Emad's Blog

Under windows vista, when trying to install a web project from visual studio, you may get an error with nearly no useful information at all.

There is a few steps that needs to be taken to get over this, they are well illustrated in:
http://lvildosola.blogspot.com/2007/07/making-web-setup-projects-run-on.html

A full list of visual studio 2005/Vista issues can be found at
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa964140.aspx

http://tadalist.com/ from 37Signals.

It is a very simple TODO list from the company that prides itself with building application with mush less features than their competitors.

Their idea is to just focus on features that really matter.

http://tadalist.com/ is 100% free to use.

A nice collection of short “how do I?” videos from microsoft covering a wide variety of technologies: ASP.NET, SQL EXPRESS, AJAX, VS Team syste, etc.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/bb498194.aspx

An Easy way to add an Identity column to a table created by SELECT .. INTO is:

Assume the table is created using

SELECT NAME INTO NAMES2 FROM NAMES1

simply add this,

SELECT IDENTITY(INT, 1,1) AS [ID], NAME INTO NAMES2 FROM NAMES1

A single line makes all the difference when using log4net with .NET 2.0

log4net.Config.DOMConfigurator.Configure();

If this line is not included, log4net will not work at all.

more details in this posting

This Exeption may rise when trying to Fill a table using a Table adapter.

One of the reasons this may happen is if the SQL statement is not Selecting a column that is not null in the DB

for example :

if table has field1, field2, field3 and all do not allow null, This exception will be thrown if you try SELECT field1, field2 from Table.

Of course, there may be other reasons for the excption like actually violating a constraint 🙂

I noticed that if the Refresh() method is called on a crystal report after setting the Paramaters programatically, the Refresh method will blank the parameters causing the popup asking about parameters values.

example:

report.SetParameterValue(“note”, note);
report.Refresh();

if this case, the crystal report will still pop up asking about a value for the paramter “note”

Microsoft just release a new release of the smart client software factory
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480482.aspx
This was by the end of May 2007.
a Few days later , they released the first preview edition of new project code named “acropolis”, which they say is “is a set of components and tools that make it easier for developers to build and manage modular, business focused, client .NET applications”
http://windowsclient.net/Acropolis/Default.aspx

The point is that SCSF (Smart Client Software Factory) will be phased out and replaced by the project acropolis.

The controversial question now is:
Is it worth the time to learn about SCSF when everyone knows it is doomed to be phased out anyway?

The different components included in the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX toolkit can be found here

The toolkit provides different components used to enhance the User experience using AJAX. It is an open source project hosted at the Codeplex website (ToolKit home page)

One trick in setting the session time out for Web applications in IIS 6.0.

you may notice that no matter how long you set the session timeout to be, it will timeout after 10 or 20 minutes.

The reason for this is that by default web applications are using an application Pool ( new feature in IIS 6.0 that wasnt there in the IIS 5.0).

The application pool- to save resources- will shut down the worker process after being idle for a certain amount of time( default 20 mins)

It will do so regardless of any session timeout in any web application using this application pool.

To change this, Point to the application pool used by the web app in question, right click “properties” goto “performance” tab and under the “Idle Timeout” panel, either change the time period or uncheck the “shut down after…”