StolenBit

A Clever(?) AdWords Technique

2009-11-21T16:00:00.001+07:00

For those of you who read manga, you probably know of the name “Naruto”.
”Naruto” is the name of a quite famous Japanese manga series (read more…).
While browsing through a manga site today, I have come across an AdWords that really caught my attention.
”Naruto Hotels”!!! (What the…). Please see the image below for the ad.
I can see that it is an ad from a trip agency but why Naruto!!!???
After reading the details, I realized that, if I don’t misunderstand, the ad probably takes any famous word and put it as the title even if it doesn’t relate to what it is trying to sell.
The outcome is that the trip agency ad appears on a manga site!

What do you think about this marketing technique?
Do you think the manga readers are their target audiences?
Is this technique effective and not against any rule?
Will it confuse the Web users seeing the ad?

Buildings For Sale

2009-03-26T22:58:00.001+07:00

OK. This is unusual but, well, here we go!

We’ve got buildings for sale in Chiang Mai, Thailand – the land of smiles :)
Chiang Mai has been one of the best place to live in Thailand and probably in Asia or even the World.
With its unique characteristics and cultures, millions of people around the globe come to visit every year and many of them have even decided to settle down.

Today we offer you a great place with a great deal.
The buildings are located close to a famous shopping mall – Central Plaza, Kad Suan Kaew, and one of the most famous educational institutions in the North – Chiang Mai University.
It also takes no time for you to commute to Chiang Mai International Airport.

3 3.5-story buildings for sale:
The middle two are for sale at 3.49M THB each.
The right one is for sale at 3.79M THB.
(The biggest one on the other side has been sold.)
Dimension: 4m x 12m (48 sq.meters)
backyard: 2 m
footpath area: 1.5 m
parking area (in front of building): 4 m

Nice people, great place, and excellent location!
Isn’t that great?
What are you waiting for!
Call +66 (81) 814-2607 for English
Or +66 (87) 101-9613 , +66 (83) 482-6413, +66 (85) 695-2937 for Thai

View Larger Map

Hit Enter Key in a TextBox to Submit a Form – ASP.NET

2009-03-25T11:33:00.001+07:00

In ASP.NET, by default, hitting the Enter key in a TextBox fires the Click event of the first button found in the form.
For example, you have sub-forms within a <form> element and each form requires its own default button.
The default action of firing the first button found on a Web page is not what we want.
Making the <form> run at server and setting a DefaultButton property for the form is not a solution since it can only assign one button as the default button.
Having more than one server-side forms is not a solution either since it will not work.

One solution is to surround each sub-form with <asp:Panel> element and setting its DefaultButton property to a desired button.
This way, you can have many sub-forms on one page with their own default buttons :)

Enable Firefox to Access a SharePoint Site Without Logging In

2009-01-21T11:00:00.001+07:00

By default, you will need to provide a username and password for accessing a SharePoint site via Firefox even though you are in the same domain as SharePoint’s.
This does not happen in IE.
To enable an automatic login for Firefox, you will need to configure Firefox to use Windows’s built-in NTLM authentication.
To do so, follow the steps below:

Type about:config in Firefox’s address bar and press Enter key.
In the Filter textbox, type network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris and press Enter key.
You should now see the specified setting appearing in the preference name section.
Double click the preference name (or right click and choose Modify) to modify the value.
In the appearing dialog, enter the SharePoint server URLs (with no tailing “/”) separated by a comma and click OK when done.

That’s all and you are good to go :)

A Class in App_Code Folder Does Not Get Compiled

2008-12-23T17:41:00.001+07:00

Today I’ve experienced one odd thing with Visual Studio 2008.
As we know, App_Code is not needed for a Web application project under VS2008 since class files can be put anywhere.
However, to keep it clean and easy to find, I decided to created one and create class files under the folder.
It appears that those created objects do not be available.
In the other words, they do not get compiled.
After messing around, I found that the “Build Action” property of those files have been set to “Content” by default.
Well, it should be “Compile” so that the files get compiled.
I’ve also tried to create another folder with the name of “cs”.
The created class files under “cs” have the “Build Action” property of “Compile”.
Therefore, the solution is either set the “Build Action” property to “Compile” or never use a folder with the name of “App_Code”.

Now the question is… why does the “Build Action” property of the files under “App_Code” is “Content”?

