Nifty tidbits!

Instant messenger client utopia

24 Feb, 2007 Utilities

http://[GAIM…] I hate running 3 different chat clients (yahoo, msn, gtalk) on my machine - and that’s just 3x memory, startup programs and useless adversting too many. And I hate msn and yahoo’s advertising that’s built into their clients…esp on MSN which insists on opening a mini page on login… Use GAIM - and do yourself a favour. Of course that’s if you don’t need the very specialized features :)).

XSLT Analog to sysouts

29 Apr, 2005 XML

I’m on a high. I’ve been stuck with this problem of trying to understand a HUGE xslt that operates on an even bigger XML. I sorely needed something that will let me trace through the xslt execution to understand the flow. Tried a couple of IDEs - Stylus Studio (free edition) and Marrowsoft XSelerator. Stylus studio did a graceful exit, Xselerator went purple in the face and died a gruesome death :-(

I'm on a high. I've been stuck with this problem o...

29 Apr, 2005 XML

Unit testing asp.net apps - NunitAsp

14 Apr, 2005 Agile unit-testing

I love the premise of Test Driven Development - I’ve even used it a few times in the line of duty ;-) (I do have to admit, I’ve been naughty and left out the step of Â seeing the test case fail a few times )…Anyway, I end up working on web applications more often than not and while you can use TDD for your class libraries, a web app is a totally different animal.

ASP.NET compared to Java web apps

11 Apr, 2005 ASP.NET Web

For the most part, I find ASP.NET far more easier to use than Java. But the ONE BIG THING where I’ve found ASP.NET sorely lacking is in the support for page templates. Page templates, if you need to brush up, allow you to define common layout and contents for a web site. Furthermore, once defined, its easy to change the layout and or move your default items around the place.

ASP.NET validation summary

8 Apr, 2005 ASP.NET Web

The ASP.NET validation summary is great for displaying all the errors in the page. It would be nice though to be able to use a validation summary to display errors that occur on the server side. A typical scenario is when you have a page that does a search and then displays the results of the search. For the case where no results are found, it would be nice to be able to display the results in our custom validation summary control.

Paging algorithm for ASP

8 Apr, 2005 ASP.NET Web

Been tinkering with getting a nice paging algorithm out. To get a basic hang of the problem, do take a look at * Many ASP developers create their own search engines that return back the results to the web browser one page at a time * Do take a look at the second query given. I’ve modified it a little bit so that you can sort by a given field and removed a bit of the cruft (the au_lname like '%A%' bit).

Hiding commandbar buttons in office addins

28 Mar, 2005 programming visualbasic

Have been pulling my hair out trying to make commandbar buttons go in VB Addins for Office 2000. There are a couple of gotchas here Any references to buttons that you’ve added are not valid by the time you get to the disconnection method. There’s a MSDN KB article on this and the workaround is to use FindControl to get a new reference to the button. The above technique works for Powerpoint and Excel.

BSNL Broadband..

24 Mar, 2005 broadband utilities

I finally got a broadband connection from BSNL last week. T’was heady stuff for the first few days - was getting 40 Kbytes/sec downloads - which translates to around 320 Kbps - more than the advertised 256Kbps. And then it all had to come down eventually!!! For the past two days, the downloads are going at 3 Kbytes/sec… So today I called their help desk and as expected, got no real help other than getting a complaint registered.

Calling web services asynchronously

10 Mar, 2005 programming async

Am learning how to call web services asynchronously….here are some good resources to start off with. Accessing an XML Web Service Asynchronously in Managed Code Communicating with XML Web Services Asynchronously I would actually like to make asynch calls from vb (sic!)…well that’s quite some way off..