Starting off with ajax.net development for a project requirement. To wet the legs I stated off with a hello world application, and faced few issues. Thankfully the workarounds were easy and took very little time. This post is for reference purpose to others who may face the same problem.

Tools:

Windows XP SP3

MS Visual Studio .NET 2008

MS SQL 2008 Dev. Ed.

Game:

• Created an empty folder D:/Projects/Test/Ajax/Hello1
• Created virtual folders /AjaxTest –> D:/Projects/Test/Ajax/ and /AjaxTest/Hello1 –> D:/Projects/Test/Ajax/Hello1
• Opened VS, opened website /AjaxTest/Hello1
• Added new AJAX Web Form (Default.aspx)
• Went to design view and was presented with the following error on the design page:
• 
• Since it was reference error, I tried adding an empty Web Configuration file and reloaded the web form in design view and it solved the issue
• Added an update panel, a label and a button to the web form
• Added an event to the button click to display a message on the label
• Loaded the web form on the browser and was presented with the following exception:
• The path '/AjaxTest/Hello1/App_GlobalResources/' maps to a directory outside this application, which is not supported.
• Did some research online and found that adding a trailing slash to any virtual application home folder in the current web sites path causes this problem.
• Removed the trailing slash of AjaxTest virtual folder
• All is well now! :)

Happy coding!

This is so cool, if we could get a similar data made available for GCC my life would be so easier :D

[via] Geeks are Sexy

CodePlex - US Census Data for SQL Server 2008

“Project Description
This is a repository for US Census Data for SQL Server 2008 with spatial information. Some of the data that is and will be included will be for states, counties, cities, and zip codes. The project will be updated as the data is available in SQL Server 2008 format.

Please note that this tables contain geometry data types made for the "Flat Earth Model."

Data downloaded from http://www.census.gov and imported using the SQL Server 2008 Spatial Tools (http://www.sharpgis.net/page/SQL-Server-2008-Spatial-Tools.aspx) by Morten Nielsen

…

"

…”

US Census Data for SQL Server 2008 - State and County Table

“…

State Table
source code, 1785K, uploaded Today …

County Table
source code, 14132K, uploaded Sat …

Release Notes

The State and County Table are based on the 2000 Census Data and was normalized to the best of my knowledge. Please note that the the County table requires the State table. Both scripts contain the create and insert of the data.

The State geometry was derived by grouping all of the counties of each state using the User Defined Function found here: http://conceptdev.blogspot.com/2007/12/sql-server-2008-geometry-stunion.html

…”

US Census Data for SQL Server 2008 - Version 0.0.1.0

"...

State
source code, 1528K, uploaded Today - ...

County
source code, 7148K, uploaded Today -...

City
source code, 12258K, uploaded Today - ...

ZipCode
source code, 42531K, uploaded Today - ...
Release
Notes
Changes:
Added the ZipCode table
Modified all scripts
to include the spatial index
Compressed the files to a rar to make the files
smaller#

..."

A number of the podcasts I listen to have been covering SQL Server 2008’s spatial data type, so when I saw this I knew I had capture the data and mention it…

Update 4/20/2009 @ 7:15am:

There's now a City table/download (21860K) too... ;)

Update 4/20/2009 @ 4:20PM:
Added 0.0.1.0 block, which includes ZipCode data!

US Zip/City/County/State spatial data all ready for your SQL Server 2008… Just download, SQLCMD/import and go
Greg (noreply@blogger.com)
Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:18:00 GMT

From March 30th, Google has enabled its transliteration service for Indic languages to its Gmail users, if you have been waiting to compose emails in your native Indian languages (well, for now they support Hindi, Kannada,  Gmail is all game now .

Head over to your Gmail settings, and enable the transliteration service along with specifying your default preferred language and you are all set. By the way, if you are looking into transliterating some arbitrary text without sending it as an email, you can use the transliteration service available at http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic

I have been thinking of using this service for few things, lets see

The below post will provide a "hello world" kind of introduction to connecting to a remote IBM WebSphere Message Queue server using client application written in C#.

