Archive for August 2008

HOW TO build a simple Tab Menu Control

If you need a dynamic Menu for your ASP.NET website that should show up differently for different kinds of users, you need not look beyond the ASP.NET 2.0 Menu. It has umpteen properties (over 75!) that can be set declaratively to configure beautiful standards compliant Menus with no effort at all. But if all you need is a simple static Menu to navigate through a few pages, the ASP.NET 2.0 Menu could be overkill. Instead, you can consider building your own lightweight Tab Menu Control and play as you like with it.

This Simple Tab Menu Control leverages the power of Javascript & DOM to detect the hyperlink that matches the page visitor is on and highlights it. As all the processing is done on the client-side with Javascript & CSS, it is relatively faster & light-weight. Check this no frills, bare-bones example...

If you need a lightweight multi-level static menu for your ASP.NET pages, you can adapt & wrap the Suckerfish Menu into a User Control.

HOWTO

HOW TO use Wikipedia content in your application

Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, open content encyclopedia project launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

As of April 2008, Wikipedia had over 10 million articles in 253 languages, about a quarter of which are in English.

Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, or database queries (such as for Wikipedia:Maintenance). All text content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).

If you need only English content, you can fetch the English Wikipedia SQL (or rather MySQL) dump.

You can also access any article programmatically, one at a time in XML or as an RSS Feed.

This is what Answers.com possibly uses to fetch aggregated results including Wikipedia content, for user queries.

Tools/Utilities

Free Bug Tracker/Issue Trackers tools

Take a look at Michael Flanakin's comparison of Web-Based Issue Trackers next time you need a free Bug Tracking/Issue Tracking tool and pick the one with the features you need. (Thanks Corey Trager)

And if you need one for a quick non-confidential personal project, there are also some hosted online for free to choose from -

Defectr, Unlimited Accounts
AceProject Basic
LightHOUSE Free edition, 1 project with 10 users
Issue Tracking Anywhere, supports up to 3 users
BugHost Lite, supports up to 3 users

SourceForge.net and CodePlex are popular open source project hosting websites that also provide supporting features like source control, discussion forums and issue tracking.

Related link:
Rating the quality of a software team

miscellaneous

6 months of BSNL Broadband

Six months ago I signed up for the BSNL Broadband Internet Home 500 Combo Plan. While the bandwidth and speed offered under the plan have been decent, all my interactions with the State-owned BSNL staff have been unpleasant. The unhelpful local Help Desk, lethargic Billing clerk, tip-seeking Linesman, and the discourteous Customer Service personnel (Helpline # in Hyderabad - 12678) were painfully slow in discharging their duties and tested my patience to no end. They are all yet to get over their bureaucratic mindset.

I paid Rs. 1500 (deposits for the Landline phone & Broadband Internet service) initially. The monthly charge is Rs 629 (Rs 550 for the Internet + 60 for the Modem monthly charge + service charges). If you pay your bill online on their sloppy & extremely amateurish website, you get a 1% discount.

Never mind if perky Priety Zinta swears by BSNL Broadband in the ad (she is paid to act), go for BSNL Broadband only if you can endure bureaucratic behavior.

HOWTO, Trivia

HOW TO find approximate time when a web page was posted

For certain time-sensitive info on the Web to be useful, it helps to know when a particular web page was posted.

Google now extracts and shows the byline date from pages that have one. The byline dates are presented uniformly even though they may be in different formats.

Search Google by providing the URL of the web page whose posting date you want to find. If this does not help, try the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Learning Resources, SQL Server

Free SQL Server Videos

The MSDN Webcasts site has a nice bunch of downloadable webcasts (beside Virtual Labs & Podcasts) on SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005

Michael K. Campbell has recently launched www.sqlservervideos.com–a site that provides free SQL Server training videos.

There aren't too many videos for now, but it's something to watch out for.

In the Windows Dev Pro Update Newsletter, he has shared deployment issues that he has faced while putting up the website that made for interesting reading. I'm excerpting it here as I didn't find an online link for the same material -

403 Access Forbidden. Initially, every page on my site greeted me with this error. As an IIS 6 veteran, my initial thought was that I’d forgotten to ACL my files and content. But the site was running on IIS 7 where automatic worker process injection removes that headache. As such, my first thought was that maybe something like UrlScan was interfering with my URL Rewriting Engine. Happily, however, the site is hosted with ORCS Web and they were all over the problem in a jiffy. The culprit? When I initially created a site with them, it was hosted on IIS 6 but was later transitioned to IIS 7. As part of the conversion process, the site was configured to use a classic application pool instead of an integrated pool. As such, my URL rewriting code simply wasn’t allowed to run.

Errors in my Errors. Once the site was up and running, I decided to test out my very cool error pages. The idea was to provide end users, or visitors, with helpful markup and information, while still ensuring that I was throwing HTTP 500 and 404 responses out to search engines and bots. I got errors all right, just not the ones that I wanted. Worse, somehow they managed to ripple through the site, and tear the whole thing down after a few requests. Sadly, this was all my fault, and required a few tweaks of my processing logic. Because the Global.asax was also in charge of routing these errors, I threw in some exception handling code in my error handling code as well. I knew that unhandled exceptions in Global.asax turn ugly very quickly.

Stupid Robots or Stupid Code? Since SEO is such a key part of my site, imagine my horror (a few days after launch) when I discovered that while normal visitors were accessing the site fine, search engines encountered nothing but errors. Tracing my way through my code, I found something written months ago that would help ensure that search engine requests wouldn’t be counted along with normal ad impressions. Sadly, while this code worked in testing, it just didn’t work out in the real world with real robots. I think I’ve fixed the problem, but I’m hoping for the glorious return of the robots.

Replacing "soft 404s" with "hard 404s" as described in Errors in my Errors above is a Google SEO best practice.

Further on, he has also pointed out that there is now a tool to manage migration from IIS 6 applications & servers to IIS 7.

Related links -
Tips on ASP.NET Hosting & Deployment