SmallWorkarounds

Unable to start Debugging. The Silverlight Developer Run time is not installed. Please install a matching version

2011-04-04T00:55:00.001-07:00

If you have enabled the automatic updates to Silverlight , then you might face this issue if you download and update the version of Silverlight to the latest version.

Now when you will start your Silverlight application it will complain to you that it can’t start debugging as a matching version of Silverlight Developer Runtime is not installed.

This is not a big trouble its just that you have updated the copy of your Silverlight but the silverilght developer runtime also needs to be updated, microsoft should have given or mentioned it clearly somewhere while updating the Silverlight version but it hasn’t i.e why its difficult to find.

The simple solution is to go to www.silverlight.net and scroll down to the home page you will find a heading where you have “Developer runtime for Windows and OSX”. Under this section go and download the Windows developer runtime and install this runtime.

This will do the trick for you after installing that when you restart your visual studio you will find that you are able to debug your applications as you were doing earlier.

Also given below is the direct link to download the Silverlight Developer runtime http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=188039

Happy Programming !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nuget Package Manager a very useful Visual Studio 2010 Extension

2011-03-15T14:26:00.001-07:00

Sorry folks i have not penned any article since a long time as i was busy with life and wasn’t able to spare out much time for blogging, but from now i will try to post useful things as soon as i find a little time.

For today i found out this very useful Visual Studio 2010 Extension called Nuget Package Manager.

The beauty of this application is that you get a whole lot of third party dlls at your disposal to use in your application.

It will add the references to your application directly and there is no need to download the dlss and include in the project and secondly it will modify your web.config files also automatically.

So you just have to click like you did traditionally as “Add Service Reference” and you are ready to go…

For installing Nuget Package Manager Extension go to the link http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/27077b70-9dad-4c64-adcf-c7cf6bc9970c

After installing nuget you will find it inside the Extension Manager in Visual Studio

Now in whichever project you want to add any third party assembly you can right click on Reference and do an “Add Library Package Reference”. It will open the Library Package Reference manager for you.

This manager will display all the available libraries and third party assemblies on Nuget, you can selecte any of those to be added into your project.

Just select the assembly which you want to add as an example i have added the ELMAH assembly for giving the project an error logging mechanism.

Similarly you can add a lot of other assemblies with the help of Nuget. All in all its a very good extension and you need not code anything to add those references and also you needn’t make any changes in your web.config manually, everything is done for you automatically by Nuget.

Its a very good tool which .net developers can leverage to generate cleaner and quick code.

Happy Programming !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

del.icio.us Tags: Nuget,Visual Studio 2010

Silverlight Spy: A must have tool for any Silverlight Developer

2010-05-05T10:49:00.001-07:00

I have been using up Silverlight Spy from many months now, i do a lot of Silverlight development and believe me its a must have tool for every Silverlight developer it gives a feeling that a lot of developer tools have been combined for a Silverlight Developer you have a lot of things in Silverlight Spy, it can be compared to what firebug is to general web development , Silverlight Spy is to a Silverlight Developer. I will show you various different features of Silverlight Spy just as the write-up progresses.

Silverlight Spy Features List discussed in the write-up :-

1.Browser Feature

2.Explorer Feature

3.Output Log

4.Properties Window

5.Code View /XAML/C#

6.Statistics

7.Performance Monitor

8.Event Monitor

9.Network Monitor

10.Application Analyzer

11.DLR Shell

12.Cross Domain Access Policy Validator

13.Advanced Settings and Options

Now lets start analyzing every single feature of the Silverlight Spy.

1.Browser Feature

Silverlight spy comes with inbuilt browser feature you can just give the url to any of Silverlight application and the silverlight spy will open that application for you in the inbuilt browser facility.

2.Explorer Feature

Explorer feature is used to navigate to each element in the Silverlight tree , you can go inside each and every element tree to look into what is the xaml used to build up that application.

Explorer feature combined with various other inbuilt features will let you do in depth analysis and study of the code.Explorer feature is very useful while you are stuck in small UI issues like your canvas or stack panel or grid are not positioning correctly, silverlight spy will be savior for you at those moments.

Like firebug for html pages silverlight spy also have this highlighting feature in-built as soon as you select some element it will get highlighted in the UI in the inbuilt browser.

Also there is a cool shortcut to quickly highlight and navigate to a particular element in the application , use Ctrl + Shift to navigate to an element in the silverlight tree.

So you can navigate both ways either selecting an element from the UI to the explorer tree or from the explorer tree to the element in the application.

3.Output Log

Output window tells you every minute details which are going on while your app is either loading or running sometime you get really frustrating Ag_Parser errors due to some missing images and many other reasons which you cannot know just by looking into the firebug details of your browser.

So this output window is really helpful in those scenarios as well.

Also the output window lets you know the type of Silverlight application your are using this means the version , prerequisites if any.

4.Properties Window

Properties window is a special window where in you can change the properties of the element selected in the explorer window as shown above in the figure. Property window is a great help to find small UI bugs you can adjust margins, padding and height and width and various other properties to reflect changes in the browser so that you know what exactly you need to change in order to get the change in the actual code.

Explorer view also contains various other features such as Object Browser, Isolated Storage Browser, UI Automation , Styles and also the User Interface.

