in FoundControls

/// </summary>

/// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>

private class ControlFinder<T> where T : Control

    private readonly List<T> _foundControls = new List<T>();

    public IEnumerable<T> FoundControls

        get { return _foundControls; }

    public void FindChildControlsRecursive(Control control)

        foreach (Control childControl in control.Controls)

            if (childControl.GetType() == typeof(T))

                _foundControls.Add((T)childControl);

            else

                FindChildControlsRecursive(childControl);

How to expand/increase the size of an existing virtual hard disk in VMware Player

2011-02-09T09:42:00.002+01:00

I guess I was a bit stingy when I initially set the size of my virtual hard disk and had to pay for that later on. But sometimes it’s impossible to foresee a future need.
Don’t you worry now! It’s a piece of cake to expand the virtual hard disk at a later point in time. Just follow these steps:

Make sure to backup your virtual machine before proceeding. Just incase!
From VWware Player (I’m using version 3.1.3), select the virtual machine you want to expand and click Edit virtual machine settings.
Choose the device Hard Disk (IDE), click the Utilities button and choose Expand….
Enter the new maximum size in GB and click Expand. This will take a moment.

Your virtual hard disk is now expanded but the guest operating system is still not aware of this.
Start your virtual machine.
If your guest operating system is Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista or Windows 7 you could expand the volume in Disk Manager. But if your guest operating system is Windows XP like mine was you have to use a third party utility. I used EASEUS Partition Master which has a free edition for home users.
Download, install and start EASEUS Partition Master – Home Edition.
Choose the partition you want to expand and click Resize/Move Partition. Move the slider to the desired size (probably all the way to the right) and click OK.
Click Apply and EASEUS applies the new size to the volume.
You can now stop using CCleaner every five minutes

Forcing UI redraw/repaint in IE7

2011-02-02T09:53:00.003+01:00

A while ago I had a nasty problem with an element that got on top of other elements and was not clickable anymore. This happened in Internet Explorer 7 when I changed the position from absolute to static during horizontal scrolling.

I tried several techniques for redrawing the element but none of them were successful until I stumbled upon this method:

var nastyElement = $("#elementId");

nastyElement.css("display", "none");

var redraw = nastyElement.offsetHeight;

nastyElement.css("display", "block");

Credits go to vasko who wrote about this on http://ajaxian.com/archives/forcing-a-ui-redraw-from-javascript.

Passed another Microsoft exam

2008-01-18T13:04:00.001+01:00

This time it was the dreaded 70-529, dreaded because I seldom use the techniques included (Web Services with and without WSE, .Net Remoting, Serviced Components, MSMQ). Well, of course I've used Web Services but never had the need to apply WSE (Web Service Enhancements) which makes things a lot more complicated and, by the way, is nowadays outdated by WCF. Nevertheless I've learned a lot and if I had knew what I know now, I would probably have solved some challenges in the past differently.

Another sign of me finding this exam pretty tough, other than using adjectives such as dreaded, would be the time spent on studying. Roughly about 3 months. Obviously not at full rate, but I mean... 3 months!!! This is probably the first time I've completed all the lesson reviews, labs and included practice tests (in this book). But, hey! It paid of. If you are thinking I over-studied, you're absolutely right! I scored 905 out of 1000. 700 is needed to pass. Well, ok for 70-300 I read 2 books and a whole lot of online articles but was never close to 905.

OMG! What about the level of detail on those exams. It's crazy! You actually have to know stuff like the entire schema of every imaginable XML based configuration file and just about every namespace, interface, class, method and associated signature in the entire framework and then some. One has to stretch ones imagination quite a bit to find the reason.

Picture this: You're stranded on a deserted island with nothing but your laptop. Somehow the laptop took a beating and all the sectors where Visual Studio was installed got demolished (MSDN included). That could happen!
Now for the not so likely part. In all you're desperation, being on a deserted island and all, you find the sudden urge to put together a nice .Net app. Your toolbox: notepad and one VB.Net (what else) standalone compiler. No problem 'cause you're certified! You know everything there is to know by heart.

Come on, seriously! Hook me up with MSDN, Intellisense and Reflector and give me your best shot.

I think the big advantage you got, as a certified developer, is knowledge about what's available, in your toolbox if you will.

Anyway, now it's time for my little ritual that I've been looking forward to for some time now. It's nothing much but it always feels nice. It includes:

Bringing all books to the office and putting them in our overly crowded bookshelf and adding them to a list (Sharepoint of course)
Deleting any practice tests from the laptop
Finally, showing the certificate to the boss to collect some bonus

My long term goal is to become MCPD Enterprise Application Developer but if any exams for WCF, WF or WPF becomes available I will take them first. Not in beta though. I did that mistake once and was actually one question away from succeeding with 70-510 Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server. Imagine a customer seeing that and hiring me to set up their TFS for their worldwide organization of developers, CCM, project managers, testers and so on. Wait a minute! Haven't I found myself in that situation before? Nah, not likely for a consultant ;)

Do you need a progress bar to go with your site?

2008-01-14T11:16:00.000+01:00

Are you in a quick need of a progress bar and tired of being bullied by proud designers? Some of them will actually order you to stand behind a line, singing I Will Always Love You like Whitney Houston while doing the Macarena just to think about helping you. Tell them gently to stick their attitude where the sun don't shine and then follow these simple steps:

Aim your browser to http://www.ajaxload.info/
Choose one of many templates (indicator type)
Choose background color (or transparent) depending on your site
Choose foreground color to go with your site. If you want a new color, why not try one of many color scheme tools. Here's one http://www.steeldolphin.com/color_scheme.html for you
Click Generate it ! - Voilà

Developing CSS and Javascript

2007-07-30T16:30:00.000+02:00

When developing CSS and Javascript all help available is much appreciated. One way to go is to use hook up your browser with plug-ins.

My previous plug-in of choice was Web Developer for Firefox but I was never really satisfied. My new favorite is definitely Firebug. I can't even put any words to tell you how impressed I am by this tool. Add it's buddy HTML Validator and you got a strong duo that will make you, Google and your customers happy :)

Without doubt you, as a web developer, are brutally aware of the fact that Firefox and Internet Explorer renders things differently. Luckily Microsoft recently released Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. It's not as good as Firebug but it still helps a lot. I don't really see this as a problem because you should always build your web applications for Firefox and then customize them for Internet Explorer using conditional comments (<!--[if IE]> and so on). When testing for Internet Explorer 6, and that is absolutely needed since more than 50% still uses it according to TheCounter, I simply use a lightweight Virtual PC image supplied by Microsoft.

Problem opening documents from Sharepoint

2007-06-04T10:00:00.000+02:00

Symptom

When trying to open a document from Sharepoint the browser freezes.

Possible cause

Upgrading from Office 2003 to 2007.

Solution

In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12
Delete owssup.dll
Run the Office diagnostics by selecting Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office Diagnostics. This tool will find the missing component and install the "correct" version.

I actually couldn't follow step 3 since I didn't have Office diagnostics installed. I used Repair from the installation wizard instead and that worked like a charm.