5 December 2005 in .Net | Comments (2)

Just a few small tips on dealing with tabs (the control structure, not text based tabs ).In Visual Studio 2005 if you click on a tab with the scroll-wheel it closes that tab.

I discovered this a while back because that’s how I’ve become used to dealing with tabs thanks to FireFox. Scroll-wheel click on a link to open in a new tab, scroll wheel click the tab to close it. It really speeds up having to right click a link and select “open in new tab”.

– JD

7 November 2005 in .Net & Tools | Comments (0)

A couple of weekends back I got a chance to play with Cuyahoga. I spotted a reference to it on Nic’s blog.

For those of you who don’t know what it is, Cuyahoga is an open source content management system (CMS). I get involved with CMS products from time to time at work (EPiServer and Microsoft Content Management Server) so I like to look at other products in that space. One thing that really impressed me about Cuyahoga was the ability to manage several sites from the one central administration area. I like it when I see some of these enterprise features available in smaller products.

While doing some reading about Cuyahoga I stumbled across an interesting site that might be useful for other people that touch on the CMS space: http://www.cmsmatrix.org/. CMS Matrix provides a comparison tool for comparing features, price etc of heaps of different CMS.

Overall I liked the experience but some of the more basic (expected?) features seemed to be lacking just a bit. I’m looking forward to playing with some of the future versions – it looks like it would be great to leverage for some personal projects. Now, if I could just work out how to pronounce Cuyahoga…

– JD

1 September 2005 in .Net & Code & Microsoft & Windows | Comments (0)

As promised, a post on my experiences at TechEd 2005.

This was my first time attending TechEd and I was really impressed.

I was stunned at how well Sky City catered for the ~2500 people attending this year. I used to work in catering while at University and was always embarrassed by how amazingly poor the food quality was (I had no control over it so nobody should blame me! I’m a lover of food!). It was great – I don’t think I’ve eaten that well in my entire life.

All the speakers also were really good to listen to.

I really enjoyed the security related talks (I think we can all agree that Steve Riley and Jesper Johansson are kick ass speakers!) – if you ever get a chance to listen to either of these guys talk I would strongly suggest you take it up. I think Nic said it best by saying “basically the presenter I’d want to be”. He was speaking of just Steve, but they’re both awesome.

There were so many topics that I enjoyed – Darryls discussion about the compact framework was great – right at my level. Really did well at inspiring me to have more of a play around with my phone to do some cool things. I’m not sure what yet but that’s half the fun

Other Intergenites did a great job as well – I attended talks by Derek, Andrew Tokely and Jeremy Boyd. All excellent.

I must add that at the start of the week I wished TechEd was a week long. This quickly changed. I don’t think I’ve been so worn out in all my life! Once you include the drinks, the partying etc, it takes it out of you. I don’t know exactly how JB manages it – but he went up their early, then headed over to the Australian TechEd. All up he must be doing 6 or more talks! This excludes mention of the huge amount of work he did before Tech Ed – not just with preparing his topics, but in organising the Hands On Labs which Intergen ran this year. Well worth a mention.

Also a hi to Darryl Burling and Chandima who mentioned that they have read my blog – always good to hear

- JD

20 April 2005 in .Net | Comments (0)

In a recent .net user group meeting in Wellington we saw a demonstration of Visual Studio 2005. Somebody asked about turning on Smart Navigation and the property was found not to be available. Reading through the known issues document of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2:

Issue: Setting a Control to have focus when smartnav is set to true, cause IE to crash on postback
Details: If SmartNavigation is enabled on a page in which either Control.Focus() is called or HtmlForm.DefaultButton is declared, and the user posts back to the server repeatedly, there is an increased risk of Internet Exlorer crashing. A typical sign that this has happened is an Internet Explorer dialog containing the text:

Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
Workaround: Smart Navigation has been deprecated. To work around this issue, use the MaintainScrollPositionOnPostBack instead of Smart Navigation.

12 December 2004 in .Net & Tools | Comments (0)

One thing that has bugged me for a while (and I have been giving some answers but wasn’t overly satisfied) is that there doesn’t appear to be any good small standalone database engines that you can integrate into a .net application.

Today I was browsing a website and came across and advert that lead me here (http://sourceforge.net/cloudscape_download.php). It’s a 2MB database system that includes OLAP support, is open source and integrates directly into Java applications (I didn’t find too much information above what was on that page, so if I’m wrong, let me know).

Where is the .net alternative? I’m pretty sick of hearing that our choice is MSDE (or the future Express edition of SQL) as that’s considerably larger than the 2MB touted here.