5.Code View /XAML/C#

6.Statistics

Statistics window is also a very important and informative part of the Silverlight spy package it calculates for you the number of objects which have been created under a UI Element , you can get the idea of how many elements are getting created under that UI element and whether so many elements are required or not , it gives you information of the Objects including the UIElements, Geometries and Brushes

7.Performance Monitor

Performance Monitor consists of Memory profiling, process profiling, processor usage, frame rate and isolated storage usage. Performance monitor gives you the real picture of how much memory all your objects and application is taking , how many processes are running and what is the actual load on the processor due to the application, what frame rate is the application running on, and how much isolated storage is being occupied by the Silverlight application

8.Event Monitor

Event Monitor is another important tool built inside the Silverlight Spy , basically Event monitor monitors and reports every event which is getting fired ranging from Mouse Enter to GotFocus and all other events , its very helpful when you want to know why your specific event is not firing or what is causing your event to not fire , its really helpful in those situations.

Another good things is that you can customize which events you want to fire leaving other unnoticed because many times you would not like to fire the mouseEnter event every time because its really irritating.

9.Network Monitor

Network monitor tracks all the traffic passing through the wires it acts like a mini fiddler from within the Silverlight spy, you can get basic network monitoring features for the application using this Network Monitor tool.

10.Application Analyzer

Application Analyzer consists of two tabs one tab contains the rules and another tab contains the results which are shown after the analyze process is complete.Rules consist of Deployment Rules and Performance Rules

11.DLR Shell

We can also execute dynamic languages such as Ruby and Python in the silverlight applications AppDomain , it has a lot of inbuilt samples also for executing with the DLR Shell, its a very powerful and really interesting feature.

12.Cross Domain Access Policy Validator

Cross Domain Access Policy Validator will let you know the status of the cross domain access of the the service files on your server it checks for the correct clientaccesspolicy.xml and crossdomain.xml files if you want to make cross domains call to a server and you want to know whether the server allows cross domains calls or not you can just check the server with the Cross Domain Access Policy Validator tool.

13.Advanced Settings and Options

There are various other advanced settings which you can configure according to your development needs, as mentioned above you can add the code reflection support to look up into the code from the xap file using the reflector you just have to give the path of the reflector.exe and silverlight spy will automatically decompile the Silverlight assemblies for you.

Sometimes if you have a slow internet connection and the xap file size is large then it might take a long time to download for such situations you can increase the xap file download time to any number of seconds otherwise silverlight spy will give a timeout error as soon as the default time is passed.

Silverlight spy gives you an option to turn on the inbuilt ruler to have accurate measurements in the application UI you can look yourself the relative margins and the height and widths of the UI elements.

You can download the latest bits of the Silverlight spy which works for the latest Silverlight 4 build from http://firstfloorsoftware.com/downloads/SilverlightSpy3/SilverlightSpy.3.0.0.11.msi

Happy Programming !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Update : 22 Sept 2010

If you are using Silverlight Spy with your MEF application in Silverlight then you will get a nice little error as soon as you try to open up your application in Silverlight Spy.To rectify this you have to go to Tools –> Options –> Advanced->Enable DLR and uncheck the enable DLR option.

The property 'Multiple Select' does not exist on the type 'RadGridView' in the XML namespace 'clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls.GridView'

2010-04-08T15:07:00.001-07:00

If you have updated from the Q32009 version of Telerik RadSilverlight controls to the latest Q1 2010 release of the RadSilverlight controls and you were using MultipleSelect property in the RadGrid then you will get this error.

Its very simple to resolve this error this property on the RadGrid has been declared obsolete and has been replaced by a new property called “SelectionMode”

If you were using MultipleSelect = False, then now you can use SelectionMode = Single , this is the default value and it says only one item can be selected at a time.

If you were using MultipleSelect = True , then now you can use SelectionMode = Extended. this means that items are added to the collection by combining the mouse clicks with Ctrl or Shift keys

There is one more value to this property and this is like SelectionMode = Multiple this means that items are added to collection on the click of the item and are removed from the collection when you click again on the item.

So above mentioned is the solution to your problem if you have recently upgraded from the older version of RadSilverlight controls to the new version of the controls.

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ElementBinding,Binding Modes & UpdateSourceTrigger Property in Silverlight

2010-02-12T09:20:00.001-08:00

Silverlight has a great binding syntax and its two way binding approach is a life saver, also it gives room to various new and creative concepts which developers can use to create really cool apps and features.

In this article i will talk a little about the Two Way Silverlight binding and the UpdateSourceTrigger Property.

Consider an example where we have a TextBox and a Silder control, now we want our TextBox to change its numeric text as we move the thumb of the slider control, now doing this is very simple in Silverlight by the element to element binding syntax, you just have to set the textbox text property to bind to the element slider and set its binding path to the value property of the slider control.

<Slider x:Name="slider" Maximum = "40" Value= "10" />
<TextBox x:Name="tbSliderValues" Text="{Binding ElementName = slider,Path = Value}"/>

So by the above code what you can do is as soon as you change the slider value i.e as you move the slider thumb the text in the textbox gets changed to the current value of the slider.

Now what if you change the text in the textbox , will the same thing works in the reverse order as well , meaning changing the text in the textbox will change the slider value , is it possible ????

Yes this is possible with a very simple tweak , just say thanks to the TwoWay DataBinding syntax of Silverlight

Just modify your code as given below and it will work like charm.