Case-Insensitive XPath Searching

2008-12-20T19:50:00.001+07:00

As far as I know, there is no such xpath function to do the case-insenstive search.
However, there is a work-around for this.
The solution is to receive a lower-case string as the input and use lower-case() xpath function to help perform the search.
Consider the following XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<specification>
<name>ASUS Striker</name>
<manufacturer>ASUS</manufacturer>
<model>Striker</model>
</specification>

The following xpath do the search for “asu” which returns two string - “asus striker” and “asus”:

/specification//lower-case(text())[contains(.,'asu')]

As we can see, using lower-caes() and contains() helps search for lower-case string even though the xml contains upper-case string.
The text() function indicates the value of the node in context.
You can also try name() which indicates the name of the node.
You can try using upper-case() with upper-case input string as well.

VMWare Workstation on Windows Server 2008

2008-12-05T02:23:00.001+07:00

I’m currently in a progress of deciding whether to VMWare Workstation or Hyper-V on my Windows Server 2008 for a development environment. At first, I meant to seek for the one with better performance. However, I’ve come across one article at diTii.com about an issue on using VMWare Workstation on Windows Server 2008. Below is what they say. It’s good to know this stuff beforehand. Thanks :)

Due to the fact, in the current Intel/AMD chip architecture, only one hardware-based hypervisor can run at a time, you will want to create a special boot entry for a Hyper-V-less boot time configuration of Windows 2008. Assuming you are currently booted into Windows 2008, at an administrative command prompt, type the following:

bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Windows 2008 (No Hyper-V)”

The above command should say: The entry was successfully copied to {guid}.

Copy that {guid} to the clipboard including the curly braces.

Now, type the following command:

bcdedit /set {guid} hypervisorlaunchtype off

In the above command, replace {guid} with what you into the clipboard.

Boot into the ‘Windows 2008 (No Hyper-V)’ instance and you will no longer bluescreen while running VMWare guests.

Space Under An Image in IE

2008-11-06T10:12:00.001+07:00

When adding an image in a <div> (as shown in the HTML code below), IE displays a little white space below the image. This doesn't happen on Firefox though.

The fix is simple, just put the closing div tag </div> on the same line as the image and the problem is fixed:

Tell Your DotNetNuke Module Setting Page To Load Module.css

2008-10-30T11:36:00.001+07:00

By default, module.css does not get loaded for a module's setting page. To let it load the file, add the following code (in C#) to your module setting code behind file (settings.ascx.cs):

protected void Page_Load( object sender, System.EventArgs e ) {

    DotNetNuke.Framework.CDefault DefaultPage = (DotNetNuke.Framework.CDefault)Page;

    DefaultPage.AddStyleSheet( "ModuleSettingStyles", string.Format( "{0}/module.css", this.ModulePath ), true );

Debugging a DotNetNuke Compiled Module in VS2008

2008-10-29T16:26:00.001+07:00

If you are using VS2008 to create a DNN module with a compiled module starter kit, one option is to attach the project to w3wp.exe process. You can access it via Debug > Attach to Process... menu.

If attaching the project to w3wp.exe doesn't seem to be an option somehow (e.g. you just cannot find it), what you need to do now is to modify some project settings as shown below.

In my case, I've create a host record with local.dotnetnuke as the host name. In your case, you may want to replace http://local.dotnetnuke with http://localhost/dotnetnuke, for example. Please note that I've saved my project under /DesktopModules/ContactUsForm. So my project url becomes http://local.dotnetnuke/DesktopModules/ContactUsForm.

Save the project and try running it again. You should now be able to debug the project

Cannot Resolve Collation Conflict for Column n in SELECT Statement

2008-10-27T17:08:00.001+07:00

When creating a stored procedure and it contains a SELECT statement, you may get the following error message even if the collation of your database seems to be correct.

Cannot resolve collation conflict for column n in SELECT statement.

where n is the column number.

This can be easily fixed by appending the following portion of SQL to the column n in your SELECT statement:

COLLATE <your database collation name>

For example, COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS.

The database could not be exclusively locked to perform the operation

2008-10-27T15:47:00.001+07:00

When trying to change the collation of a database, you may get the following error message:

The database could not be exclusively locked to perform the operation.

To workaround this problem, we first need to set the database for single user. And change it back for multi user after changing the collation.