Points to note:

• Server and client should have a common OS login name. The passwords can be different between the server and client, what matters is that the login name should be identical.
• The login name you have selected to use should be part of the MQM group on the MQ server, or it should be explicitly given permission for querying the Queue manager and the queue.
• I have come across code on the web where they have mentioned how to connect to MQ server even with a different OS login name from the client side by explicitly setting the login and password onto the MQEnviroment class static properties, but it has not worked for me till now. So, my example code would be assuming that there is an identical login name between the client and server.
• Make a note of the Server-connection channel name (case sensitive), queue manager name (case sensitive), queue name (case sensitive) from the server side.
• You would need to install at the least the client package of MQ onto the client machine, the client code would be using the library from this installation to connect to the server.
• A reference to amqmdnet.dll would have to be added to the client project, its located in <MQ Installation Path>\bin\amqmdnet.dll

Now for the code

   1:  using System;

   2:  using System.Collections.Generic;

   3:  using System.Text;

   4:  using IBM.WMQ;

   5:   

   6:  namespace RemoteMQTest {

   7:      class Test01 {

   8:          static void Main(string[] args) {

   9:              MQEnvironment.Hostname = "My_Server";

  10:              MQEnvironment.Channel = "My_Channel";

  11:   

  12:              string mqQueueManagerName = "My_Q_Manager";

  13:              string mqQueueName = "My_Queue";

  14:              int openOptions = MQC.MQOO_INPUT_AS_Q_DEF;

  15:   

  16:              MQQueueManager qMgr = new MQQueueManager(mqQueueManagerName);

  17:              MQQueue q = qMgr.AccessQueue(mqQueueName, openOptions);

  18:   

  19:              MQMessage message = new MQMessage();

  20:              message.Version = 2;

  21:   

  22:              q.Get(message);

  23:   

  24:              Console.WriteLine("I got the message : {0}", message.ReadString(message.DataLength));

  25:              message.Seek(0);

  26:   

  27:   

  28:              q.Close();

  29:              qMgr.Close();

  30:              Console.WriteLine("done!");

  31:          }

  32:      }

  33:  }

Note that in line 25, we are explicitly making the message to seek back to 0th byte.

Happy coding

The Opera browser is my preferred browser as of now, with its low loading time and in-built support for mouse gestures and so many other small good things; it has established itself as the best choice for my taste. Even though it is great as it is out of the package, it helps a lot to customize it to iron out some quirks.

1. Adding Wikipedia quick search option

One of the neat things of Opera is that you can provide a quick search option, using which you can just provide a prefix letter and type your search term straight from the address bar; no need for any specialized area for making your search. Want to search google? or Yahoo!? or Answers? you can do just all this just by providing the appropriate prefix and typing your search term from the address bar (e.g., just typing "g vijay shankar ganesh" would search the term on google whereas providing "y vijay shankar ganesh" would search the same term on Yahoo!).

But, what escapes my logic is that how come they missed adding Wikipedia to the pre-built quick search options? Well, anyway its not much of a problem, all you need to do is Tools -> Preferences (Ctrl + F12) -> Search and then add the following details:

Name: Wikipedia Search

Keyword: w (w is by default used for download.com search, I seldom use it so I change w to use Wikipedia instead)

Address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go

That's it, press OK and now you can just type "w" proceeded by your search term and you will be directly taken to the appropriate Wikipedia article if that's found or else it will take you to the result page of Wikipedia Search.

2. Open Folder option for transfers

Another one of those options which obviously needs to be present by default, it makes you wonder why it's the not the case though. Once your download / transfer has finished downloading / transferring, the right-click option on the transfers screen only provides you with option to directly execute / open the file. I most of the time prefer opening the folder where the download has taken place and then do what's needed of the file. This can be accomplished by following the method described in the following blog post:

http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/open-folder-in-transfers-right-click

Cheers!

Charlie Calvert's Technical Blog Index

gen_yar - WinAMP plugin to copy all files in current playlist somewhere 

Physicist Brian Cox talking about CERN's LHC and his work, at TED

In the hunt for improving my development methodologies and techniques I recently came across on the concept of using Powerpoint for prototyping the user interface of the application that's yet to be developed. It is quite an interesting concept, apart from getting a look into the idea Long Zheng has provided a template package in  Powerpoint which can be used for designing such prototypes.

I am already loving this idea and planning to use from the current development cycle.

Okies, carrying on with the series we will look into expanding on the Essential tools - part 1:

StExBar (Freeware / Open source)

StExBar is a plug-in for the Windows Explorer, which adds much needed functionality to the explorer / folder view. It provides many useful commands for your everyday use of Windows explorer. And you can add as many custom commands on your own as you like.

