Online Office

Have you ever worked with online office suite? Do you know you can create word/ spread sheets / HTML pages online and you can save them online moreover you can also share it with your friends and family (collaboration) .

Google spread sheet provide another interesting feature along with just sharing i.e. live chatting with the people collaborating with you on the same document.

List of few known word / spread sheet / HTML page creators:

Online word processors

• zohowriter. (owned by zoho)
• writely (acquired by google)

Online spread sheet

• google spreadsheet
  
• zoho sheet
  

Online HTML page creator

• google page creator
  
• zoho creator
  

Whats not there ? i guess online DB and what else ????

Thanks,

WiMax in Pakistan

WiMax wide spread in Pakistan

read more | digg story

Making width and height of ASP:ImageButton to work with Safari and other browsers

If you ever come across the problem of using with specified width and height, it will work fine with the IE but the image dimensions will not be set for other browers like safari, the reason behind it is, whenever you specify the width and height of the it genertaes the Style attribute whenever HTML is rendered and embed the width and height in to it, which works fine in case of IE only.

So what do you need to make it work in each and every web browser. You need to add the width and height attributes to the object using imgBtn.Attribute.add("width","20"), then it will work fine for each and every brower.

Example:

if you have such asp.net code

" asp:imagebutton id="ImageButton1" runat="server" width="50px" height="20px" "

the HTML code generated by it is:

{ input type="image" name="ImageButton1" id="ImageButton1" alt="" border="0" style="height:20px;width:50px;" }

it works fine with IE but not with any other browser

so what needed to be changes, we need to add this

" asp:imagebutton id="ImageButton1" runat="server" "

ImageButton1.Attributes.Add("width","50");
ImageButton1.Attributes.Add("height","20");

now the HTML genertaed will be:

{ input type="image" name="ImageButton1" id="ImageButton1" alt="" border="0" height:20px width:50px }

Enjoy..

ASP.NET: Interview Questions

Hi, These are the typical questions that i usually asks while taking an ASP.NET specific interview. Hope these might help someone :)

*What is View State?
*Can you read the View State?
*What is the difference between encoding and encryption? Which is easy to break?
*Can we disable the view state application wide?
*can we disable it on page wide?
*can we disable it for a control?
*What is provider Model?
*Any idea of Data Access Component provided by Microsoft?
*Any idea of Enterprise library?
*What is web service?
*What is WSDL?
*Can a web service be only developed in asp.ent?
*can we use multiple web services from a single application?
*can we call a web service asynchronously?
*Can a web service be used from a windows application?
*What do we need to deploy a web service?
*What is the significance of web.config?
*Can we have multiple web.config files in a sigle web project?
*Can we have more then one configuration file?
*Type of Authentications?
*Can we have multiple assemblies in a single web project?
*What is GAC?
*What is machine.config?
*What different types of session state Management we have in asp.net?
*What are cookies?
*What is Cache?
*What is AJAX?
*Is AJAX a language?
*What is the difference between syncronus and asyncronus?
*What is an Assembly?
*Can an assembly contains more then one classes?
*What is strong name?
*What is the difference b/w client and server side?
*What we need for the deployment of a asp.net we application?
*what is the purpose of IIS?
*Difference between http and https?
*what is purpose of aspnet_wp.exe ?
*what is an ISAPI filter?
*what do you mean by HTTP Handler?
*What is the purpose of Global.asax?
*What is the significance of Application_Start/Session_Start/Application_Error?
*What is the difference between the inline and code behind?
*what is side by side execution?
*can we have two different versions of dot net frameworks running on the same machine?
*What is CLR? Difference b/w CLR and JVM?
*What is CLI?
*What is CTS?
*What is .resx file meant for?
*Any idea of aspnet_regiis?
*Any idea of ASP NET State Service?
*Crystal report is only used for read only data and reporting purposes?
*We can add a crystal report in aspx page using two techniques, what are these?
*What is the difference between stroed procedure and stored function in SQL?
*Can we have an updateable view in SQL?
*What is connection pooling? how can we acheive that in asp.net?
*What is DataSet?
*What is the difference between typed and untyped dataset?
*What is the difference bewteen accessing the data throgh the dataset and datareader?

Thanks,
Happy Interviewing.

RSS Puller in ASP

I have created a sample asp page that pulls the data from RSS and displays it on the page, using an XSL fro formatting the output. You just need to change the URL of RSS in:

<%= getXML(" RSS_URL ") %>

Where:

RSS_URL: URL of the RSS whose contents we want to see.

You can change the output of the RSS by updating the XSL file.

ASP RSS Puller

ASP.NET 2.0 Magic: Asynchronous Web Pages

The classic and inherently synchronous processing model of ASP.NET pages is simply unfit. Asynchronous HTTP handlers have existed since ASP.NET 1.0, but the ASP.NET 2.0 provides an easy to use API for managing Asynchronous Web Pages. If we have an I/O incentive operation then the ASP.NET synchronous page is blocked waiting for the I/O to complete, which leaves the end user waiting. In case of asynchronous access the execution of page is divided in to two segment, one when the execution starts and the other when the task is done, these two task works in separate threads.