ALTER DATABASE <database_name> SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE
ALTER DATABASE <database_name> COLLATE <target_collation_name e.g. SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS>
ALTER DATABASE <database_name> SET MULTI_USER

Access to the Path... is denied

2008-10-23T18:08:00.001+07:00

When your ASP.NET application tries to access a file in a folder, you may get an error message saying "Access to the path <file path> is denied.". To solve this problem, you will need to provide permissions for NETWORK SERVICE (Windows 2003/2008) or ASPNET (Windows XP) account to access the folder containing that file. To provide the permissions, do the following:

Right click on the folder and select Properties.
Go to Security tab (if it doesn't appear, see below) and click on the Edit... button under Group or user names section.
Click on the Add... button and, on the popup window (titled Select Users or Groups), click on the Advanced... button.
Click on the Find Now button.
Select NETWORK SERVICE (or ASPNET) account and click OK twice to go back to the permissions window.
On the Permissions window, select the account and check Allow for Full Control.
Click OK twice to close the Properties window.

Now your ASP.NET should have an access to the folder.

What if the Security tab doesn't show up?

You'll need to uncheck the Simple File Sharing option in folder options.

On the Tools menu of your windows explorer, select Folder Options.
On the View tab, scroll down until you find the option saying "Use Simple File Sharing (recommended)".
Uncheck it and click OK to accept the change.

Now the security tab should appear and you can start configuring the permissions as stated above.

Two Great Firefox Extensions for RSS and Google Bookmark

2008-10-22T18:08:00.001+07:00

The first extension I would like to recommend is RSS Ticker. As you may have already known, Firefox can act as an RSS feed reader and you can just bookmark a feed as if it were a Web page. RSS Ticker displays and scrolls a list of those feeds right under your menu bar. Go ahead and give it a try.

That's it. When there is a new post, you'll get notified right on your Firefox

Another extension that I've found to be very very useful is Google Bookmark IncSearch. As you browse across the Web and find some useful pages that you want to keep, one way is to bookmark it on Google Bookmark so that you can access your bookmarks from anywhere. However, sooner or later, you will find yourself store TOO MANY bookmarks and just you don't seem to find what you want within your own bookmarks - even though you've well organized them. And you probably end up with googling for what you want again -*- Well, it would be nice if you can just search within your bookmarks if you know it IS there, wouldn't it? Google Bookmark IncSearch can help. OK. That's enough for saying. Give it a try and I'm sure you'll love it just as I do

Enable Remote Connection on SQL Server 2008

2008-10-22T16:54:00.001+07:00

By default, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 doesn't allow any remote connection. What we'll need to do is to enable TCP/IP protocol in SQL Server Configuration Manager > SQL Server Network Configuration > Protocols for <InstanceName> and enable the TCP/IP protocol as shown in the picture below. An example of InstanceName is MSSQLSERVER.

After restarting SQL Server (InstanceName) service (as shown below), it should work without any problem. You can quickly access the services windows by going to start menu > run > type services.msc. Locate the SQL Server (InstanceName) service, right click on it, and choose restart.

In my case, completing these steps enables me to connect from a remote machine successfully. However, someone reported that we also need SQL Server Browser service running too. Therefore, if completing the steps above doesn't help you get connected, you may try setting SQL Server Browser service to Automatic and start the service.

Failed to map the path..."

2008-10-21T10:29:00.001+07:00

When you create a new .NET Web application under a default Web site in IIS 7 (so the URL of your new Web application will be http://localhost/mywebsite, for example), you may encounter an error saying "Failed to map the path...".

To get rid of this error, make sure that the application pool of your new .NET Web application and the application pool of the default Web site are the same. The following pictures show the cause of the error:

Change the application pool of the latter one to be the same of the first one solves the problem

This row already belongs to another table."

2008-10-21T01:48:00.001+07:00

When you try to add a DataRow from one table to another, you may encounter the following error message:

"This row already belongs to another table."

This error message appears if you try to add (copy) a DataRow from table1 to table2, for example, with the following C# code:

table2.Rows.Add(row);

where row is a DataRow object from table1.

To successfully copy the row, you'll need to use ImportRow() method:

table2.ImportRow(row);

Don't forget to define a proper value of column number for table2 first or no data will be displayed if you bind table2 with a gridview, for example.

WSS 3.0 Security Groups

2008-10-17T21:40:00.001+07:00

In WSS 3.0, there are three (3) out-of -box security groups.