What is even more sad is that not only does Java have this CloudScape product but they have an array of others including the likes of the Berkeley database (which in the last few years was ported to Java).

If anyone knows more than I do in this area (which should be just about any .net developer!) feel free to chuck a comment.

- JD

3 December 2004 in .Net | Comments (0)

So this evening I tried installing and playing with EpiServer on my home pc. What a nightmare.

Everything went fine except I ran into some issues – the sample site was crawling. Then after a short amount of investigation I found that it wasn’t just episerver – it was all sites, even static html sites running through IIS were crapping out on me.

A bit of poking around the event logs I find that it’s MCMS ISAPI filters that are causing all my issues. A tad confusing since you initially don’t think a new site would have them but since they’re installed at the root (wrong terminology?) of IIS you don’t tend to notice they’re there (well at least I didn’t).

So I decided to just uninstall MCMS – I don’t use it that much at home really, just when I occassionally work on something from home when I’m not feeling to flash.

You would imagine that an uninstall process would uninstall things now wouldn’t you. Welcome to MCMS. Not only did it do a half arse job of that but it left my IIS install in tatters with missing files, no sites running etc.

Again, a little bit of poking around and it’s the damn ISAPI filters again!! Finally, after removing them again, we have lift off and my other sites begin working again. All up around 2 hours worth of work to get a site working because of MCMS and it’s filters.

Thank goodness that EpiServer is just an ASP.Net application!

- JD

P.S. It’s late, I’m tired, this probably seems like a simple issue – I don’t care, it’s my blog and I’ll bitch if I want to!

6 November 2004 in .Net | Comments (0)

Over the last week I’ve been battling with converting a VB version of an ower-drawn listview to C#.

The benefits of the code I’m trying to convert is that it supports displaying thumbnails in the listview – something missing from even the .net 2.0 listview control (Note: I’m not interested in just setting the icon size to 100 or whatever and loading an imagelist and setting the listview.View.LargeIcons – that’s not efficient enough and will require all sorts of ugly hacks).

So anyway, I’ve altered the original code quite considerably and finally managed to get it somewhat working. I say somewhat working because it’s not actually displaying the thumbnails, but it’s a million miles ahead of where I was. My current problem seems to be that the dwItemSpec value that I’ve pulled from the Message gives massive numbers, like 758437504. This causes problems as that’s meant to be the index of the listview item. Obviously I don’t have close to a billion list view items, I only have 9, so it never gets to doing the custom draw due to it always thinking the current item is out of view.

I’ll keep going at it and see how I get on. The code works pefectly in VB, so I’ll build that and decompile that to see if it gives me any help.

The custom listview I’m attempting to duplicate is the one that ships with the FotoVision sample smart client application from the MSDN Smart Client site. Well worth a look at for anyone who enjoys winforms development.

- JD

29 October 2004 in .Net | Comments (1)

Been a while since I last posted so I thought I’d dump something I’ve done recently.

I’m on holiday at the moment so this afternoon I decided that I would order a pizza. Decided to go with X pizza company (lets keep them anon. for now). They have an interesting site where you can signup and get the “Managers Special” which allows you to print out an online-only vocher and claim your discount.

What was interesting was that while looking at this page my flatmate and I had a poke around and found that with some very simple URL manipulation you can get the name and email address of everyone that has ever signed up with X Pizza Company of New Zealand.

This lead me to think, how hard would it be to harvest these details? Within about 10 minutes I had a C# application that was dumping the details to a csv file (I only got a few – don’t want any calls from my ISP to complain about DOS attacks coming from our IP ). It was somewhat scary at how easy this was to do.

My flatmate then made an interesting observation – most of the email addresses were hotmail accounts. Sure enough, if you plug these into the MSN site we had about an 80% strike rate for getting the persons profile.

So now, from this we could effectively build up:

• Name
• Email address
• Likes / Dislikes*
• Photo*
• Age*
• Marital Status*
• Location in NZ*
• Gender* (if you couldn’t guess from the name)
• Favourite Quote*
• Occupation*
• Link to personal website*

*Information from the MSN profiles. Some of these fields may not be completed.

What makes this a little worrying is that it would probably only take about another 30 minutes of coding to build up a lot of information about all the people on the list we gathered from X pizza company.

When you really start to think about it further and imagine that you could automate a google search on the email address or name (and possibly limit it to New Zealand sites only) you could build a huge database of information about people who have never met you in their entire life.

The amount of information on the net that could be used to exploit people through Identity threft is enormous – and, as you can see, can be automated rather easily.

Obviously, while I mentioned that the details can be gathered from an exploit in a website, you could do it just fine without an exploit through things such as dating sites, message boards etc.

Makes you think about what you put online

- JD