General
It's been a long time in between updates for subtext, but, has it actually been worth it? Well, kinda. Compared to the 1.9.5 release this one seems a little rough around the edges.
If you're on a shared host WITHOUT full trust, beware! Things will break in multiple places, including:
DTP.aspx (The homepage) (tag "st" undefined, needed to add back 'Register TagPrefix="st" Namespace="Subtext.Web.UI.WebControls"') (My web.config merge error)
/admin/Posts/ (EnclosureMimetypes config section missing requirePermission="false" attribute)
/admin/Feedback/ ("FeedbackStatusFlag" undeclared, needed to prefix with the namespace)
Subtext.Framework.UrlManager.UrlReWriteHandlerFactory.GetHandlerForUrl(string url) also breaks...
MindManager is a very slick product, it looks and feel like every other Office application. I've used this product for a few university project management assignments to create things such as work breakdown structures (WBS) as well as just general information organisation.
The version I'm using is the Lite version (heaps cheaper) which still carries a lot of features but lacks the integration to other office products. It also lacks the additional information you are able to attribute to the topic nodes such as start, finish dates, time estimates and resources. Although these would also be nice to have from a...
NHibernate is a remarkable ORM, however with all the magic comes a few caveats, these being the difficulties running NHibernate apps in a shared hosting environment. I'm still convinced that it's entirely possible, so I've decided to start compiling a list of success and failures that others (and myself) have had in getting things working.
Compatible Shared Hosts
Host Name
Comment
...
Over the past few days I've decided to start recording my time with an open source program called Kimai. I'd have to say, I'm not liking the results to far. Kimai has recorded that I've spent 24 hours at work over the last 48 hours. Now, I do realize that other people are working even LONGER hours than me, I personally feel they are crazy, they are the ones that should be hooking up Kimai, and they probably wouldn't even have to bother going and turning the recorder off. All the hours have come about because of the looming deadline of...
I just couldn't resist sharing the news with all those who have been burned with the Netgear SC101 network storage device. Call it what you like NAS, SAN, Hard drive with blue cable plugged in, doorstop, whatever. Netgear has finally after a few delays (6+ months), released a Vista driver, which, yey, I can verify works on my Vista Business Edition. I still haven't had any luck with getting it installed on Windows Server 2008 (errors with "Failed to install the Z-SAN SCSI miniport driver" whatever that is), but hey, 1 out of 2 ain't bad.
So if you're one of...
I've mentioned previously, there has been some experimentation around with getting WebKit to work on windows. I just didn't really expect Apple to release a full Safari for Windows. So naturally owning a MacBook that I use to run both OSX and Windows, I downloaded both versions. Although the Windows version gives you a taste, it just doesn't 'feel right'. Not sure what it is, but Safari just seems so much smoother in it's native OSX. I'm sure future versions will improve on this, but wow, cool.
Another feature of Leopard that I'm pretty impressed with is the ability to have 'Piles'...
Yes, I'm one of the crowd now, all because my old host Jumba is turning off the last of their Windows boxes, and coincidentally, the one I was hosted on. This has happened previously when they shut down some legacy Windows servers and forced everyone on it to upgrade.
Since Jumba is now no longer offering HELM windows hosting they have recommended xHostSolutions who have pretty comparative deals to what I was previously on, only better. This now gives me access to an MS Sql Server database, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to install SubText.
I still think that Single User Blog is a...
If you are only ever running one ASP.NET application on a website this is not an issue. However, if you are running a site which may have an application at the root and other separate applications running in sub or virtual directories, then Settings inheritance could be a problem.
You can read more about how config files get inherited on msdn but here's a tip for stopping settings in the root app from getting inherited. The <location> tag is the only tag I've come across which has the inheritInChildApplications attribute. So to target the main <system.web> just wrap it in the location tag as seen below.
<location path="."...
Since the postgres forums appear to be a little quite, I'll post my error here as well.
This error is in regards to the postgres .net npgsql driver and seemed to only occur when using stored procs.
The Error
The behavior I experienced happens when using stored procedures started out with me getting the following error:
ERROR: 42601: a column definition list is only allowed for functions returning "record"
After checking and double checking the stored proc and the parameters I was sending in I turned Npgsql's debugging on. The error appears to be coming from a statement that looks like the following:
select * from...
C# is a pretty sweet language, and there are many, many, many little things that just make the code that much nicer. Have you ever been in a situation where for some reason you NEEDED to have a string/code fragment/js fragment/sql statement inline in your code because you don't believe in resource files or stored procedures?
Aside from whatever great debate about "if you should or shouldn't". If you are going to, please, please, learn to take advantage of what C# has to offer, yes I'm talking about the '@' string literal.
Now I'm not going to target anyone in particular,...