Owners (Full-Control)
- Get full access to the entire site and its subsites.
Members (Read/Write)
- Have "Contribute" permission level associated. This "Contribute" permission level gives members quite a bit of power and could be out of control sometimes.
- Members cannot see "Site Actions" button and those items hidden by an admin. However, by default, they CAN edit and delete an item created by an admin!!! ("Contribute" permission level)
Visitors (Read-Only)

Though visitors cannot see the "Site Actions" button, cannot do site personalization, and cannot edit or delete items, they, by default, CAN modify a shared document -*-

You can create your own SharePoint groups.

MOSS 2007 comes with more out-of-box groups.

<< Back to [70-631] TS: Configuring Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 - Exam Notes

www.localhost.com Nightmare

2008-10-17T17:17:00.001+07:00

When you're working with Visual Studio and trying to run a web application project, you may encounter a problem of the URL change from http://localhost to http://www.localhost.com

This is caused by the IPv6 issue. Look in your hosts file (usually located under C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc). Look for the line:

::1 localhost

Comment it out with a # sign and it'll become:

#::1 localhost

That's it. You're now up and running

IIS7 - Authorization Failure - Cannot verify access to path...

2008-10-16T17:18:00.002+07:00

When creating a new web application in IIS 7, you may encounter an authorization failure when clicking on the "Test Settings..." button as shown in the first picture. This is because the Web application is configured to use pass-through authentication which somehow may not have enough permission to access the physical folder of the Web application.

One way to work around is to create a new local user and give it an administrator role. In my case, I setup a new administrator account and named it "iis". Now click on the "Connect As..." button to set a new user for this connection and, of course, use the created one.

After clicking OK and test the settings, you will not get any warning message again.

Select ASP.NET Version in IIS 7

2008-10-16T14:13:00.001+07:00

In IIS 7, ASP.NET version selection is different from that on the earlier versions of IIS. In this version, the ASP.NET version is specified in an application pool. You can create a new application pool and let your Web application use it (see picture on the left).

Using a separated application pool also gives you a better performance - in exchange of resources though.

[70-631] TS: Configuring Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 - Exam Notes

2008-10-15T11:28:00.001+07:00

The list below is a summary of what we (probably) need to know for the 70-631 exam (configuring WSS 3.0). More items and details on each item will come later.

Beginning SharePoint 2007 Administration: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Göran Husman: Books

