$0 PDA

I was listening to Soma's (MSFT) interview in Merina today, he quoted "... thing that is common to any human is *Time* ... everyone has only 24 hrs a day ...", if you think about it a bit, we can appreciate importance of time management, so here is my blog on poor man's personal organizer, IMHO pen on paper is simple and best.

With so many hifi PDA devices in the market, here is one which costs you nothing. You don't have to carry a charger, it won't annoy you with reminder chimes and best of all you don't have to write a fat check to get one. Before you decide to click the link, sit back and question yourself why you need a PDA, if you think of just a personal organizer, check these out PocketMod & D.I.Y Planner.

Ajax WTH!

For last couple of weeks i got quite a lot queries from team on Ajax. Its more of a standard response from me "use it, if it makes sense!".

IMHO one has to weigh the Ajax features against the coding complexity. Enter enterprise apps scenario, you got lot of additional things to consider, most importantly code maintainability and alternate technology options. Comparing enterprise apps against google map, google spreadsheet, flickr is like comparing apples and oranges. I'd seriously consider SmartClient if we really needed a windows feel in web.

Bottom line, page postback is not always evil !

search for code

I had a chance to try google/codesearch and i did get what i was searching for in first few tries, though it's a long way to go.

Update 12/17 : Even better one.

System.Transactions TransactionScope issue

I was having problem using this new model Transaction handling in .net 2.0, better than going to Enterprise services for just transaction handling, way it prmotes itself from Lightweight to full DTC XACT transparently helps a lot. Yeah i did bump into some posts pointing an bug that is currently open in this model, but that's not my issue today.

When i run the test app in Win XP SP2 connecting to 2 different SQL 2K server on Win 2K3, i got the following error "Network access for Distributed Transaction Manager (MSDTC) has been disabled." After some googling, enabled inbound/outbound transaction in DTC security settings and ended up with different error message, this happends when connection is opened
"The transaction has already been implicitly or explicitly committed or aborted", this one was tough, after lot of hit-n-miss i turned off firewall and it started working. Ahhhh.... WTH

hunt for bigfoot in code jungle

Moved a web app to be used by all N.A. employees of the client, for unknown reason app was throwing error for 2 employees out of whole population, unfortunately 2 guys are top brace, so we had to figure out the problem asap and i wrote DbTrace component to trace SAP function module calls for specified users and it all seems to be ok and i was out of the scene. Looks like support team was searching for the bug for more than a month and they keep coming back and questioning web app. Today it was found that 2 employee's user defaults are using non US notation and hence SAP was rejecting a valid numeric value 'coz it was expecting in different format, gahhh......

Rounded corners

Have you experienced editing the round corner image 'coz client decided to change the color of the rounded corner area, i happen to go thro one recently, considering my limited image editing knowledge somehow managed it.

Today happen to see this curvyCorners, js framework that provides this using few lines of javascript. As usual googling further found Atlas, ahem ASP.net Ajax sample. To make consistent coding practice and simpler server -side programming model, I'd prefer the later.

If think that is interesting, following should raise eye-brows, till now I'm also one of those millions who thought invisible table AKA table border="0" is only way to organize webpage layout, sit back and take a tour of CSS based design and why invisi table is bad. No idea if this is going to hit mainstream or not, but worth a try.

app offline page

Thought of using app_offline feature and display the system down page for an webapp update happening today, if you haven't heard about this, here is a fly-by, if asp.net 2.0 engine sees this file in app root dir, it shuts app domain and serves this file to clients, brings back the app domain after this file is deleted.

Unfortunately clients needed to test the app during the down time and hence i need to allow list of users and server down message for rest, i started coding this logic in Application_AuthenticateRequest , ahhh what am i thinking coding this in app and i need to move the app again to remove this logic.

Finally wrote this in a HttpModule and wired it in the request pipeline, once testing is done its as simple as deleting off that 1 line in web.config. For more details on HttpModule, here is one i wrote for some other reason.

Ajax Ondemand Tooltip

Client wanted to show a tooltip containing details for key column on mouseover. After talking to him 2 mins, it is clear that they really don't need this for every key showed in the screen, rather interested only a select few. Typical case for on-demand tooltip, i should be lucky today, i happen to cross the overlib tooltip js and ASP.net Ajax WS call to get the details and display a overlib tooltip on dblclick of text and it can be either closed manually or it'll autoclose in 5 secs.


Probably something likethis or intelliTxt might show up in the control toolkit. Here is the sample code.

web.config configuration node xmlnamespace issue

I had developed and using a data access component which readds the db configuration from app.config. Today i was told it is not working and it indeed was not able to select the db config details node. After few mins of hit-n-miss, the issue is due to xmlnamespace attrib in configuration node. Once i remove the xmlns , i was able to select the specified node

<configuration xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0">
<dataConfig ...

XmlNode enterpriseLibraryDataNode = appConfigDoc.SelectSingleNode(@"/configuration/dataConfig");

Not sure from where the dev team got this namespace from, googling a bit tells me its a VS 2005 beta release bug. Whatever the case, i hate to find a simple attribute crashing straight forward xml dom select node code.

downloading streaming media ...

I get this request many times, how to download streaming media, like download song from raaga.com or download movie from tamilgrounds.com. I'm not going to give lot of details , to put it simply *anything* playable from internet should be downloadable, all we need to find underlying media url and save the file.

Many a times finding the playing media url is going to be bit tricky, we should be able to get it using any packet sniffer, I use very much tailored app for this URL Snooper and use Flashget as download manager, but any packet sniffer should do.

Signing off with link to tamil drama's (credits Gg)