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October 2006 - Posts

Tuesday, October 31, 2006 5:28 AM

SYSK 230: Do You Need BizTalk To Load a CSV File?

Consider the following scenario: you get a comma separated values (CSV) file from your business partner via a file upload feature available on your B2B web site. For this file to be processed, you need to convert it to a relational format (e.g. data table).
Posted by irenak | 1 Comments
Monday, October 30, 2006 5:18 AM

SYSK 229: AJAX.NET Update Panel or Web Service?

AJAX.NET has two methods for incrementally updating user interface of a web page – UpdatePanel and .asmx/.svc programming model. So, which should you choose when? If you need to have access to the view state of your server side controls, including the
Posted by irenak | 2 Comments
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Friday, October 27, 2006 5:26 AM

SYSK 228: Get Table Columns or Rows with Single Key Press

Imagine this: you type in a table name in SQL Server Management Studio, press Ctrl+9 and get all rows from that table displayed in the results pane. Or you press Ctrl+8 and instead of data rows, you get metadata about columns of that table. No more typing
Posted by irenak | 7 Comments
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Thursday, October 26, 2006 5:26 AM

SYSK 227: Monthly Calendar control in ASP.NET

Did you ever need a calendar control that allows you to color-code certain days based on your business logic and display details on mouse-over event? Here is an example of what I’m talking about: So, perhaps the yellow color means “standard” appointments,
Posted by irenak | 5 Comments
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Wednesday, October 25, 2006 8:59 AM

SYSK 226: Exception Handling in JavaScript

Have you seen a coding guidelines document that did not call for some sort of exception handling, be it in the form of __try/__except, On Error GoTo, try/catch, or any other way? Most developers would agree that it’s important to catch exceptions and,
Posted by irenak | 0 Comments
Tuesday, October 24, 2006 5:18 AM

SYSK 225: Portals, Dashboards, Scorecards…

In case of portals, the story is reasonably clear. I think most would agree that the goal of portals is to provide users with integrated access to relevant business information. The key words here are: access, integrated and relevant. So, it’s a “one
Posted by irenak | 0 Comments
Monday, October 23, 2006 5:31 AM

SYSK 224: Why Join Is Better Than Sleep

All the “best practices” I’ve seen recommend avoid calling System.Thread.CurrentThread.Sleep() method. Agreed; but there are some legitimate situations when you just have to block for a certain period of time… If that is the case, consider using System.Thread.CurrentThread.Join()
Posted by irenak | 2 Comments
Friday, October 20, 2006 5:16 AM

SYSK 223: The Power of Double-Not Operator

If you need to convert a non-boolean data type to a boolean, and you’re dealing with a typeless language (e.g. javascript), you’ve got a couple of choices: write an if-then-else logic or use the not-not (a.k.a. double-not) operator. The results are same,
Posted by irenak | 2 Comments
Thursday, October 19, 2006 5:38 AM

SYSK 222: CPU Impact of Animated GIFs

Animation, whether via an animated gif (a sequence of frames) or custom drawing, does not come for free. As a rule of thumb, the more colors and the more frames your animated gif has, the larger the memory footprint and the higher the CPU utilization.
Posted by irenak | 0 Comments
Wednesday, October 18, 2006 6:53 AM

SYSK 221: Combat Spyware -- Check Your Browser Settings

From within Internet Explorer, click on Tools and then on Internet Options. Now click on the Advanced tab, and under the Browser section make sure Enable Install On Demand (Internet Explorer) and enable Install On Demand (other) are not checked. This
Posted by irenak | 0 Comments
Tuesday, October 17, 2006 5:28 AM

SYSK 220: Triggers and Bulk Insert of Data

Fact: triggers execute automatically whenever user modifies data in the underlying table or view. In my projects, I frequently use triggers when comprehensive auditing is a requirement. However, I’ve seen some developers use triggers as a mechanism to
Posted by irenak | 0 Comments
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Monday, October 16, 2006 5:32 AM