ISBN: 0470125292
ISBN-13: 9780470125298

Use Unicast mode to solve IP address conflict problem for intra-array communication.
NLB (Network Load Balancing) help distribute loads/requests across servers.
Install Web server certificate from WSS server on ISA to ensure that all external requests are inspected and encrypted.
Deploy ISA and publish WSS web site to prevent direct access from outside of the network to the WSS server.
To decommission and migrate all sites from one server to another on a different farm, edit the host record of the old server and configure IP address of the new server.
Configure AAM (Alternate Access Mapping) to allow remote users to access WSS Web site via a specific URL.
A SharePoint site can respond to more than one URL. In this aspect, it's similar to setting multiple URLs for a Web site in IIS.
Create a host record in DNS zone with a name value of WSS that maps to the IP address of the NLB cluster to ensure that each server in the cluster receives requests for WSS content.
Configure Event Throttling to write events to Windows event log.
We can review the IIS logs to verify that all access to the WSS Web site is encrypted.
Enabling Diagnostic Logging to have a WSS server create trace logs.
Tracing involves occurrences of particular events.
Let MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager) take care of the services across all WSS servers.
Don't forget to install WSS management pack for her.
Also let MOM take care of the HTTP errors.
Don't forget to install IIS management pack for her.
Include Network Interface, Processor, and Physical Memory objects in a counter log to identify potential hardware bottlenecks.
To remove all customizations on a page without losing any data, enable the "Reset specific page to site definition version" option in the site settings.
To create a Web page with custom Web Part zone layout, use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.
An image put in the default.master file will appear on all pages in a WSS Web site.
A master page helps keep consistency across multiple pages.
For developers - Always include error handling in the code when creating a custom Web Part.
To have requests distributed across multiple servers while having the content centralized, deploy 2+ front-end servers and store content database on a single instance of SQL Server.
To upgrade from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 without losing any existing URL, just install WSS 3.0 over the existing WSS 2.0 deployment.
To be able to access sites in languages other than English after an upgrade, we need to install the language pack template pack on WSS 3.0 server and run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration wizard.
If multiple WSS Web sites are run on the same WSS server, be sure to configure each Web application to run in its own application pool so that they don't affect each other.
Installing WRM (Windows Right Management) client SP2+ on each front-end Web server can help prevent users from printing or saving documents.
You can create a custom group and allow requests to join or leave the group so that users can automatically submit a request to obtain elevated permission levels and only approved users are granted.
To ensure that external users can authenticate before they're grated access to a Web site, specify the authenticate provider in the web.config file.
Enable anonymous access to Web application and Web site so that all Internet users have access to the WSS Web site.
To have SSL encryption enabled for all requests, install a certificate on each front-end server that receives the requests.
Obtaining a certificate from a trusted certification authority (CA) ensures that users do not receive SSL errors from their Web browser.
"Members" permission level users can only view and add content to a document library. Read more...
Using a member of dbcreator and securityadmin SQL Server 2005 server roles as the database installation account when installing SQL Server will minimize the amount of permissions provided to all users.
When using a custom authentication provider, be sure that the connection string details, membership, and role information in web.config file are for the custom authentication provider.
You can add content types to a document library to specify what types of documents a user will see when he clicks on the "New" menu item.
Backing up your Web application and content database using Central Administration helps minimize the time required to restore in the event of server failure.
You can use STSADM.EXE to add and deploy .wsp customization file.
You can also use STSADM.EXE to backup a site from one server and restore it on another server.
A deleted document stays in the stage-1 (site-level) recycle bin for 30 days by default before getting purged to the stage-2 (site collection-level) recycle bin.
In the case of pre-authentication failure for a specific application pool identity account, you'll need to reset the password for both the application pool identity account and the corresponding user account.
To allow access to a Web site from a mobile device, activate the MobilityRedirect feature for that Web site.
You can change a default database server in the Central Administration so that any new WSS Web site will store content on the new database server.
You can use the Three-state workflow to ensure that operations run in order.
MOSS 2007 provides more OOB (out-of-box) workflow.
To ensure that all users can view the public documents, in the Web application settings, configure the WSS server to use an HTML viewer server.
PASSED!

DotNetNuke Module Error " It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level."

2008-10-07T10:27:00.005+07:00

When creating a DNN C# module using a starter kit on this website, for example, you may encounter the following error when trying to run the module:

It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS.

Taken a look at the solution created by the starter kit, it creates a web.config file.

This file is what causes the problem.

Just deleting it or renaming it to something else like web.config.bak solves the problem :)

New Google Favicon for Firefox Search Bar

2008-10-02T00:01:00.005+07:00

As we all know that Google has been using a new favicon for quite sometimes. But on our Firefox search bar, the favicon is still that capital "G". Here is how to make it a new one:

Locate the google.xml file under %Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins.
Open it and locate the line starting with <Image width="16" height="16">.
Change the value of this tag (data:image/x-icon;...) to the text in this file.
Save it and restart Firefox.

Advantages, Disadvantages, and When To Use XSLT

2008-10-01T23:56:00.000+07:00

According to this web site, here are some advantages and disadvantages of XSLT:

Advantages

Easy to merge XML data into a presentation
More resilient to changes in the details of the XML documents than low-level DOM and SAX
Database queries can be returned in XML
- Insensitive to column order

Disadvantages

Memory intensive and suffers a performance penalty
Difficult to implement complicated business rules
Have to learn a new language (if not already familiar)
Can't change the value of variables (require recursions)

XSLT has been designed to use with XML.

Therefore, a scenario that most of the work involves XML transformation (e.g. to HTML or another XML tree) is probably the best scenario to use XSLT.

One example is the communications among organizations via Web Services where XML is used for data exchange.

For a normal website development, some other languages e.g. ASP.NET or php could probably be better choices.

They can handle complex business logic better than XSLT.

Question

In term of a website maintenance where XSLT is needed in some parts, is it better to have every page transformed to aspx (or php, or whatever) using XSLT or to mix both normal aspx and XSLT pages? In term of performance, I guess only use XSLT when needed is a better choice. If the performance penalty for using XSLT can be negated, I believe using XSLT for the whole site could be a better idea (for the maintenance reason).