<Slider x:Name="slider" Maximum = "40" Value= "10" />
<TextBox x:Name="tbSliderValues" Text="{Binding ElementName = slider,Path = Value,Mode = TwoWay}"/>

Also to make a little point here about the different types of mode available in Silverlight, basically there are 3 types of mode in Silverlight :-

OneWay
TwoWay
OneTime

One way is used when you know that the changes have to take place in only one direction meaning you can use oneway mode with Slider and TextBlock control in a simple case.

TwoWay mode is used when you want both the binding elements to reflect changes when either one is changed.TwoWay binding mode is the most commonly used mode in silverlight.

OneTime mode is used when you already know that you need to perform binding only one time and later the values related to that thing will never change in your application or if ever they are changing you are not reflecting those changes to your UI.

That said you have got the idea about the binding in Silverlight,now consider a situation in which you have a textbox and on the textchanged property you want to perform the binding to the slider, by setting the mode to two way will only work in this case when you loose focus from the text box i mean it will by default not work on the textchanged event.

So here what we have to do is explicitly force an Update to the property value.

private void tbSliderValue_TextChanged(object sender, TextChangedEventArgs e)
{
BindingExpression expression =
tbSliderValue.GetBindingExpression(TextBox.TextProperty);
expression.UpdateSource();
}

Now this will update your property everytime the textchanged event is fired for the textbox.

Now if you know that you will not need to update this using the default behaviour as in the case above you can reduce overhead by specifying the UpdateSourceTrigger = Explicit which tells that you already have set the update behavior explicitly so no need to check for the updates

<Slider x:Name="slider" Value="1" Maximum="100" Minimum="1" Width="300" Height="20" />
<TextBox x:Name="tbxSliderValue" TextChanged="tbxSliderValue_TextChanged" Text="{Binding Value, ElementName=slider, Mode=TwoWay, UpdateSourceTrigger=Explicit}" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="300"/>

UpdateSourceTrigger property has only two values one is Explicit and another is Default

Happy Programminig!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cannot get the list of output files from the project

2010-01-18T03:47:00.001-08:00

If you are a Silverlight developer who likes to keep himself updated on the latest stuff around in technology then you might face this problem. Actually this happens when you upgrade your system to VS2010 , by update i don’t mean that you are changing the target framework to be used to .net framework 4.0 update here just means that your .csproj file now knows that it has to open itself with VS2010 but after sometime if you feel that VS2010 beta is unstable, which looked to me also then you want to revert back to old and tested VS2008 everything can be reverted back without problems but when you will build the project in VS2008 you will notice that it complains “Cannot get the list of output files from the project” this is because the ToolsVersion used is still 4.0

The simple solution is to just go to the .csproj file in any of the text editors and modify the ToolsVersion in every project in the solution which contains your silverlight project.

Just replace the ToolsVersion = 4.0 with ToolsVersion= 3.5 and your solution will start working again.

That’s it.

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wireless network problem in WS2008

2010-01-17T02:38:00.001-08:00

If you are using WS2008 with your wireless network card or you are using WS2008 on a laptop, you might face a problem that after installing properly the driver of the wireless device WS2008 still couldn’t find any wireless networks.

This is not a bug but a simple issue i.e by default WS2008 doesn’t install the wireless LAN service so you have to install it manually to make your wireless card running.

At first i also got a bit frustrated as to why my wireless network is not working but soon i found out this solution, it was not so direct so i thought to share the solution with you all so that others having the same problem might feel easy to configure it.

Just go to the features section in the server manager and click on “Add Feature” then select “Wireless LAN Service”

After installing the wireless LAN Service your wireless device would start finding the networks.

Happy Programming !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HTTP Error 403.14 - Forbidden The Web server is configured to not list the contents of this directory.

2010-01-15T01:12:00.001-08:00

If you are using IIS 7 then you probably might face this error.It’s a little frustrating when such errors occur and simple IIS 6 or IIS 5.1 users when it was really simple to configure and run a website, those users feel really hooked up.

I myself faced a lot of issues but as you progress with IIS 7 you will find it simple to configure and very easy to manage.

As far as this issue is concerned in the earlier versions of IIS we used to just set the directory browsing checkbox to be checked in order to enable directory browsing on the virtual directory or the website, its really simple in IIS 7 also just click the directory browsing option in the configuration section and on the right side of the directory browsing view you will find enable by default directory browsing is disabled.It will be more clear from the below image.

This will solve your Directory Browsing issue for IIS 7.Stay tuned for more on IIS 7 tips and tricks series.

Happy Programming !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Error 1 The “Validatexaml” task failed unexpectedly.System.IO.FileLoadException.Could not load file or assembly.

2009-12-14T06:51:00.001-08:00

If you are facing the ValidateXaml exception and your build fails then it might be due to the new feature of blocking the downloaded content.

This means whenever you download a project from the internet it is quite likely that windows will automatically block its content for few dll’s and if it’s so you will get this error.

So the easy solution is to look for the file for which its complaining as in the above solution its the Activity control for which it’s complaining, so just navigate to that file right click on the file and press unblock and that’s it , go and rebuild your solution and everything will work as desired.

I have myself faced this problem in Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7.

You might try this also in Windows Vista as well.Hope this helps.

Happy programming !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Silverlight 3 RIA Services :- Cannot resolve symbol web

2009-12-02T02:46:00.001-08:00

If you are using RIA Services with Silverlight and facing the problem that Web part or the server part of the project is not getting recognized on the client side or the Silverlight side, then one probable and main cause is that you are using Resharper and if that’s the case then the below solution will help you tackle this problem.

