This is a call for features….what are the critical / nice to haves for an online image gallery?
Mar 272006
Jan 192006
I thought this was too cool so I decided to post an example on it.
First Create A Class
We need to create a class the items of which we will add to our custom collection. This one’s pretty simple, it’s a car:
‘ Quick class to give us some properties
Public Class CarItem
Public _Make As String
Public _Model As String
‘you have to implement the properties to be able to bind it later on
‘ (i.e. declaring the variables as Public won’t work)
Public Property Make() As String
Get
Return _Make
End Get
Set(ByVal Value As String)
_Make = Value
End Set
End Property
Public Property Model() As String
Get
Return _Model
End Get
Set(ByVal Value As String)
_Model = Value
End Set
End Property
End Class
Create The Custom Collection
The important parts to note are the first line where we inherit from System.Collections.CollectionBase. This provides all the basic functionality of the collection to us.
The next thing we do is to re-implement the Add and Item properties. This is what makes it so cool. Later on when you access these properties the intellisense knows that your adding a “CarItem” object and you have all the properties of the “CarItem” available.
The Microsoft article made the Item property ReadOnly. I’m not sure why, I decided to implement the Item property just like the Base object’s Item Property (allowing Get and Set).
‘This is the custom collection that we can populate and do things like bind to .NET controls
Public Class Cars
Inherits System.Collections.CollectionBase
‘Re-implement the Add method, but type it to our object
Public Sub Add(ByVal Car As CarItem)
list.Add(Car)
End Sub
‘Reimplement the Item property but type it
Public Property Item(ByVal index As Integer) As CarItem
Get
Return CType(list.Item(index), CarItem)
End Get
Set(ByVal Value As CarItem)
list.Item(index) = Value
End Set
End Property
End Class
Using The New Collection
Now that we’ve created our new collection we can use it. The code below shows an example of how you might bind the collection to a datagrid. Obviously you’d probably be adding the data from a database and not manually, but this is good enough for example. The last line also shows how you can use the item property to inspect the items within the collection.
Dim MyCarCollection As New Cars
‘This would be better done through a database 
Dim Car1 As New CarItem
With Car1
._Make = “Ford”
._Model = “Ranger”
End With
MyCarCollection.Add(Car1)
Dim Car2 As New CarItem
With Car2
._Make = “Jeep”
._Model = “Wrangler”
End With
MyCarCollection.Add(Car2)
‘Assign our custom car collection to the cars datagrid and bind it
dgCars.DataSource = MyCarCollection
dgCars.DataBind()
Response.Write(MyCarCollection.Item(0).Make)
Here’s an Example of The DataGrid After Being Bound
Pretty cool eh?
Here’s the original Microsoft Article which I basically re-implemented here 
Jan 032006
Hey there everyone. Just thought I’d tell everyone that I’ve upgraded http://blog.killfly.com to WordPress 2.0. On yourside I suppose it doesn’t look a whole lot different, but there’s all kinds of new things for me to play with….that’s the real reason I had to write this post…
For those technical people out there, here’s what I did:
Backup Current Site
- Exported database from MyPhpAdmin as SQL file in case I needed to restore.
- Downloaded all the files from the blog.killfly.com subdomain to my local hard drive.
Get New Files And Prepare Upload
- Downloaded and extracted the new WordPress2 ZIP file to my desktop.
- Copied the config.php and php.ini from my local backup to my downloaded copy (so I can upload one big folder).
Do Actual Upload and Update
- Deleted all the wordpress files from the blog.killfly.com server (made sure to leave my stats folders).
- Upload new files.
- Ran the /wp-admin/upgrade.php file as per the instructions.
- Opened http://blog.killfly.com/ in my browser.
I realzed my custom banner was missing (my fault)…
Fix Missing Banner
- Uploladed my personalHeader.jpg file from my local backup at wp-content\themes\default\images
- Uncommented the line in header.php using theme editor to re-display the custom header.
Done!
Granted, my blog is fairly small, and I didn’t have any uploaded images. But I was very happy at how easy the upgrade was.
-Andrew
Dec 262005
The largest clove of garlic I have ever cut into. Keep in mind, this is just one clove of an entire head!
This was actually a clove of garlic tha was inside a gift basket that we recieved. Since we were cooking up some chicken that was also in the gift basket, I decided to take on the garlic.
I minced about 3/4 of this clove and quickly fried it in butter,making sure not to burn or even brown it. This was added to a pan of fettucini with fresh-cut tomatoes and the garlic. This pasta/garlic mixture served as a bed for the chicken.
Yummy! Almost (but not quite) as good as Chicken Cordon Blue from Mama T’s.
Nov 232005
Argrggggg. I tried using their stupid service and couldn’t get any of the source control options to work. Now it’s stuck on one of the Source Control options and I can’t find a way to change it…..
Oct 272005
When managing permissions for an ASP.NET application, make sure to set the permissions for the user that the application will be running under. This account is different depending on what version of IIS is running (which you can likely extend to the operating system in use).
To find the user that the application runs under, insert the following code into a page of your application:
Response.Write(Environment.UserName)
The user that Windows XP uses (in my tests) is: ASPNET
The user that Windows Server 2003 uses (also in my tests) is: NETWORK SERVICE
Another factor to consider is that the above accounts were found with the application running with “IMPERSONATE IDENTITY” = False. If it were set to true, the account would either be IUSER_MACHINENAME or the domain user if IIS has authenticated them.