I don't know why but FreeTextBox has just never cut it for me. It's wonderful and easy to install and it comes as a nice control in a .NET assembly. But it doesn't give you the nicest HTML back, in fact I'd go as far as to say, it mutates GOOD HTML you put in there yourself, this is bad. Luckily there are some other free alternatives such as TinyMCE, which is a nice little editor. The only catch is it's pure javascript and requires a little manual intervention to work with your serverside code.
On a...
After a little bit of thought from my last post I decided to write a small sample class and use tooltips to document what some of the most common modifiers do. So run your mouse over the boxes below to see the documentation about the keyword.
Edit: In an effort to unbreak my RSS I've moved it to it's own page http://www.kowitz.net/CSharp_Modifier_Keyword_Guide.aspx
As with most days I learn things about programming and C# that I didn't know before, until I've already past the point where I know I'll never ever come close knowing everything.
Now, I though I knew a bit about method/property modifiers, well apparently not, found one today that I haven't seen before.
Unexpected places to find 'new':Maybe I've been living under a rock for quiet some time, but I'm talking about the keyword 'new'. And I bet the first this that's come to mind is 'what kind of developer are you? everyone knows about 'new'!
Well it...
A few weeks ago before everything started getting really busy both personally and work wise, I still somehow found the time to put together a mobile version of my blog content.
Device DetectionIn the beginning I was just using the ASP.NET property Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice for device detection, but for some reason WindowsCE is not considered a mobile device by this property, so I included an additional 'if Request.Browser.Platform.Equals("WinCE")'. The mobile devices request will be redirected to www.kowitz.net/mobile/ which displays only one post on the screen at a time using 100% mobile controls and pages.
While I was creating my Mobile...
Why not use IHttpHandler for rewriting: You can find the previous post I've done on this subject here, it has a c# source code example and will also explain some of the downfalls of using the IhttpHandler for rewriting. In summary my basic feeling on this is IhttpHandler is great if you know the Url that is going to be requested eg. /Rss.ashx every time an rss reader requests this Url, the reader will never know that Rss.ashx doesn't necessarily have to exist as the response is picked up and written back by the handler. How is IHttpModule more useful url rewriting? When it...
I have been aching to try out Live Writer to do a post...but no success yet :(
Many people have probably seen the "Powered By ASP.NET 2.0" button.
So I thought it was only fair to convert it into a Powered by SUB button.
Or here's another more subtle one.
I found this project the other day while I was searching for something about kde, it's the Swift web browser. Swift is a shell for the Win32 port from the open source WebKit project. WebKit is the rendering engine used in Safari and Shiira, which is based on the source from the Linux rendering engine KHTML used in browsers such as Konqueror.One thing that I've always admired about the output from Safari is the smooth aliased appearance of the page and in particular the page text. Couple this with KHTML's standards complaint track record Swift may be a neat...
Just recently I have been getting bombed with more trackback spam then I'd like. SUB has some built in protection for this by scanning the incoming exert for a link to the current post. The initial problem with this approach (as Al explained to me) is that other blogs such as wordpress will only submit the first X number of characters if its a long post, meaning that a link back to my post may not be in there and the trackback will fail.
That aside, in my case nothing was never going to work even for ham, this...
WWDC, one of the more important events of the year for Apple has kicked off at 2am Aussie time with Steve Job's keynote presentation. This year Apple has unveiled the new MacPro sporting a Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processor. Other notable mentions include the preview of Leopard (OSX10.5) which looks promising and has all the usual creative flavour Apple adds to everything.
Here are a couple of neat things in ASP.NET 2.0 that I've used recently.
Access the controls on a master page. You'd think it must be possible, and it is, it's easy to do.Label Label1 = (Label)Master.FindControl("Label1");
Label1.Text = "Set by child page";
ObjectDataSource...Before I used it I was suspecting that it may have been like one of the adapters in 1.1 which I try to keep away from on a the page itself. I find it cleaner to put all the database access logic in a datalayer under the business objects. Well it seems Microsoft may have been thinking...
Here's my own little rant I'd like to add to articles like this: http://beyr.wordpress.com/2006/02/27/stupid-people/
This needs to be posted to bring shame upon those who accuse and complain before they think and examine.
On the weekend I was having a picnic with my family at one of the park benches beside the beach. After a while a 'stupid person' walked back to their car (which was parked beside mine). A few seconds passed before they started ranting at the top of their lungs "Thanks to the person that owns this car!" (pointing at my car) "For putting a dint in...
Intro
Over the last few months we have been attempting to implement some 'better' best practice methodologies within our SDLC. Some of the things that we have already been addressing are:
Simple Coding Standards and Rules
Nant Build Scripts
Continuous Integration with the help of Cruise control
Although I feel this is a good start, one of the more critical best practice aspect that has not been properly addressed is Unit and Regression testing. At the beginning of the previous project we had good intentions but because we got extremely battered for time, the Unit tests were all but abandond. However, the time has come...