We can set an asp.net page to execute asynchronously by setting up the Async tag in the Page declaration of the ASP.NET Page.

<%@ Page Async="true" ... %>

This reference on the MSDN will be helpful in understanding it in details.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/10/WickedCode/

Speed Up your web sites with HTTP Compression

Need of HTTP Compression:

1. Increase the speed of web page retrieval (effectively the speed of your web site).
2. Reduce the bandwidth utilization.

How to achieve all these??

You can achieve the above goal by decreasing the size of your HTML pages, JS, CSS which can be done be a technique known as HTTP Compression.

Idea behind HTTP Compression:

The idea is to compress data being sent out from your Web server, and have the browser decompress this data on the fly, thus reducing the amount of data sent and increasing the page display speed. There are two ways to compress data coming from a Web server, dynamically, and pre-compressed. Dynamic Content Acceleration compresses the data transmission data on the fly (useful for e-commerce apps, database-driven sites, etc.). Pre-compressed text based data is generated beforehand and stored on the server (.html.gz Files etc). [source:]

The compression techniques (algorithm) used can be
1. GZIP
2. Deflate Compression

I found a very useful link with details of the software used for HTTP compression

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/18/

Home automation in the Netherlands

This guy is monitoring everything he can: phone, energy, water, gas usage... This is crazy.... check it out!

read more | digg story

Some Useful Web Links

Hi,

One of my colleague accumulated a list of useful links on the web , i have uploaded that document on the Writely . It you want to collaborate on this document to add more useful links, please send me your email address so that i can add you in the collaborator list.

Its URL is:

http://www.writely.com/Doc.aspx?id=bcsw8fz74pf

Hope it will be useful for you you guys.

Acknowledgments:

Adeel Anwar

Virtual Karma: Complete List of Web 2.0 Applications | Rian's blog

Virtual Karma: Complete List of Web 2.0 Applications | Rian's blog

Posting data to another ASPX Page

Posting data to another ASPX Page:


One of the common problems faced by the JSP and ASP developers while developing application in ASP.NET is posting data to another ASPX page. By Default if you have a server side form tag in an aspx page then it will post the data to the same page.

I Came across a very easy to understand article for doing this, hope it will also help you in understanding the concept.

How to use Microsoft Indexing Service?

Using Microsoft Indexing Service:

Want to add document search in your application, you can use microsoft indexing service to do that. You can create a Catlog in the Microsoft indexing service on the folder whose document you want to search from your application. I will guide you on how to use microsoft indexing service from your ASP.NET page.

Go to Computer Management->Services and Application->Indexing Service and make sure that it is running.

You can create a new Catalg by Right Clicking the 'Indexing Service'. You can give a name to the catalog and browse to the folder which you want to be indexed by this catalog.

MS Indexing Service + ASP.NET
Creating an ASP.NET page that can query from the MS Indexing service, I will use the 'Web' catalog that is created by deafult by the indesing service on the 'c:\inetpub\wwwroot\' folder.

We can connect to the MS Indexing service through the following Connection String {"Provider=\"MSIDXS.1\";Data Source=;Integrated Security .="}

You can select the Name of the File, the path where it is located and some of the text from the file. {Select FileName,Path,Characterization from Scope()}

Code:
protected System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnection oleDbConnection1;

this.oleDbConnection1.ConnectionString = "Provider=\"MSIDXS.1\";Data Source=Web;Integrated Security .=";

{You can change the 'Data Source' to the name of the catalog in which you want to search}


protected System.Data.OleDb.OleDbCommand oleDbSelectCommand3;
protected System.Data.OleDb.OleDbDataAdapter oleDbDataAdapter2;


this.oleDbSelectCommand3 = new System.Data.OleDb.OleDbCommand();
this.oleDbDataAdapter2 = new System.Data.OleDb.OleDbDataAdapter();

Sample Project:

Sample ASP.NET Project

What is .Resx file in Dot Net?

What is .Resx file in Dot Net??

It is an XML based file, with key value pair.

Reading from .Resx File:

You can access the .Resx file using this code:

ResXResourceReader reader = new ResXResourceReader(Server.MapPath("test.resx"));
IDictionaryEnumerator rsxr = reader.GetEnumerator();
foreach (DictionaryEntry d in reader)
{
Console.WriteLine(d.Key.ToString() + ":\t" + d.Value.ToString());
}
//Close the reader.
reader.Close();

Writing to .Resx File:

We can write the binary data of an image to the .Resx file using the following code

Image img = Image.FromFile("urdu.jpg");
ResXResourceWriter rsxw = new ResXResourceWriter("urdu.resx");
rsxw.AddResource("urdu.jpg",img);
rsxw.Close();

Use of .Resx File:

It is very useful while working on Localized project [Multiple Languages], You can make different resource files for different languages and depending upon the user choice you can change the Language of the application.

