Visual ActiveKent Sharkey .NET SE 3.11 : Code

New year, new article

ksharkey — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:20:00 GMT

Well, I *think* yesterday was an official MSFT holiday (I wasn't here, anyway), so today was really the first day of the new year for new headlines and articles. So, we start the year with an article by someone named "Kent Sharkey". He's a (relatively) new author for MSDN, so I hope you give him some slack. His article describes the technology behind some of the new "Team" pages we've been adding lately -- a means of in-memory merging multiple RSS feeds to create a new RSS feed.

The InfoPath less travelled

ksharkey — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:07:00 GMT

I've been meaning to learn InfoPath for a while, and the new(ish) Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET, plus Christmas downtime gave me a chance. See the babbling in the full post. You've been warned -- I know, hard to believe I'm supposed to write for a living....(read more)

ASP.NET Member Management Component Prototype now available

ksharkey — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:38:00 GMT

The Microsoft ASP.NET v1.1 Membership Management Component Prototype contains classes that allow a developer to more easily authenticate users, authorize users, and store per-user property data in a user profile. The authentication feature validates and stores user credentials which a developer can use to manage user authentication on a web site. The authorization feature lets you treat groups of users as a unit by assigning users to roles such as manager, sales, member, and so on. Combined with ASP.NET's built-in authorization functionality, Windows Shared Hosting developers have end-to-end support for maintaining user-to-role mappings and authorizing users based on this information. The profile feature enables you to provide users of your Web site with a custom experience. By defining and using profile properties, you can track any custom information your application requires, including user information and user preferences.

Download
Discuss

UPDATE: I was reminded by the Spider King that "There are already two applications in beta using this component; DotNetNuke by Perpetual Motion and Community Server by Telligent Systems.

YABRT: Yet Another Blog Ranking Tool

ksharkey — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 06:08:00 GMT

While browsing my Bloglines subscriptions, I see that there is yet another tool available for monitoring the "importance" of blogs -- PubSub. From their site:

LinkRanks are a measure of how many pages link to each particular site, with more weight given to fresher links and to links from a wider variety of pages.

The interesting .NET angle on all of this is that they have a C# library for communicating with their service.

ClickOnce from the RDs

ksharkey — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 18:02:00 GMT

Sorry, this actually went live on the 1st, but I'm a little behind.

The latest article from the Microsoft Regional Directors (in this case Mauro Sant'Anna of Brazil) has been posted:

Deploying Windows Forms Applications with ClickOnce

NOAA Way -- the Web Service

ksharkey — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 21:15:00 GMT

Looking at my news items this morning, and what do I see? NOAA (the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, aka, the Weather Guys) now has a Web Service available (sadly RPC/Encoded) to get the weather. Details here. WSDL here. Party on your desktop.

We have many questions...

ksharkey — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 01:04:00 GMT

Scott Mitchell's latest playpen is something I've been looking to find for a while -- a FAQ system built on ASP.NET. Multicategory, pumps out RSS feeds, what else could you want (besides a download) So far, it looks pretty r0xx0r (sorry, I've been spending too much time around l33t forums lately). Looking forward to see how it progresses.

MSDN += new RssFeeds() ';

ksharkey — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:35:00 GMT

Duncan has been working on our new RSS generation system. The new one he's created should be more flexible, accurate and up-to-date. He's looking for feedback on the new format as well. There are two changes we're really interested in feedback. First, he added category support. This is added in two formats:

as RSS category tags
<category domain="msdndomain:ProductVers">Visual Basic.NET</category>
using a custom element that defines the topic domain
<msdn:technology>ADO.NET</msdn:technology>

The second change is that the RSS feeds now have an attached XSLT stylesheet. This means that in browsers that know how to render attached stylesheets, you get a "friendly" view of the RSS, while your aggregator sees the RSS as normal. Send thoughts here, or on Duncan's blog.

Dino visits Bedrock...

ksharkey — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 16:33:00 GMT

Dino brings you his latest -- an excellent article discussing using inheritance to add features to common ASP.NET classes, like the Page class. He shows how you can add page refresh, long process handing and more to *all* your pages in one fell swoop.

TTFN - Kent

Hunting grounds

ksharkey — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 18:31:00 GMT

In my ongoing attempt to fix my “work/life” balance [1], I decided to start playing City of Heroes [2]. Like many MMORPGs (non-RPG geeks: stay tuned, there will be a code reference later) there are 'hunting grounds' in CoH. Hunting grounds are places rich in relatively easy to acquire experience, perfect for power leveling.

OK, Kent, get to a point.

For developers, the equivalent to hunting grounds are places that can provide rich areas to find help. They may be obvious, or not. So, how do you find these hunting grounds? I decided to leverage the Google API to find a clue. I wrote a quick app (will be shared later once I clean up the code) to find the first 10 links for a search. Then it calls each of those with the same critera, adding a “site:“ restriction to it, retrieving the estimated hit count for that site. The result is 1-10 sites (Google may return multiple pages from the same site in the first request), with the hit count for the search on that site. Theoretically, the sites with the most hits should be good hunting.

