Should homebuyer credit extended?

Saw this banner ad:

It surely would make realtors happy, but is it any good for the current situation? See why its not: link

FatMixx » Television Commercial Music

 FatMixx is an awesome site to find those cool TV commercial music. I was looking for the cool music that was played during the Verizon LG Chocolate ad. I hate the phone but the song Strict Machine by Goldfrapp is awesome. One more.. the new dell ad music The W.A.N.D by Flaming Lips

Prevent child web application to inherit web.config settings from root web application

To prevent child web application to inherit settings from root web application, use the nifty inheritInChildApplication  attribute (new with 2.0) in your location section.  It’s a shame that this important property (or articles related to this) are not mentioned in the msdn help for <location> element.

more on this property:

J Ambrose Little

Brendan Kowitz’s .NET Blog

To quote Brendan..

"Most collections in the web.config have the <remove> tag or <clear> tag to remove irrelevant modules or handlers in the child app.  The problems I’ve found occur with settings relating to the <pages> tag, which most items in it don’t support <remove>. This means if your child applications doesn’t share or have the same registered controls, masterpages or themes then you are probably going to have issues or be forced to specify the settings on a per-page basis.  This is where the inheritInChildApplications="false" really comes in handy"

I have used this to isolate certain appSettings as well as <pages> section and is a life saver 🙂

Listing managed processes

If you have VS 2005 SDK installed

at command prompt

run "%vs80comntools%vsvars32.bat" to set environment variables

then type ClrVer -all to find all managed processes

 

Some handy VHD images from MS

Windows XP SP2 + IE6 image

Windows XP SP2 + IE7

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/try/vhd/default.mspx

Restore Session in IE

 Want this?

install ie7pro

Google Reader Rocks

In one of my previous posts, I had a rant about how Ajax was not for everything and about my bad experience with Google Reader has been… you know over the days.. Google Reader has become rock solid and I am using it with same number of feeds.. and its awesome.. check out the keyboard shorcuts.. and if you forget them on google reader just press ? and the help screen for keyboard shortcuts shows up.. cool…(my favorite shortcut keys: space, j, k, u, n, s and t)

posted using WLW

Context menu overload in visual studio 2005

After uninstalling Resharper 2.5 and installing Resharper 3.0  I was greeted with two Resharper menu’s and one Refactor menu from vs.net2k5. Here’s some help to remove those context items and annoying menu’s (via IntelliJ forums):

1. Go to Tools ->Customize , at this point all the menu items in vs.net are customizable.

2. Choose the menu item, drag it and throw away (drop it off somewhere inside vs.net)

3. To remove context menu items, after step 1.  Turn on context menu in and repeat 2.

Screenshots:

AJAX is not for everything

 

I have over 1000 feeds now and I have been using RSS Bandit exclusively for reading my feeds. Since I have been away from my home computer for sometime now I decided to import my opml to google reader.

I have used their older version and found it to be completely useless. Eventhough I know that rss reading is different from emails, I needed the ability to mark items as read so that I can keep my rss reading list tidy. I guess this would be the most basic feature that was absent in the older google reader.

<rant>Since I saw the announcement for the new google reader I thought I’ll give it a second chance. The stupid reader crawls with my list. AJAX is more of an annoyance than a feature here. I wish there was a way to turn the AJAX off and give the plain simple HTML page. I can live with postbacks but crashing and unresponsive browsers is most annoying. People behind the AJAX bandwagon please realize that AJAX is not the panacea for poor interface. Just because its cool doesn’t mean it could work everywhere. I guess two sloppy applications from google are the spreadsheets (why use an online spreadsheet when U can attach an Excel file in a email?) and google reader. </rant>

Google maps are great, not the best in directions.. but the street level views is cool. 

I highly recommend bloglines. By far the fastest web based rss reader. Minor annoyances with the UI is something I can trade off with the speed at which it displays my rss items…no more chocking browsers.

 

btw.. the last two posts were published from Windows Live Writer which rocks! One of the sweetest applications I have used. Simple, Intuitive (I haven’t hit the F1 key) and fast. Great job on this MS!

ASP.NET Adding Dynamic Controls in EventHandlers

As most of you guys know, adding controls dynamically to aspx pages is a pain. There is always a tricky situation that messes up the eventhandling or viewstate or diffuculties in walking through the child controls through the container controls like placeholder. I faced one such with dynamic controls being added in a button.click handler. Just so that you or I can save some time here are some reads to look for before you use dynamic controls in your application:

Page Lifecycle

1. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178472 (read everything)
2. http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20051227.asp 

(Peter’s table is great in 2. Pay attention in particular to events LoadViewState, ProcessPostData1, ProcessPostData2 and their order in Page’s timeline. And then read about it from Dino’s excellent article abt ProcessPostData1 and ProcessPostData2 sweeps here. Then read everything Scott has to say:

Scott‘s Articles

1. Dynamic Controls in ASP.NET
2. Working With Dynamically Created Controls
3. Dynamic Web Controls, Postbacks, and View State
4. Control building and ViewState Redux
5. Tip: When Adding Dynamic Controls, Specify an ID

In short these are the general things that you would want to do to ensure all work smoothly.

1. Add new control to a placeholder’s control collection.

eg:

TextBox myTxtBox = new TextBox();
myPlaceHolder.Controls.Add(myTxtBox);

2. Only after step 1, set the attributes for the dynamically created control.

myTxtBox.ID ="myDyna"
myTxtBox.Text = "Hello! I am Dyna"

3. Ensure you specify the ID’s for the controls you add.

4. If controls are dynamically created in an EventHandler like Button.Click or DropDownList.SelectedIndexChanged then follow the pattern in Dino’s article. Which if I may summarize is to:

• Isolate Control Factory methods from EventHandlers
• Use ViewState or some other persistent flag (dropdownlist.SelectedIndex != -1, etc) to check if the controls have been added dynamically.
• If the flag is true then re-create them again in page load so that during ProcessPostData events the controls are found and viewstate restored for them from the temporary collection as described in Dino’s article.