AJAX : Todays Buzzword

AJAX: Today becoming very common, and you will see lot of people talking about it. Microsoft has also launched an ATLAS Framework which is the implementation of AJAX.

What AJAX is all about??

Want to get the bigger picture, I hope these slide will help you a lot, If not then do write to me for any assistence.

http://www.geocities.com/basit_tanveer/Data/AJAX.ppt

Executable Jar File in JAVA.

Creating an executable jar file is not that tough if it does not involve any external jars. Create a manifest file and mention the main class path in the manifest file. Place all the class files in a folder along with the manifest file and run the following command:

jar -cfm [name of the jar file] [name of the manifest] *

Flags Description:
c: Create new archive
f: Specify the archive name
m: include manifest

* means include all the files in the current folder and all the sub folders.

The manifest file look something like this:

Main-Class: [name of the main class along with the package details]

Example
If your project has two files a.class and main.class. which are placed in a package(abc.def). Then the manifest would look like this(mainClass.mf):

___________________
Main-Class: abc.def.main
___________________

and the command to create an executable jar will be

jar -cfm test.jar mainClass.mf *

Everything works ok if you are not using any external jars but the problem arises when you have externals jar like you have used the logging component log4j. The manifest attribute Class-Path attribute in which you can mention the paths of the external jars, but i tried it for log4j but it didn't work it gives me error 'Logger Class Def Not Found'. I had created the following manifest for that (Keeping the above exapmle in mind)

__________________
Main-Class: abc.def.main
Class-Path: lib\log4j.jar
__________________

but this didn't worked.

Then i came across a work around for this, which is you create a jar file of your project class files without adding the extenal libaries ie. using the following same manifest:

___________________
Main-Class: abc.def.main
___________________

Place the created jar files along with the external jar files in another folder and then use the following manifest to create the final jar file.

____________________
Main-Class: abc.def.main
Class-Path: main\test.jar lib\log4j.jar
____________________

Notice that test.jar is the jar file of your actual project. the final jar created using the above manifest will work for you.

Camps & Medicines are needed more than anything else, Pakistan Intl. Airlines will carry donations for free.

As you may already know, the disaster that struck Pakistan's Kashmir and NWFP areas has left at least 40,000 dead and 2.5 million homeless (full stats are not in yet, many areas are not accessible at all because of damaged roads due to landslides), there is dire need of clothes, food items, medicines and camping equipment for the survivors.

http://news.google.com.pk/news?hl=en&ned=us&amp;ie=UTF-8&q=earthquake+toll+40%2C000&btnG=Search+News


The winter has arrived and rain and hailstorms have severely hurt the rescue efforts. Please ask your local volunteers to collect as many donations as possible.

Lot of people in Pakistan are collecting donations and lots of cargo trucks, airplanes and helicopters have been dispatched to the affected areas, but the most important items that are short in supply are camps. No more camps are available in and around Lahore, and manufacturers have order for thousands of camps, but they won't be ready for many days.

2.5 million (possibly many more) people are left with no shelter, which means at least half a million camps are required.

The best thing would be to purchase camping equipment and medicines and send them to Pakistan, preferably Islamabad (because Islamabad is the closest big city, 95 km from Muzaffarabad, the epicenter) or Lahore (another 300km from Islamabad) because even with all the monetary aid, camps are not available here at all.

Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) will carry all relief goods for free from all of its stations in its global network ( http://www.piac.com.pk/press_release/pr293.asp)

Here are the url's of PIA's booking offices around the world alphabetized by cities:

http://www.piac.com.pk/b_offices/A.asp

(New York, Chicago, Houston in USA, Toronto in Canada)

List of PIA's worldwide Stations by Countries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_International_Airlines#Services

Links for online Donations: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=38&threadid=1708958&enterthread=y

Please take action as quickly as possible, because the winter is here and the survivors are looking forward to our help. Feel free to contact me for any more information you need.

Thank you.

DotNet Framework & IIS installation order

If you ever install the dot net framework before the IIS, then your aspx pages would not work. The solution to this problem is that:

open the command prompt [For windows Xp and greater]
>>cd C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322
>>aspnet_regiis.exe -i

In case you are using any other windows then search the aspnet_regiis.exe file and run this file from the command prompt with -i argument.

Note: Today one of my friend asked me about this problem and he told me that he is unable to find any solution of this problem on the net, so i though of publishing it on my blog. Hope it will help many.

Turtle 1.0 is a cool utility by Xeus Technologies for playing around with files, like removing invalid characters from file names, replacing plain text/pattern from one or multiple files, stripping comments from source files etc. It support multiple file types.

You must try this utility.

http://xeustech.blogspot.com/2005/09/turtle-10.html

This website offers ASP.NET 2.0 Beta hosting for free, till the ASP.NET 2.0 is released actually so you can try it...

http://www.hostmysite.com/aspnet/


Enjoy ASP.NET 2.0 free web hosting

Added the chat link on my blog.... Hope it will work fine..