Sonu just announced on DotNetSlackers a brand new competition entitled "Peers Contest".

The rules are pretty simple, simply register on the DotNetSlackers forums and start answering the questions and/or asking questions to your peers.

The competitions officially launches on October 5th.

Prizes:

• 1st place - XBox 360 Elite and Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET.
• 2nd place - ANTS Profiler 3 Pro and The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks book.
• 3rd place - The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks book.

This is an awesome competition with some equally stunning prizes!  Go sign up and enter now!!!

javascript+AJAX solution for inline edititng in grid.

The ASP.NET AJAX Showcase demonstrates how businesses are using ASP.NET AJAX to add functionality and provide greater user experiences in their Web-based applications. The three exciting new additions include Foonance, Lottery Post and RoundPegs. If you too have created a cool Web site leveraging ASP.NET AJAX, please let us know.

Yesterday Telligent, in an interesting turn of events if you ask me, announced that Personal and Small Business licenses for Community Server are no longer available. Yes, you read it right - not will not be available, but as of November 2nd, when it was posted, are no longer available.

More from me soon, I promise. Life was a bit on the wild side lately.

We just completed the .NET Framework 3.5 update to the Commonly Used Types and Namespaces poster. Here's a link to the PDF if you want to grab it now and be the first on your block to get it on your wall. We'll be using it at a variety of places, if you...(read more)

Sometimes you want to know a type's exact namespace and assembly (for instance, in order to find it in Reflector). Instead of waiting forever for Visual Studio's Help to load (that is, if you haven't already disabled F1) or searching Google for the answer, simply click on Go To Definition (or F12 in the default C# scheme), and hover over the meta data file's tab page header.

You can now find the open-source projects on one Starter Kits and Community Projects page. Check out the newly listed DinnerNow.net and Umbraco CMS for examples of building a connected application and a fast, flexible content management system

Lori asked:

I’m seeing results with VB’s StrComp function that I would not expect.  For example:

    StrComp("Lee-P", "Leema", vbTextCompare)

Returns 1, but

    StrComp("Lee-P", "Leema", vbBinaryCompare)

Returns -1 as I would expect.

Why does this first return a 1 rather than -1? 

PS: I see the same behavior in VB6 as well as VB.NET.

This may look familiar to regular readers, especially people who have seen Punctuation... now, isn't that SPECIAL [weights]? or the more recent A&P of Sort Keys, part 9 (aka Not always transitive, but punctual and punctuating)....

Yes, it is good old word sorting -- VB does it too! :-)

(The vbBinaryCompare constant is what it sounds like, and the vbTextCompare one is the default user locale)

Expected really is in the eye of the beholder, ain't it?

Now, we are sitting on the opposite side of an implementation that was first written over 15 years ago, though I wonder whether in retrospect it would be more intuitive to make SORT_STRINGSORT the default behavior and only do word sorting when it was explicitly asked for. There would be fewer complaints about cases that are not as intuitive since they aren't as straightforward as the co-op vs. coop case, but at the cost of a lot of less than ideal results.

I have gone back and forth on this one a whole bunch -- trying to make it easier on confused developers, trying to make it better for ordinary users who just wouldn't be expecting punctuation symbols to be weighed so heavily.

Kind of a time waster, but every time this issue comes up I walk through the alternatives again....

Which is better? If it were up to you, what would you have suggested as the default a decade and a half ago?

 

This post brought to you by - (U+002d, a.k.a. HYPHEN-MINUS)

Paul Andrew has posted a link to the .NET framework 3.5 commonly Used Types and Namespaces poster - cool stuff!

Download it here. 

 

Daniel Moth also has a good older post on the .NET 3.5 bits
 

In my opinion it is. Take a look at GAIA Ajax Widgets!! This is a completely different approach of Ajax then the MS way but it really has advantages over the MS way. And it renders fine in all major browsers IE, Firefox and Safari and you can even use it in combination wit the Mono platform.

Large calls over the wire are gone.. It all works based on java scripts so updates of controls are not done by sending the HTML but by sending a java script call. And all in the way you are used to code, so no hurdles are need to be taken.

Ever had the problem that you had several parts of the screen needed to be updated and had the controls triggering this event outside of the update panels? Well, with the gaia placeholder you can ForceAnUpdate and have the areas rendered the way you need it.

Having build a lot of CRM and other Database management oriented applications in ASP.NET  I have more fun with Gaia then with the MS Ajax so far..

So this is my winner for 2007 in the development web applications with a bite and a good user expericence! 

Check it out! I never ever used commercial Ajax components but for this one I will start using it (I will buy a commercial license in the near future as I cannot always comply on the GPL license). Yes, they do offer a GPL version of their software so you have all the sources you will ever need.