SYSK 219: Solution for SQL Reporting Services Problem Described in SYSK 203

In http://blogs.msdn.com/irenak/archive/2006/09/22/766164.aspx post, the following problem was described: if you have a SSRS report parameter that is multi-value and of one of the label s in the “available values” list exceeds 25 characters , the dropdown
Posted by irenak | 5 Comments
Friday, October 13, 2006 8:03 AM

SYSK 218: Reclaim Space Immediately After Dropping a Column

If you are deleting a column of varchar(max), text, ntext, or image data type, your database has likely allocated a large amount of space for the stored data. When you drop a column, it’s always a good idea to rebuild indexes which may help you reclaim
Posted by irenak | 0 Comments
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Thursday, October 12, 2006 8:17 AM

SYSK 217: Processing WebService Response using JSON

For those of you who haven’t done much work with JSON, this blog may be a good introduction... JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation (pronounced ‘Jason’) and is a lightweight data-interchange format with smaller footprint than xml, human readable
Posted by irenak | 1 Comments
Wednesday, October 11, 2006 5:46 AM

SYSK 216: BizTalk Orchestration or Windows Workflow Foundation?

Both, BizTalk server and .NET Windows Workflow Foundation (WinWF) provide design tools to build a process workflow. So, what product/technology is right for you? Below are some questions I go through when making such decision on my projects. · Do you
Posted by irenak | 1 Comments
Tuesday, October 10, 2006 5:23 AM

SYSK 215: Testing the Limits of .NET 3.0 Workflow Foundation

First, here is what triggered this investigation: since your application (windows/web) hosts the workflow runtime in process, and given that the WinWF is managed code, it made me think: 1. What application domain will it run in? Will it create its own
Posted by irenak | 3 Comments
Monday, October 09, 2006 5:22 AM

SYSK 214: in cm mm pt px pc em… You guessed it – this post is about font sizes

Did you know that the “best practice” in terms of font sizes is to use em not px ? Interested? Then read on… When it comes to font sizes, they can be fixed , a.k.a. absolute, or relative , a.k.a. variable. As the name suggests, fixed font sizes do not
Posted by irenak | 0 Comments
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Friday, October 06, 2006 7:24 AM

SYSK 213: Curious to Know How C# lock Keyword is Actually Implemented? Then read on…

We know that C# keywords are simply programming language (in this case, C#) lingo that map into the .NET framework types, objects, etc. So, what does the ‘lock’ keyword map to? Through the simple use of ildasm tool, you can see that the lock keyword ends
Posted by irenak | 4 Comments
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Thursday, October 05, 2006 5:42 AM

SYSK 212: Does .NET Garbage Collector call Dispose? Dispose – Best Practices.

Since there are still developers out there that are not clear on if/when should you call Dispose, and what your class’s finalizer should look like if it holds on to non-memory resources such as file handles, GDI objects, database connections, etc., I
Posted by irenak | 9 Comments
Wednesday, October 04, 2006 5:17 AM

SYSK 211: Trace Only What You Want with TraceSource and SourceSwitch

With .NET 1.0 came the beloved System.Diagnostics.Trace and System.Diagnostics.TraceSwitch classes. While it provided the ability to filter out Trace.Write statements that did not meet the trace level setting of the TraceSwitch setting, it gave no ability
Posted by irenak | 3 Comments
Tuesday, October 03, 2006 5:35 AM

SYSK 210: Cross-Process Synchronization

Say you need to prevent two pieces of code from running at the same time. If you’re dealing with two threads in the same application domain, then it’s easy – you’ve got many synchronization objects to choose from for the job such as System.Threading.
Posted by irenak | 1 Comments
Monday, October 02, 2006 8:16 AM

SYSK 209: What Is Groove 2007? And, Is Microsoft Competing with Itself?

Groove is collaboration software that allows project teams to work together in a more efficient manner. How? Below are some of its features: The Files tool is used to store, organize, and share files. To support offline usage, Groove stores all workspace
Posted by irenak | 0 Comments
 
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