Before applying this solution do check that RIA Services is installed on your machine because if its not installed then the cause of this problem would be RIA Services itself is not present on the machine.But if it’s installed and you are still facing the same problem then here goes the solution.

Just go to your solution and in the client project or the Silverlight project click on the “Show all files” icon

You will notice a Generated_Code folder inside the Silverlight project

Right click on the Generated_Code folder and select the include in project option

As soon as you include the Generated_Code folder in your project the problem you were facing will be removed.
This will also remove one other problem, if you use both Expression Blend and Visual Studio for the development then you might have observed if you have opened a file inside the visual studio and expression blend simultaneously if you build your solution in Visual Studio then it asks to overwrite files inside the generated_code folder, if you include this generated_code folder inside the project then this problem will also be removed.
One important thing to keep in mind is never try to modify files inside this folder as they are generated dynamically the above workaround is simply to solve issues that come across the development to quick and ease things.

Happy Programming !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Silverlight Toolkit November 2009 Released

2009-11-26T01:12:00.001-08:00

Silverlight Toolkit is on a rapid pace from July to October and now again a release in November there are various improvements and other nice features which you will like.

You can download the Silverlight 3 Toolkit November 2009 from

http://silverlight.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=36060#DownloadId=93512

And also the Silverlight 4 beta Toolkit November 2009 from

http://silverlight.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=36060#DownloadId=93513

Stated below are the changelist from the October version of the toolkit.

RTL

All Toolkit/SDK control visuals and input handling to exhibit the correct behavior for right-to-left languages and cultures in Silverlight 4.

Mouse Wheel Support

Controls that support scrolling can now be scrolled using the mouse wheel in Silverlight 4

Support for Validation in Themes

All Toolkit controls now show validation UI out of the box when there are data input errors.

BusyIndicator

New BusyIndicator control in the Silverlight Toolkit to easily toggle UI to a busy state.
Based on David Poll's ActivityControl which is used in the RIA Services project template and samples.

DataForm

Added Content property that allows the form UI to be set directly, without having to specify data templates to improve experience in the designer.

Charting

Supports more flexible subclassing scenarios of core classes
Provides more helpful exception messages in limited scenarios
Updated default Chart template to respect Padding
Type of Chart.LegendItems collection items changed to object for flexibility
Converted Legend to a HeaderedItemsControl for consistency.

ISM

Removed ImplicitStyleManager from Silverlight 4 to phase it out now that implicit styles are supported in the platform.
Updated Themes (TwilightBlue, ShinyRed, etc.) to work with implicit styles.

System.ComponentModel.Composition.Packaging.Toolkit.dll

Adds PackageCatalog and a Package class which enables support for downloading secondary XAP’s and loading them into a MEF catalog.

Silverlight Unit Test Framework

The Silverlight Unit Test Framework (Microsoft.Silverlight.Testing.dll) and the Visual Studio unit test metadata for Silverlight are now installed alongside the Silverlight Toolkit binaries
Source ships inside the Infrastructure Zip installed with the MSI

Silverlight Development Infrastructure and Tools

Visual Studio project and item templates for Silverlight Test Applications
Silverlight 3 version supports Visual Studio 2008, Visual Web Developer 2008, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express
Silverlight 4 verison supports Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express
Experimental Silverlight Code Coverage support: collect block-level coverage data when using the Silverlight Unit Test Framework on a machine with Visual Studio 2010 and Static Analysis Tools
Silverlight test automation support through Microsoft Build: easily include unit test execution inside the build process. Support for simple automation of Windows Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome automation.
DefaultStyleTask for large control library projects

Silverlight Toolkit October 2009 Released

2009-10-21T13:43:00.001-07:00

I am glad to announce that my favorite Silverlight Toolkit has a next release out for production use earlier release was in July 2009 and now its the October Release.

You can download this release at http://silverlight.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=30514#DownloadId=88327

Change List includes

Visual Studio 2010 Support

All controls updated to provide a great design time experience in Visual Studio 2010

Charting

All classes now unsealed
ISeries interface introduced as base interface for all Series
Breaking change: StylePalette renamed Palette and type changed to IEnumerable<ResourceDictionary> from IEnumerable<Style>
LegendItemStyle introduced to provide easier customization of LegendItem

Drag & Drop

Drag & drop support added for common items controls such as ListBox, TreeView, DataGrid, and charting controls.
System.Windows.Controls.Data.Toolkit assembly added.
The System.Reactive assembly is now installed alongside other Silverlight Toolkit binaries.

Other Updates

Accordion

Themes updated to add support for this control

ChildWindow

Themes updated to add support for this control

DataForm

Themes updated to add support for this control

DataPager

Themes updated to add support for this control

DomainUpDown

Mouse wheel support added to change value

GlobalCalendar

Mouse wheel support added to navigate between months in year mode and years in decade mode

GridSplitter

Themes updated to add support for this control

TimePicker / TimeUpDown

Mouse wheel support added

TreeMap

VB Sample added

System.IO.FileNotFoundException Could not load file or assembly 'App_Web, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified

2009-10-05T09:13:00.001-07:00

I recently faced this problem with one of my WCF services, i was unable to find the reason for this as it complains that it could not load an assembly which in my case never existed.So seeing the error i knew that it was not my fault but it was the fault of the framework itself.