Programming visual C# 2005: The Language by Donis Marshall
Book highlights for me:Below is a brief list of some of the language highlights presented in "Programming Visual C# 2005" that I have finally been able to get my hands on.Nullable types//Define a nullable type int? a = null;
//Boxing a nullable type object b = (object)a;
//Detecting if a boxed value is a nullable typeif(b.GetType().IsGenericType && b.GetType.GetGenericTypeDefinition() == typeof(Nullable<>))
//Avoiding nulla.GetValueOrDefault(0);
//Setting a default value a = value ?? 0;Weak references//Using weak reference is a way of pointing to an object's value, but it's special because when our friend the garbage...
Foreword:
Below is a description of a bug tracking and project management concept that I think would help handle business driven development for an internal software development unit. It is understandable that IT will of course be needed to make recommendations (forceful decisions in some cases) over what needs to be developed next, however in general the overall product should mainly be driven by the user's highest priorities and desired features.
Description:
There seems to be a lot of bug tracking software out there, however, I'm struggling to find an extensible package that properly incorporates some kind of XP model.
TrekXP is an...
Yes thats right, for all those interested in the next in the Half-Life series, it's finally here. Half-Life 2 has all the latest features that your can sink your latest graphics cards and dual cores into. The first one was almost worth buying just for the eye candy, so I'm interested to see how much further Valve will go this time.
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...
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,...
When Apple release iLife '06 it included a "feature" in iPhoto called photocasting (similar to the all successful podcasting). So basically I'm guessing it's just iPhoto subscribing to some rss feed right? I was initially interested in how this worked, so I've had a quick google search to see what sorts of things come up. Here the summary of a user that was posted on ones of Apple's mailing lists:
"To sum up, the "photocasting" feature centers around a singleundocumented extension element in a namespace that doesn't need to bedeclared. iPhoto 6 doesn't understand the first thing...
Just an observation, and of course I'm not expecting any miracles in this department. But from the 15 days I've had this new site running the msn.com search has indexed 74 pages (basically the entire site) and google.com is currently sitting on 3. I must admit I had my hopes pinned on google to be the first to index everything. I even went to the trouble of providing google with a sitemap. Oh well…I guess in terms of speed of inclusion into a search engine, we have a winner…
I signed up with Jumba a few weeks ago now, so I’ve been really trying to get at least SOMETHING onto this webspace. There were a couple of conditions on choosing Jumba…I want ASP.NET…well that’s about it.
So the two things I currently have installed here are SingleUserBlog v2 and nGallery.
I’ve played around with the SUB source code back in v1, and “apparently” v2 is heaps better.
The changes I made to SUBv2 Well already I’ve written a new datalayer that uses the sqlite engine. What’s my reason for the sqlite datalayer? Well, I originally liked the idea of SUB...
My telstra plan is nearing its end, so I took the opportunity to go with a new phone...this one is financed on vodafone. I dunno what vodafone is like so i'm gunna find out. The ‘pre-paid-plans’ allow you to bail at any time which is good I guess. So do I have a new number? Well the story goes…
My number started out as a Communic8 number on pre-paid which was OK, but the phone sucked. This number was then ported over to Optus pre-paid which kinda sucked + the new phone was sim locked to Optus, but it was...
In the hour since i got up this morning what did i do...1. I exercised for 1/2 an hour2. Ironed a shirt for work3. Did the washing up4. Made and ate breakfast5. Am still waiting...
What did my pain-in-the-ass house mate do for an hour...well i dunno nor do i ever wanna know. He was in the bathroom for that entire freak'n hour! Everyone in the house hates him for their own individual reason, how can one idiot person be incompatible with so many people for so many different reasons?? Nature is cruel isn't it..
My house mate’s parents sent him a package from India…now the package was in a box about the size of a medium rice cooker (that’s what was in it haha), then a cloth bag was sown up around the box to protect it then the address was written on the cloth with a biro. So yesterday he picked up the package from the post office and took the bus home, as he probably always does.Although when he got off he forgot to bring the package. So last night at around 10pm two police people were knocking on the door looking...
Very very cool..http://www.konfabulator.com/
Works with windows and mac..As for Apple's dashboard?http://www.macworld.com/news/2004/06/29/konfabulator/index.php"If this is what they do with the products they think are the best, then whywould anyone have any reason to develop more cool stuff? I certainly don't" (Arlo Rose, the developer of Konfabulator)
I wouldn't be happy either.
It’s finally happened…
Apple to Ship Mac OS X “Tiger” on April 29
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/apr/12tiger.html
Yep...And yet another reason why I like IBM AlphaWorks...Using .NET winforms from within Eclipse...they'll do anything. http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/eclipsewinforms
SQL Server diagrams help visualise your database schema, but copying them seems to be a little tricky. Here is an article on MSDN that will help: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q320125
An alternative to SWT? I have no idea, haven’t tried it yet. https://jgoodies.dev.java.net/ JGoodies provides cross-platform JGoodies-Forms and JGoodies-Looks, from the screenshots they look pretty good.When I get Nib4J working I’ll be giving them more of a look.