Get FREE Ajax Controls now!

 With kind regards,

 Michael Hensen
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Well it's Sunday the 4th of November, my wife's birthday . Where are we spending it? In Las Vegas! The DotNetNuke Conference, OpenForce07 starts on Tuesday here at the Mandalay Bay so we came out to Vegas a few days early. Last night we went to see KA at the MGM, it was awesome. Not quite as good as La Reve that we saw at the Wynn two years ago, but still a great show. Today we're going to do some site seeing and then have dinner with her folks again. The rest of the week is DotNetNuke related. If...(read more)

A template based, command-line oriented .NET code generator

The Article will guide you with complete knowledge of how to add a google map in your webpage with knowledge of JAVASCRIPT, Use of Geocoder, Use of InfoWindow, Use of Marker, Tabbed Markers, Maximising marker, Creating context menu in your map

This article explains how to manage sessions ending when using the ASP.NET StateServer (which does not fire the Session_End event)

I wrote a beginners article on how to create your own extension methods in .NET 3.5 and then how to go about testing them using new built-in features in VS2008. Please go read the article at the Code Project : http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/ExtensionUnitTests.asp.

If you are interested in extension methods (like I am obviously) and plan on writing your own, I think the article is a good starting point. I give suggestions on when to use them and when I think it is not appropriate. I also talk about some unexpected behaviors that occur when using extension methods on variables that are null. It then walks you through a step by step guide on how to write unit tests for the extension methods using the new unit testing features of VS2008 pro.

Please check it out and comment on how I could improve it and please remember to rate the article.

Liron asked via the Contact link (long enough ago that the point about not sending me time sensitive questions is likely clearer than it had to be):

Hey Michael,

I've read a lot about the subject of keyboard layouts, being interested in the programming side along with the linguistic side, and since I'm pretty sure you have the most intimate knowledge of the subject, and since this question requires insight, I think you're the man to ask:

I want to be able to find out which physical key a user is pressing, in Javascript. The "closest" I get to scancodes is virtual keys, that I can get from keyup and keydown events, but I have no way to tell if the user is using QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ, Dvorak, or who knows what.

I actually only need "sane" options that 99% of the people use, so I'd settle for QWERTY, QWERTZ and AZERTY (And please correct me if this assertion is wrong)...

I thought that maybe I could try to match the VK I get with the text the browser sends in response (For example, if VK_Y sends ט then I can assume it's QWERTY because that's a character that's only mapped to the QWERTY Y key, in any mapping), but that leaves me hanging in German, for example, where I can't tell if VK_Z+"z" came from QWERTY's Y key or Z key location.

Short of asking the user to hit some specific keys before starting, is there any way you can think of to get this data? Ultimately, I want to be able to map each keystroke to its physical location (=scancode, for my purposes)...

Thank you for your time, and good day,
Liron.

Unfortunately, there is no great answer here. I usually look to references like Jan Wolter's JavaScript Madness: Keyboard Events and the like, which spend a lot of time showing the differences between browsers and platforms.

As you can see from that document, there is no readily accessible way of getting at keyboard scan codes. It makes a lot more sense to go with the VK values (and as that page indicates, not even them for lots of the punctuation characters).

Or better yet, if you need a bunch of characters in a specific layout on the keyboard, then you can do the work to configure the keys for the application (let the user type to assign the keys they want to use, and then you know what they decided and can take advantage of it....

Now in some specific script hosts, more information is provided, but in general these are even less consistent than the core language, which is itself not consistent with very much!

 

This post brought to you by A (U+0041, a.k.a. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A)

javascript+AJAX solution for inline edititng in grid.

Warning: Rant to follow:

Ok, I know Outlook 2007 is a complicated piece of software. I know its gone through a whole series of revisions. Could I make a better piece of software? Well I'd like to think so, but the people at  Microsoft are smart people so it could be debatable.

What I do know?

Outlook 2007 is significantly less stable for me than Outlook 2003 ever was and I am sick of it. It complains of being "unresponsive" on a daily basis for me. I don't know what the change is that has caused this (perhaps a windows update?) but I guarantee that Outlook 2007 goes "unresponsive" at least once a day.

Damn its annoying. Outlook acts as the software hub for my my day. It holds my appointments, reminders, meetings, and pretty much my daily everything. Its imperative that this software is reliable. I don't care if no features are added, but I do care that the features that are in there are reliable. Please make it so. I need it that way.

A wrapper for using MAPI on the Pocket PC and Smartphone written 99% in .NET, resulting in a fast and easy-to-maintain library

MSFT Midsize Business Center has some information on Groove and SharePoint co-existing together. It has  been that way for a very long time - it was called the Groove Mobile Workspace but a lot has changed since then.. Read on..