Wateen Connector is one of my projects that got me interested in Visual Studio .NET – some of the team members of CyberPK helped and contributed to this small utility.

I actually made this on a request from a CyberPK’s Loyal and Regular user, i didn’t thought that other users would be experiencing the same problem like him, Until i recently fell into it myself.

It sure is annoying, having to keep logging in to your Wateen WiMAX account – so Wateen Connector was created. Wateen Connector is Exclusively made for Wateen WiMAX users.

About Pakistan’s Wateen Telcom

Wateen Telecom is a Internet Service Provider in Pakistan, its a new venture of Warid Telcom – Wateen Telecom established one of the largest country-wide WiMAX Network in the world.

Wateen Connector lets you log into your Wateen Services as you usually do. The extra features that you get is that Wateen Connector allows you to Monitor your internet connection and if it goes down it will let you know about it, And will ask if you like to keep monitoring it. If you set monitoring on you will be notified as soon as you disconnect or get connected – Wateen Connector also has a Auto-Login feature that logs you into your Wateen Account easily and effort-lessly!.

Wateen Connector now lets you chat with other Wateen users using the chat services implemented on our website. One of the useful features that we added was the ability to view your bandwidth usage from the application.

For complete detail and information visit Wateen Connector’s Homepage.

class.upload.php – Free PHP Upload Class

This PHP script uploads files and manipulates images very easily. The perfect script to generate thumbnails or create a photo gallery! It can convert, resize and work on uploaded images in many ways, add labels, watermarks and reflections and other image editing features. You can use it for files uploaded through an HTML form, a Flash uploader, or on local files. It uses the GD library.

This script is released under the GPL Version 2. If your project is not GPL, commercial licenses are available.

Look at the example below:

$foo = new Upload($_FILES['form_field']);
if ($foo->uploaded) {
  // save uploaded image with no changes
  $foo->Process('/home/user/files/');
  if ($foo->processed) {
    echo 'original image copied';
  } else {
    echo 'error : ' . $foo->error;
  }
  // save uploaded image with a new name
  $foo->file_new_name_body = 'foo';
  $foo->Process('/home/user/files/');
  if ($foo->processed) {
    echo 'image renamed "foo" copied';
  } else {
    echo 'error : ' . $foo->error;
  }
  // save uploaded image with a new name,
  // resized to 100px wide
  $foo->file_new_name_body = 'image_resized';
  $foo->image_resize = true;
  $foo->image_convert = gif;
  $foo->image_x = 100;
  $foo->image_ratio_y = true;
  $foo->Process('/home/user/files/');
  if ($foo->processed) {
    echo 'image renamed, resized x=100
          and converted to GIF';
    $foo->Clean();
  } else {
    echo 'error : ' . $foo->error;
  }
}

What does it actually do in this example?

This example uses a file uploaded via a form. With this single file, it will :

• copy the file without any modification
• copy the file after having changed its name to ‘foo’
• copy the file, resizing it to x=100, y=auto, converting it to GIF

Why use this class?

• with one uploaded file, you can do as many copies, convertions, resizing you want.
• you can resize each image dimension, or both, keeping the image ratio or not.
• you can choose to resize an image only if it is bigger -or smaller- than the wanted sizes
• you can manipulate the image in many ways, play with colors, add borders, labels and watermarks…
• its use is simplistic but powerful
• you can work on uploaded files or local files, useful for batch processing
• Flash uploaders are fully supported
• MIME type detection is very comprehensive
• more than 60 documented configuration settings
• a lot of variables are set up during the process. You can retrieve all these values after a process.
• error messages are understandable, and a variable log allows you to see what the class does.
• it is already widely used on Internet
• it is free

If you like this script and are looking for some thing just like this than grab this script by going on to its website at : Class.upload.php Website

Determining if you or your application is connected to the internet may sound like an easy task – But it really wasn’t as easy as it sounds for me when i was trying to figure a way out to find a way to know if my computer is connected to the internet using VB.net / Visual Basic 2005.

I have done quite a search on this…

In my search results, I have only seen people praising to use the wininet.dll API, I do not know why people even bothered to post useless code like that, it really does not work!

However, I think I may be wrong – people with different types of internet connection might see different results, so it is completely up to you – If you have not tried that out already you should do so now.

You never know, maybe it might help in your situation – but from what I have been hearing that the wininet.dll API is not that reliable.

The two working solutions I found so far:
The first method is to ping a host (which is the most common):

    Function IsConnected() As Boolean
        Return My.Computer.Network.Ping("72.14.207.99")
    End Function

I recommend using IP Address (127.0.0.1) instead of a hostname (like www.google.com).

When you do use this method you have to be sure that the IP/Host you ping is active and online all the time – for instance (www.google.com) or (www.microsoft.com) is very less likely to go down.

The second method is my personal, which I thought was more reliable atleast in my case.

	Function IsConnected() As Boolean
	Try
		My.Computer.Network.DownloadFile("http://www.google.com.pk/abc.txt", "app_tool.dll", "", "", True, 100, True)
 
		If My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFileInfo("app_tool.dll").Length > 1 Then
			Return True
		End If
	Catch
		Return False
	End Try
	End Function

This function downloads a file from a reliable source that is always online like (www.google.com) and (www.microsoft.com) – if the download is successful we go further and check the length.

We use My.Computer.Network.DownloadFile to download the file, we pass some special parameters to it like the complete URL to the file we want to download and then the filename we want to give it after its copied to our hard-drive. We can also pass values such as a username and password (I have these set to an empty string like this “” with two double quotes). One of the useful parameter is if or not we want to show the end user a UI (User Interface) showing that a file is being downloaded to their computer, This is a boolean value True or False.

Then there is the second last parameter Timeout which takes an integar as a value (Timeout is set to 100 seconds by default) and last but not least is the overwrite parameter which to tell weather or not we want to overwrite the file, we can set that to true or false.

There is another method but I wont be discussing about that since it didn’t work quite correctly but I have been seeing people post messages alot that it is the best method – which is using a System.Net.WebRequest, But before you go let me also tell you that this method is also alot slower than the above.

I just start programming in the .NET Environment recently – i have used Visual Basic 6 before, but the .NET Environment was new for me but still it was not so tough after all. I’m not an old VB 6 guru either

I just used to make stuff on it for fun – the only i remember that i ever made on it was a Web Browser – which i think all the new VB programmers try to make and another app i made was for MSN Messenger which was to check if a certain user doesn’t have you on their contact list or has blocked you.

This was done along time ago back in the days when we used to use MSN Messenger 7.5 – now i trying to get deeper into .NET programming. I recently started and felt very comfortable programming in it; The first application i made was a small application which i personally made for one of our site users and myself.

Now, i’m currently working on another application its a System Cleaner quite similar to www.cCleaner.com.

I am using Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 right now, i will soon switch to Visual Studio 2008 - I have both installed, but only using VB 2005 for development; Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 both are available Free of charge from Microsoft Website.

I’ll be writting useful snippets and functions that i have found to be very useful along my learning experience.

This site will now be running under wordpress – Wordpress is no  doubt the simplest solution to your biggest problems.

I installed wordpress 2.6.2 as this is the latest release right now, Wordpress 2.7 is in development but i just couldn’t wait that long. I had free time in my hands so i thought why not setup a blog here – It’ll be taking me time to make my portfolio.

I’ll try my best to keep this place Alive  - One important reason i am using wordpress here is that i think it should be much easier for me to maintain snippets and tutorials that i will be posting here – and i really like the new wordpress admin user interface that is given to us to right our post

Thanks for taking the time to read this boring post