What i know and what seemed to me is that this error occurs due to some invalid data in the temporary files which .net creates while running an application.Due to the differences in the code of the temporary files from the actual code this error arises.

Little help from Google suggested me that it’s a known issue and Microsoft has not yet found any fix for this situation although there are a few workarounds which you can do in order to escape from this problem.

In this article i will discuss those workarounds and remember there is no specific workaround so you have to test all whichever may suite you.

First of all just try this one and see if it works then its the easiest, just make a note of whichever control is causing trouble to you it could be your masterpage, you usercontrol or your web service or WCF service.Just go to that control or service and simply edit something, just deleting a small space or pressing an enter key and deleting some white spaces would do and save the document, what this will do is it will ask the runtime to regenerate the temporary file and the regenerated temporary file will be correct as earlier somehow the temporary file generated for this file was incorrect.So most of the times this would do the trick especially in case of services.
If the first solution doesn’t help you then you can go to c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files and delete all the files and force a complete recompile of the whole application.You have to be very careful in deleting the temporary files and don’t try this on the production server this tip is for those who know about the working of .net.If some files are locked then you can unlock them using “Unlocker”
If the above 2 steps don’t work for you then add the batch= “false” compilation tag in your web.config

I think these three steps are sufficient to overcome this problem.

Moreover one thing which i want to add is that never directly start updating your production website with the new updates by just copying the new files on the production server, before copying just take the website down i.e pause the website and once your are done with your changes again put the website to go live or else you will run into this trouble every now and then.

If you have faced similar problems and you found some other solution or cause to this problem you can just share it here with smallworkarounds readers to help the community.

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Customizing Asp.net menu control to use jQuery,Superfish and CSS Friendly Control Adapters

2009-10-05T00:58:00.001-07:00

I have used Asp.net menu controls in a lot of applications earlier but now a days with so many new things and controls asp.net menu control seems to lag in many basic functionalities, there are various other options available to be used as a replacement of the asp.net menu control.

But what i loved with the asp.net menu control was its seamless integration with the sitemap datasource and with no hassle i could display whole of my site’s navigation in the menu control by just configuring them in the sitemap file.

What i disliked most was that the menu control by default is rendered as a table structure and not as div structure.

So to fight this abnormality Microsoft released CSS Friendly Control Adapters so that most of the controls which are rendered as tables can be rendered as a simple and clean div structure.

But today i was experimenting with other available options and i found a really cool Superfish jQuery plug-in which we can attach with the asp.net menu control to achieve very cool affects.

In this article i will share the steps on how to hook up the Superfish jQuery Menu plug-in into your asp.net website to beautify your asp.net menu control.

Also please check various option available with the Superfish plug-in on how it can be customized from the Superfish plug-in website.

http://users.tpg.com.au/j_birch/plugins/superfish/#examples

Now let’s look at the steps to integrate superfish menu with asp.net menu

Download the superfish menu from http://users.tpg.com.au/j_birch/plugins/superfish/#download
Direct link http://users.tpg.com.au/j_birch/plugins/superfish/superfish-1.4.8.zip
Unzip the package and you will find the following files in the zip version

Main JavaScript file which is required is superfish.js along with jQuery any version.js rest files are optional and are used if we use some advanced features and customizations with the superfish menu.

Main CSS file is superfish.css and for this demo we will modify this file only.

After downloading the superfish menu files now we should download the CSS Friendly Adapter from http://cssfriendly.codeplex.com/
Place the CSSFriendly.dll into your website bin folder and the CSSFriendlyAdapters.browser in your App_Browser folder.Also remember to comment out the unwanted code from the CSSFriendlyAdapters.browser file as we are dealing only with the menu.

 <controlAdapters>
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.Menu"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.MenuAdapter" />
      <!--adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.TreeView"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.TreeViewAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.DetailsView"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.DetailsViewAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.FormView"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.FormViewAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataList"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.DataListAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridView"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.GridViewAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.ChangePassword"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.ChangePasswordAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.LoginAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.LoginStatus"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.LoginStatusAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.CreateUserWizard"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.CreateUserWizardAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.PasswordRecovery"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.PasswordRecoveryAdapter" /-->
    </controlAdapters>

Also download the latest version of jQuery, otherwise there is already a version of jQuery in the Superfish package.
Now start creating your pages and once you are done , just create a sitemap file to list your whole website.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<siteMap xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/AspNet/SiteMap-File-1.0" >
    <siteMapNode url="" title=""  description="">
        <siteMapNode url="Default.aspx" title="Home" description=""/>
        <siteMapNode url="AboutUs.aspx" title="About Us"  description="" />
        <siteMapNode url="Services.aspx" title="Services"  description="" >
            <siteMapNode url="Services/Service1.aspx" title="Service1" description="">
                <siteMapNode url="Services/SubService1.aspx" title="SubService1" description="" />
                <siteMapNode url="Services/SubService2.aspx" title="SubService2" description="" />
                <siteMapNode url="Services/SubService3.aspx" title="SubService3" description="" />
                <siteMapNode url="Services/SubService4.aspx" title="SubService4" description="" />
            </siteMapNode>
            <siteMapNode url="Services/Service2.aspx" title="Service2" description=""/>
            <siteMapNode url="Services/Service3.aspx" title="Service3" description=""/>
            <siteMapNode url="Services/Service4.aspx" title="Service4" description=""/>
        </siteMapNode>
        <siteMapNode url="ContactUs.aspx" title="Contact Us" description=""/>
    </siteMapNode>
</siteMap>

After building all this your solution architecture should be like this.

