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Monday, February 23, 2009
Last week, Facebook released it's new Comment Box social widget which allows a developer to add threaded comment functionality to any site they want. It literally took me less than 5 minutes to slap it all together; and maybe if I didn't read stop to read all the itty bitty details, it probably would of taken me half that time. I must say, I'm pretty impressed -- it integrates well with my own site, and it looks slick. Facebook's widget allows allows for anonymous comments, so you don't necessarily need to be facebook user in order to submit your 2 cents. So wow, I'm
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009
How many hours during the day do you sit around and write validation code? Way to many to count, if I'm reading your mind. Validation is pretty common it's in usage that it occurred to me that I needed some sort of compact way of encapsulating rules and business logic. So on my train ride home, I thought to myself -- "Gee, I guess I could create validation attributes, and decorate my properties!" I really thought I was brilliant, and somewhat innovative, but lo and behold, I get home and discover there's already an application block written for just that
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Monday, February 16, 2009
HTTP Handlers and modules are necessary components for any given web app. While it's conceivable that a developer may never develop a Handler/Module ever, there may be legacy handlers/modules that may exist or third party applications that requires to use them. More information on Handlers and Modules here. So recently, I ran into an issue where all of my old .ashx and custom handlers blew up when running under IIS. I had upgraded to Vista from XP and being that the web application was dependant upon alot of Handler calls, this proved to be the latest challenge in the life
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Thursday, February 12, 2009
What's XQuery? It's a language backed by the W3C to standardize querying XML. Why XQuery? Microsoft started offering support for it in SQL Server 2000 and in SQL Server 2005, extended it with more support with the introduction of the XML data type column. It's fast, it's compact, and you don't need to add 10 million trivial columns. You just add one XML column and stick raw XML in there. It's that easy, a caveman can do it. Here's more information about Microsoft and XQuery. So what's the bad news? It's yet another language to learn and the syntax is
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Monday, February 02, 2009
I needed to store a collection of key/value strings, so I turned to a familiar class I've used in the past: System.Collections.Specialized.StringDictionary. It's pretty straightforward to use, you construct it, then add your items one at a time. However, I ran into some pretty odd behavior where all the keys I injected came back out lower cased.. and subsequently, blew up into a nice error screen because some of the underlining code was dependant on specifically cased key strings. According to microsoft: The key is handled in a case-insensitive manner; it is translated to lowercase before it is used with