Sysinternals Suite (Freeware)

Occasionally Microsoft does make good moves, and one such thing is acquiring Sysinternals. They had wonderful set of tools by Mark Russinovich, and after he joined MS a suit of all Sysinternals tools have been released. It's a windows developer / debuggers and administrators dream toolset. Head over to Sysinternals Suite page to check out all the available tools and download them to your hearts content.

Our day to day life becomes a lot easier when we make use of the proper tools to help us complete the task at hand. I am planing to post in about few tools which forms an essential part of my tool chain, most are free tools but sometimes there do come in gems which makes you to take out your credit card.

Below are the ones for today:

Piriform CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) (Freeware)

CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. The best function I like in CCleaner is that it provides you with the list of currently installed software list, the same one you get from Control Panel -> Add Remove Programs but a lot faster than the 'Add Remove Programs' applet. So, if you are a developer who always likes to check out various tools and find that removing some of them from 'Add Remove Programs' is a pain because it takes a long time to load, then I would strongly recommend this one. Apart from providing the previously mentioned function, it also provides option to clear browser cache and other MRU lists present on the system.

Eset NOD32 Anti-Virus (Commercial)

One of the few applications that I am ready to pay for, I have tried out various free and commercial options (commercial ones mainly as part of corporate subscriptions) but this one beats all of them by a mile. From my personal experience this is the best anti-virus there is todate, which does a good job of keeping the bad binaries at bay without taking up too much resource on your system.

MWSnap (Freeware)

Another gem of a software, a very light-weight application that provides screen capturing / on-screen measurement (ruler) / color picking / zoom tool. It also supports global hotkey's which makes your life a lot easier when you want to create an online documentation.

Unix and Linux tools for Windows (Freeware / Open source)

Are you a platform independent developer who work on both unix / linux and windows? Do you miss the powerful command line tools present in linux on windows? worry no more, you can get the following tools already ported to win32:

bc-1.05
bison-1.28
bzip2-1.0.2
diffutils-2.7
fileutils-3.16
findutils-4.1
flex-2.5.4
gawk-3.1.0
grep-2.4.2
gsar110
gzip-1.2.4
indent-2.2.9
jwhois-2.4.1
less-340
m4-1.4
make-3.78.1
patch-2.5
recode-3.6
rman-3.0.7
sed-3.02
shellutils-1.9.4
tar-1.12
textutils-2.1
unrar-3.00
wget-1.8.2
which-2.4

These are native windows binaries. so you do not need *nix simulation environment like cygwin or uwin.

Get it from (with source) : http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=9328

We will cover more in the future parts, till then bye and have a nice day!

It was quite hard to get the system to get into installation mode through the windows install CD or when trying to boot from one of the PE based boot CD's (BartPE, Ultimate Boot CD) on Dell Optiplex 755. The main culprit was the SATA harddisk and DVD drive, since the drivers for these models are not available (even after making a BartPE from the already existing Windows Installation).

The best method to overcome the problem was change the Drive Operation settings in the BIOS to "legacy" mode, so that they show up as normal IDE drives. I guess I am feeling the drives have become bit slower now, but that's the compromise needed to be taken in order for installing/reinstalling another version of Windows.

BlogEngine.Net 1.1 has been released. It's quite amazing how fast these guys have churned out the new release.

With my recent experiences in porting, chewing, and digesting dotnet projects, I kind of think that coding for Dotnet Framework V2.0 from scratch is lot easier than porting a complex system and maybe that is one of the few reasons for the quicker releases of the product (of course having an active development community and passionate project lead helps a lot).

Anyhoo, these guys are doing a fantastic job and I am planning to move to BlogEngine.NET after evaluating it out. Good going guys!

Well started with SubText (was done in framework 1.1), then moved to Wordpress (good community but had trouble with MySQL connection), then to DasBlog (still in V1.1) now finally to BlogEngine.NET (finally v2 product with source code, yipee). People! Man evolved from monkey! Any doubts there? :)

Forget MSDN, use http://blogs.vertigosoftware.com/snyholm/archive/2005/12/16/1746.aspx

Did you know you can use your gmail mail server to send and receive emails programmatically for free?

It's true; gmail allows you to use their mail servers to send email from your applications. If you combine that with the ASP.NET System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient class, you are ready to use your free gmail account and server. 

More Info at: http://www.mycsharpcorner.com/Post.aspx?postID=33

Via: Greg's Cool Stuff of the Day