You may have noticed that over the past few weeks I have been trying to build more
interactive elements into this blog, some of these include.
Most viewed posts webpart.
Rate a post.
Highest Rated posts webpart.
Concurrent user indicator.
MSN client, online / offline status.
Sessions per hour graph.
My intention was that this blog would start to expose more of the interesting content
and create a slight online presence awareness by subtly reacting to...
Today I was browsing the website ProgrammableWeb, which lists the Web APIs by a lot of well known sites. One of the things that caught my eye was MSN, and then I noticed they had a listing for Messenger. After clicking details I soon found it was only a description of how Javascript can invoke a chat window from the installed messenger client.
I wanted to take this idea further and maybe integrate something Messengery into SUB. After a single search I come across DotMSN, a C# library for Messenger. So& as an experiment I've integrated the library into SUB....
Just for the record, I thought I'd post this windows update screen shot. Microsoft has required us to have a genuine copy of windows to download the updates and cool little apps from the Microsoft.com site for some time. Now windows pirates can enjoy a great little 'nag' screen on their desktop. I've only delayed installing this update because it’s not exactly a security fix and I don't see the advantage I'm going to get by installing it. I wounder if the number of Linux users is going to increase?
On that note, it'll be interesting to see if Apple...
This problem has been bugging me ever since we hit it the other day at work. It occurred when Al was trying to style a .NET Calendar using an external CSS file. In the properties of the Calendar you can specify the css class using the CssClass fields, these render correctly. However, there are a few properties such as DayStyle which have a default colour that renders in the ‘Style’ tag of the link. If the ForeColor is specified it does render that colour, if you don’t specify, it renders ‘black’. This effectively makes the CssClass field useless for setting...
I've had a couple of experimental things going on here in this blog. Firstly is the Archive page, it now renders the archive list in a similar fashion to a plug-in Al has created for wordpress. As for the whole query problem with the wordpress version, the SUB version of this does exactly 1 query for each month listed or 0 queries if that month has already been cached.
The other experimental webpart I've been running is the "Popular Posts" component (displayed on the left). Everytime a post is hit it increments the daily count, then it selects the...
Just for something random I decided to re-arrange the objects in the banner and adjust the link font sizes.
One of the things that has been annoying me for some time about Webparts is that silly dependency on SqlExpress/SqlServer. My webhosting at Jumba comes with MySQL or something and not SqlServer. So up until this point to get around the dependency on SqlServer I simply disabled all the calls from SqlBlogPersonalizationProvider and that did the trick, but I had to manually do all the layout stuff and couldn’t use the webparts properly. A while ago when Microsoft released the source code for the old AccessPersonalizationProvider from Beta 1 I thought I’d come back and address this issue.
Here’s what...
One of the bigger features of SQL Server 2005 is it's integration with the .NET platform. Now there is the ability to write your stored procs with a language like C#.
Now I'm just wondering how much of a good idea this is. Every scenario I try to go through still leads me to the same conclusion. This is, it may be handy for those really complex procedures that require some kind of funky processing or business logic or need to access the internet or a COM object or something. But for the most part, a loop is a loop,...