Results for “DataGrid ASP.NET“:

weblogs.asp.net	3690
msdn.microsoft.com	597
www.codeproject.com	583
aspalliance.com	460
www.411asp.net	444
www.codeguru.com	194
aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com	177
samples.gotdotnet.com	14

DetailsView ASP.NET:

www.ipona.com	114
msdn.microsoft.com	25
www.ondotnet.com	5
www.ftponline.com	5
www.c-sharpcorner.com	3
www.411asp.net	3
beta.asp.net	1
www.oreillynet.com	1

Many of the top hits are common sites you should expect to see. However, there are a few tasty seemingly random items in the mix. For example, the big hit for DetailsView is a site I (deplorably) hadn't known about -- it's actually David Sussman's (of Dave & Al fame) website. Chock full of tasty ASP.NET 2.0 goodness.

Back to hunting until I hit my 1000 query limit for the day.

TTFN - Kent

[1] Read that as, “Add something, anything to the life side of the balance.”
[2] Read that as, “Waving a k in front of Robert Downey Jr.”. I tend to have a history of an addictive personality where things like this are concerned.

Forget Babelfish, now there's BabelCode!

ksharkey — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 01:43:00 GMT

Neat link from the good folk @ Borland -- an experimental C# to Delphi Convertor, done as a Web Service (and ASP.NET page).

Had to try it, so I grabbed a little C# from the C# FAQ (I'm not on my dev box right now). End result:

type
  Test = class
  strict private
    class procedure Main;static; 
  end;
  
implementation

{$AUTOBOX ON}
{$HINTS OFF}
{$WARNINGS OFF}

class procedure Test.Main;
type
  TArrayOfArrayOfWideChar = array of array of WideChar;
var
  d: System.Object;
  c: System.Object;
  b: string;
  a: string;
begin
  a := string.Create(TArrayOfArrayOfWideChar.Create('h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'));
  b := string.Create(TArrayOfArrayOfWideChar.Create('h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'));
  Console.WriteLine((a = b));
  Console.WriteLine(a.Equals(b));
  c := a;
  d := b;
  Console.WriteLine((c = d));
  Console.WriteLine(c.Equals(d));
end;

I may have to start running all my code through it ;)

TTFN - Kent

Firefox & Netscape 7.1

ksharkey — Fri, 21 May 2004 22:35:00 GMT

One of the support questions I got this week was around my favourite browser (and the latest Netscape one) and ASP.NET.

ASP.NET 1.1 doesn't recognize Firefox by default. It therefore doesn't set the Browser[“css2“] property appropriately, meaning that sometimes stylesheet info isn't sent down. So, after a bit of struggling with Regex expressions and the Browser Agent, I came up with these two additions to the browserCaps section. Anyone want to tighten up the features and/or expressions?

UPDATED 5/24 with the correct Firefox Regex.

Firefox (0.8)
Agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
<case match^Mozilla/5\.0\s*([^)]*\))\s*(Gecko\/\d+)\s*
Firefox\/(?'version'(?'major'\d+)(?'minor'\.\d+)(?'letters'\w*)).*">
browser=Netscape
version=${version}
majorversion=${major}
minorversion=${minor}
frames=true
tables=true
cookies=true
javascript=true
javaapplets=true
ecmascriptversion=1.5
w3cdomversion=1.0
css1=true
css2=true
xml=true
<filter match="^b" with="${letters}">
  beta=true
</filter></case>

Netscape 7.1
Agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)

<case match="^Mozilla/5\.0\s*([^)]*\))\s*(Gecko\/\d+)\s*
Netscape/(?'version'(?'major'\d+)(?'minor'\.\d+)(?'letters'\w*)).*">
browser=Netscape
version=${version}
majorversion=${major}
minorversion=${minor}
frames=true
tables=true
cookies=true
javascript=true
javaapplets=true
ecmascriptversion=1.5
w3cdomversion=1.0
css1=true
css2=true
xml=true
<filter match="^b" with="${letters}">
  beta=true
</filter></case>

TTFN - Kent

That's cool -- we need that

ksharkey — Sun, 18 Apr 2004 03:48:00 GMT

It's Saturday night -- what do losers like Kent do? Poke around, trying to learn PHP. I just came across something that is probably old news -- PEAR (the PHP Extension and Application Repository). It's an application, a database, and more. 5 minutes after saving a web page to my machine, I now had a database/app that I could run locally to automagically browse & download functionality to make PHP dev easier for working with SVG, RSS, databases, XML, etc. etc. or to propose new functionality. This would be a great project for folk to work on - perhaps as part of GotDotNet, or just a great community site.

Thoughts? Flames? Comments? Does Kent need to lay off the palinka? Does Kent need to find something better to do on Saturday nights?

UPDATE: OK, Andy's right -- I need to switch to Menthol Crack. The Control Gallery is quite like what I want. I'll sit down and be quiet now.

You know how to let me know...
TTFN - Kent

not Dr. Gui, but Dr. Ex

ksharkey — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 03:42:00 GMT

Old news (he/she/it already has 4 posts), but if you have Visual Studio Extensibility questions, ask the Doctor...

TTFN - Kent

Come and get it!

ksharkey — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 23:41:00 GMT

Sorry for the delay. The ASP.NET Resource Kit is NOW AVAILABLE. Details at http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/asprk/. For those who downloaded it last week, don't bother, it hasn't changed.

Spread the news far & wide! Let's see if you can break our Download servers!

TTFN - Kent

~~UPDATE: The actual download is taking longer than I thought. Give it a few minutes. Sorry about that.~~

UPDATE, Part 2 (4:27 PST): Download is now live