Now just the master page configuration is left and you are ready to go then

<%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.master.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title></title>

    <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.3.1.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

    <script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/superfish.js"></script>

    <link type="text/css" href="~/Styles/superfish.css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen"
        runat="server" />
    <link href="Styles/stylemain.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

    <script type="text/javascript">
        $(document).ready(function() {
            $('ul.AspNet-Menu').superfish();
        }); 
    </script>

    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="head" runat="server">
    </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div id="outerWrapper">
        <div id="header">
            <div id="logo">
                <asp:HyperLink runat="server" NavigateUrl="~/Default.aspx" ID="lnkLogo">    
                </asp:HyperLink>
            </div>
        </div>
        <div id="menu">
            <asp:Menu ID="menuMain" runat="server" DataSourceID="stmpDataSource" Orientation="Horizontal">
            </asp:Menu>
            <asp:SiteMapDataSource ID="stmpDataSource" runat="server" ShowStartingNode="false" />
        </div>
        <div id="mainContent">
            <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="ContentPlaceHolder1" runat="server">
            </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
        </div>
        <div id="footer">
        </div>
    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

Important :- By default the Superfish menu css file contains the settings aligned with the ul name sf-menu but the asp.net menu control renders the ul element as AspNet-menu so the important step is to replace all the occurrences of sf-menu in the superfish.css with AspNet-menu to make this menu work.

You can download the sample project and plug and play with the CSS file customized for the asp.net menu if you find difficulties in customizing by your self.

After embedding this in your master page you are done with the settings and customization and you are ready to go, i got this menu in just 15 minutes so simple and so easy.

Working Demo can be seen here http://www.smallworkarounds.com/demos/superfish.demo/

Download the Demo from http://www.smallworkarounds.com/blog/democode/Superfish/Superfish.Demo.zip

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Microsoft supporting web startups and independent web developers by providing free software's for 3years

2009-09-24T04:05:00.001-07:00

Microsoft has launched today a very exciting program called WebSiteSpark for individual developers and small web startup companies having less than 10 employees.

Given below are few software licenses which will be given free to you for 3 years

3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web)
2 licenses of Expression Web 3
4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of your servers)

IMHO it is very good initiative by Microsoft to promote small companies and individuals to leverage their products and build next generation application on the web.

More information can be found here

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/09/24/announcing-the-websitespark-program.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/web/WebSiteSpark

Saving Changes is not permitted.The changes you have made require the following tables to be dropped and recreated..Sql Server 2008 Management Studio Express Error

2009-09-14T14:38:00.000-07:00

If you have just installed Sql Server 2008 Express Edition and you have your default settings then you probably might get this error when your want to change some table and then save changes.

In the default settings “Prevent Saving changes that require table recreation” is checked which prevents to save the changes which you make in the design of the table.

So in this article i will talk less and give you a walkthrough on how to remove this ugly error and to keep it explanatory i will use images rather then simple text.

So the error looks like this

Now the stepwise solution is :-

Click Cancel on this screen and then click OK on the next screen.
On the top menu bar select the Tools option and inside tools select the Options menuitem.

3.Inside options select the “Designer” and in the designer context form “uncheck” the option which says “Prevent Saving changes which requires recreation”.

4.Click OK and you are done and now save changes to your table and your error should no vanish.

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unable to connect to Sql Server 2008 Express Edition Remotely using the IP and the named instance

2009-09-10T14:34:00.000-07:00

If you are trying to connect your sql server 2008 express edition instance remotely and facing problems while connecting it although you have tried all the possible solutions in the book then the problem can be a really very silly thing and what’s that thing , i will describe it shortly. If you are getting the below mentioned error then there might be many reasons for that error.

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.) (.Net SqlClient Data Provider)

So in the list of probable reasons is :-

Check if the sql server 2008 express edition service and sql server browser services are running or not, if not then please run them first.

First check whether TCP/IP is enabled in the Sql Server Configuration Manager Tool and select the instance of sql server 2008 express edition for that, if not enabled enable it.

If TCP/IP is enabled then check your firewall settings open two ports 1433 and 1434 on the firewall, generally 1433 is meant for Sql server and 1434 is meant for sql server browser. 1433 is TCP port and 1434 is UDP port
The silly mistake which happens when working with sql server 2008 express edition is that by default it runs on dynamic ports so you can’t run it remotely with all the above configuration and it will lead to frustration.So what to do then, the solution is just go to properties of the TCP/IP and in the TCP Port just give whatever port you want your sql server to be run on.That will do the trick for you.

After doing the port settings now check the firewall rules and open the respective ports which you have just configured and your sql server instance will run remotely.

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Adding Google Friend Connect to Blogengine.net Blog

2009-09-03T02:02:00.001-07:00

Today i am shifting my blog from BlogSpot to custom domain, so i will be doing a series of post in all the hassles i have to face during this exercise and share my experience with you, so that any one else in plans of shifting the blog to custom domain and also the blog code being open source, should not face the same problems as i am facing.

Smallworkarounds was known for its unique look and feel and various plugins customized in the heart of Google’s blogger.Still the new blog is not even close to the look and feel of the current BlogSpot version but its OK for now i will be rewriting the whole code myself within few days as i get time from my busy schedule.

I will be writing mostly on how to transfer each module you see on Smallworkarounds on blogspot to www.smallworkarounds.com.