Keep these issues in mind if you need to allow the end users elevated permissions (such as uploading files). You will have to give permissions to different accounts depending on what version of IIS you are using.
Oct 042005
Introduction
A while ago we started using Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe at work with Visual Studio .NET 2003. One of the first things we realized when we began working with it was that the reporting capabilities were lacking to say the least. Another problem we faced was the ability to tie together changes in SourceSafe with issues in our issue tracker. By using the free tool VssReporter to find the files that changed since a label or date, we were able to accomplish both of these goals.
The only drawback about VSS Reporter is that the generated files aren’t very pretty. Fortunatly one of the output options is XML which we can make to look pretty using XSLT and CSS. And then, as long as we’re in there, let’s add some functionality to integrate a home-grown issue tracker with changes made in SourceSafe. Then we can answer the question, “What bug or feature required that this file be changed?”
XSLT
The XSLT file essentially builds an HTML page out of a supplied XML file. It was a little tedious to get working a first, but after a little bit of trial and error I was able to get the layout I wanted.
Another thing that the XSL does it to look for an occurence of “ID=” in the comment field. When files are checked into SourceSafe, we have to make sure that we use a comment that includes this string. Without it there will be no way to correspond changes made to files with the issues submitted in the issue tracker. This part is optioal to you, in fact if you don’t have “ID=” in your comment, the XSL will just ignore it and not try to build a link to the issue tracker. This brings up the first modification you have to make.
If you want to use the functionality to integrate your issue tracking system with SourceSafe, you’ll have to use a comment like the one I describe above. In addition, you’ll have to change the line in the XSL file that builds the link to the issue tracker, since I’m going to guess that your URL to your issue tracker is not the same as the one I made up for the example.
Look for the line that looks like:
http://myIssueTracker/LookupIssue.aspx?Comment=
and replace it with the URL to your own issue tracker. The comment itself is appended to the end of whatever you specify here, so keep that in mind. Either your issue tracker will have to be smart enough to extract the identifier for the issue from the comment….or you’ll have to get fancier with the XSL to have it pass in only the ID number of the issue. Since my VB.NET skills are much better than my XSL, I chose to make the IssueTracker page the smart one.
CSS
The CSS file is nothing special, it just makes the display a little easier to look at.
The Final Product
An example VSS Reporter XML file shows how the three files work together to produce something that both looks nice (I think), and is useful.
If you look at the source for the XML file, you will see a line at the top that is not included in the XML file that is originally generated from VssReporter. This is a line that tell the XML processor where to find a XSL document to use (I hope I’m not lying about what is going on). In any case, you’ll need to add this line to the top of the XML file.
There’s also a ZIP file that contains the three files mentioned in this article. Just unzip all theee to the same directory.
Conclusion
Hopefully someone will find this useful. VssReporter is a really powerful (and free!) tool. I think Visual Studio 2005 Team System might make this unnecesarry in the future, but probably not for a while.
Sep 172005
Just want to post links to two cool tools that I’ve come upon:
The first is BCWipe which allows you to securly delete files, or entire drives. I haven’t used it, but I’ve talked to someone who has and they say it’s pretty cool.
http://www.jetico.com/
The second tool is Daemon Tools. This is a nice utility that allows you to mount ISO images as drives in Windows. I’ve got an ISO mounted right now, took a few seconds to click the icon in the tray, select my ISO image and then navigate to to my new “F” drive. Pretty slick.
http://www.daemon-tools.cc
Sep 142005
It was pretty good. Basically what I expected it to be, which was an overview of the new features available in Visual Studio 2005. One of the biggest advancements seems to be better data access, and more flexibility with how data is presented and bound to controls.
The DataSource wizard has been expanded too. You can now specify an external URL to fetch an XML file for a datasource, that was pretty neat. I’m not sure, but it also seemed that all the “auto-generated” connection strings were maintained in the web.config file auto-magically, even though the presenter was generating a new datasource on each page. There’s also a way to specify a stored procedure to use as the datasource. If this option is chosen, Visual Studio will read the parameters required and prompt you for where to get them (querystring, control, object, etc). Also pretty cool.
The other major feature is something called master pages which lets you specify a template-file for the entire site and control the layout with that file instead of having to keep track of includes all over the place. There’s also “skin” support that lets you define how each control should appear (i.e. all calendar controls should have a grey background, 12 pixel font, etc…). Unfortunately, the skin support doesn’t extend to regular HTML controls, so you can’t use it for things like an H1 tag…I don’t understand why not. This means that CSS is still required for these.
It will also validate the HTML for a particular browser, and will do it for section 508 compatibility if that’s required.
They didn’t cover much about Team System, which I was interested in, but they did give us a DVD of Team Foundation Server that we can install to check out the new features. They also gave us a DVD with all the presentation details on it, you are welcome to borrow mine if you want.
Aug 262005
I think I never learned how to spell “visible” until I started programming. I probably always spelled it “visable.” Now, after setting the “visible” property of so many controls I’ve become pretty good at typing out “visible”.
Just thought I’d mention that. lol