For today i will be discussing how to integrate Google’s Friend Connect into BlogEngine.net.

First of all let me tell you why i chose blogengine.net, the obvious reason is that i have already worked on blogengine.net and i am familier with most of its code and I can do tweaks to it’s code in no time.

Secondly what i found after googling was that blogengine.net is the leader in the open source blog engines built in .net. Although there are few other competitors but again all comes to personal choice you can use anyone of the other products out there.

I faced few issues with blogengine.net on Godaddy but i will be dealing those issues in the upcoming posts.

So let’s begin the journey from what i am currently doing and leave the rest for future.

Currently i have all my posts imported from blogger to blogengine.net with some minor errors which i am tweaking daily.

In my blogspot blog i was having a Google Friend Connect toolbar which used to pop up at the bottom, but now the question is how to get the same popup bar with same followers in your blogengine.net blog with your custom domain.

Googling a bit lead me to this post by Mayank Raichura , he has done all the hard work but what he has implemented is a little different from what i wanted.

You can download his sample from here

Hi implementation lets you to have google friend connect only inside the posts pages not on all the pages as this is clear from his code i modified his code a bit and everything then worked just fine for me.

 public void CreateFriendConnectBar(ServingEventArgs e)
    {
        settings = ExtensionManager.GetSettings(GetType().Name);

        //Settings should be retrieved after this...
        string sb_Site_ID = settings.GetSingleValue("Site_ID").ToLower();
        string sb_Div_Tag_ID = settings.GetSingleValue("Div_Tag_ID").ToLower();
        string sb_Scope_of_Social_Bar = "SITE";        
        bool sb_Allow_Anonymous_Post = bool.Parse(settings.GetSingleValue("Allow_Anonymous_Post").ToLower());

        //End Settings Retrieval
        e.Body += "\n<!-- Google_Friend_Connects_Social_Bar extension by Mayank Raichura -->\n";
        e.Body += BuildHTML(sb_Site_ID, sb_Div_Tag_ID, sb_Scope_of_Social_Bar, sb_Allow_Anonymous_Post);
    }
    private void Post_Serving(object sender, ServingEventArgs e)
    {
        post = (Post)sender;
        CreateFriendConnectBar(e);
    }

I removed his code where he is checking whether it is a post page or stuffs related to posts which he is checking in his first few lines and created a method called CreateFriendConnectBar(ServingEventArgs e) which i call from the Post_Serving event basically i am not checking that is the post null or something else, this will run in every case.

The important thing which you have to do other then what is stated is instead of this line

string sb_Scope_of_Social_Bar = "PAGE";

just replace “PAGE” with “SITE”, then just follow the instruction given on his blog to complete the steps.

string sb_Scope_of_Social_Bar = "SITE";

One more thing which most of you will forget is that consider a situation wherein from your previous blogspot blog your were having 2000 followers then you definitely would not want to lose your followers by just going and creating a absolutely new account for the new domain hosting.

So the solution for this is just go to your Google Friend Connect account and remap the url or site url field to your new website on the custom domain.

Also as a quick tip make sure your are having rpc_relay and canvas files in your website root folder.

Text not scaling properly during animation in Silverlight

2009-08-26T10:42:00.001-07:00

If you are facing the problem where you text is not scaling properly and the animation is not coming smooth then in this kind of situation you have to use something which can find the nearest neighbor and convert the values in accordance with this nearest neighbor.

If you are using Silverlight then you can do this very easily by typing just one line of code.

For Silverlight 2 you have to type

RenderOptions.TextRenderingMode = “RenderForAnimation”

For Silverlight 3 you have to type

TextOptions.TextHintingMode = "Animation"

Both of these ensure that the text animation is proper, if you don’t use these properties then you will find sometime when you are applying some scaling or any other rendering transformation on any container which also contains some text element then this text element inside the container will also scale.

I will give main emphasis on Silverlight 3 property i.e TextOptions.TextHintingMode

This property takes one of two possible values: Animated or Fixed.

“Animated optimizes for animation by using a more efficient, but less visually precise, smoothing algorithm. Text is still readable and the loss of precision is not that severe.”

Fixed uses an algorithm that is optimized for visually precise text smoothing, but can lead to performance issues. For example, when animations are applied to properties of a text element, in particular FontSize, you might see jitters. When transforms, positioning, or projections are applied to text elements, you might see performance issues. Fixed is the default.

You can apply this property to a layout container and the setting will apply to any text element within that container. However, in general, you should apply this property directly to a text element, such as a TextBlock, TextBox, or Glyphs, where the animations applied will only affect the text.

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Deleting User Alerts in Sharepoint (MOSS 2007)

2009-08-24T14:59:00.001-07:00

Setting alerts in MOSS 2007 is very easy just go to any list or library right click on Actions Tab and the last option available is the Alert Me feature. Configuring these alerts is very simple and is a child’s play but customizing the alert emails which are sent and sending list specific email alerts and stuffs like this are little bit tricky.

Don’t worry here we are not discussing those horrifying issues but here we are simply going to discuss on how to delete the alerts which user has set on a particular list. There is a very simple process to do this you don’t need to write code for that but i am sharing this with you as for the novice programmer it’s a tedious task to find actually where to go to delete these alerts.

Just go to “Site Actions” on the top right corner of your sharepoint site and then click “Site Settings”.

Now look for the Site Administration section under that look for the User Alerts.

Once the User Alerts page is opened select a user for which you want to delete the alert, as you select the username from the dropdown list then all the alerts related to that user will be displayed.
Now you can select single or multiple alerts and click on the “Delete Selected Alert” link to delete the selected alert.

Stay tuned for more articles on Sharepoint (MOSS 2007)

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Finding and changing the default timer interval for timer jobs in Sharepoint

2009-08-20T12:34:00.001-07:00

Many times we need to change the default timer settings either by increasing the default time or by decreasing the default time of the timer jobs for a particular sharepoint site.

Particularly if you want to send an email as soon as an action is performed within the sharepoint, in such a scenario you will need to decrease the default timing of the timer job.

There are two commands by which you can achieve this very easily:-

Finding the default time of the timer job, the delay in sending mails could be due to the default timing of the timer jobs which is by default 5 minutes.

stsadm –o getproperty –pn job-immediate-alerts –url http://yoursharepointsiteurl:yourportno

Decreasing the default time of the timer job to 1 minute.

stsadm –o setproperty –pn job-immediate-alerts –url http://yoursharepointsiteurl:yourportno –pv “every 1 minutes”

That’s all you need to do to adjust the default timer job timing delays.

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Smallworkarounds on Mobile

2009-08-19T08:42:00.001-07:00

Hi readers, i am pleased to announce that Smallworkarounds has been launched for the mobile platform using Mobify.Me service.

You can find the mobile version of Smallworkarounds at www.smallworkarounds.mobify.me

Now you can view your favourite new articles on your mobile set.There will be few more upgrades in future for this mobile site.

I came across mobify.me through Woork and as soon as i used it, i started liking this service.

I highly recommend you to go through this article on Woork to follow the steps to mobify your website.

O3D:- Google Releases 3D support open api for web browsers

2009-08-15T17:16:00.001-07:00

O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser. This API is shared at an early stage as part of a conversation with the broader developer community about establishing an open web standard for 3D graphics.

The latest release is O3D Release 0.1.40.1

O3D is available in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari and works on any Linux, Mac, and Windows computer that meets the minimum hardware requirements.

You can watch the sample here http://o3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/beachdemo/beachdemo.html

You can download O3D from http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/

MOSS 2007 :- Editing a user profile

2009-08-15T16:34:00.001-07:00

There are times when you need to edit the user profiles and relate some meaningful data other then the default data which the user brings from its active directory or standalone profile.

For this task you need to know where exactly you can modify the user profile.

This article will tell you one possible way of modifying the user profile and relating an email address to the user.

1.Open the Central Administration and from the central administration select the Shared Service Provider link.

2.In the shared service provider open the User Profiles and properties link.

3.After clicking the User Profile link you will be redirected to a page where you will find profile and import settings.On this page click on the view user profiles link, clicking on this link will take you to a page where you will find all the details related to the user, you can edit and save changes inside many of the given user related properties.

4. View User Profile will redirect you to a page where you can find all the users now you can click on any of them and as soon as you click the dropdown around them you will find options saying Edit,Delete and Manage Personal Site, now just click on Edit link to start editing the user profile.

5.Now a detailed screen will be opened for you where you can edit any of the properties among several properties which are there.You can associate work phone,title,office,department, email and many other attributes to the selected user which we are editing.

6.After making all your changes, just click on the Save and Close button at the top of the Information to save your changes.

And that’s all what you need to change the user’s profile, this is one of the method to reach here there can of course be other ways to reach at the same section, i would love to know about some other ways by which you people are manipulating the user profiles.

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can't Uninstall SQL Server 2005 Express Tools:- Error while installing Sql Server Management Studio Express 2008

2009-08-07T03:34:00.001-07:00

The SQL Server 2005 Express Tools are installed. To continue, remove the SQL Server 2005 Express Tools.

If you are getting the above error while installing Sql Server Management Studio 2008 then probably you might try the below given solutions one by one to fix this error.

I m not certain what will work for you but i have added all the options which i found after spending some time on the net which various people have given and for me the most common one worked which also i have listed below.

Rename the key “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90”. This worked for me i renamed the whole folder to “old” and then the installation started passing all the test. For x64 Windows Server 2008, the reg key needed is: “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90” ( Thanks to adam).

Once Sql server Management Studio is installed successfully, then restart your system sql server installation will automatically ask you for a restart.

After restarting you will see that your sql server 2005 instance will stop working because you played with the 90 directory and if you try to rename old to 90 then the system will not allow you to do so as it already created an entry name 90 for you having “Tools” and “Shell”.

So now we are in deep trouble what to do next, what i did was i again renamed the 90 entry which it created to 70 and the entry for sql server 2005 which we renamed as old, again back to 90 and voila everything works fine now.

Both sql server installations are running side by side and both management studios are also running side by side anyways we can open old database in SSMS 2008 so there is no need to have SSMS 2005 unless and until there is some special requirement.

This was the hit and trial method and it worked for me for the first time but i would not suggest this method to be done on any full fledged install although you may test this on your virtual pc or vmware installation as it might corrupt your sql server 2005 installation in some cases.

2.Try uninstalling any redgate products if you have installed any especially Red Gate Sql Prompt, this also caused issues to some users.

3.Try uninstalling sql server Management Studio 2005 before installing SSMS 2008

Above listed three ways will do the task for you, if you have resolved the problem in some other easy and concrete way then please do post your comment.

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!