Tuesday, August 11, 2009
I just got a nice new 32 GB iPhone 3G S yesterday from the Apple Store in Sydney. It's quite an interesting shop, but that's another story. Anyway, my hotel doesn't have wireless internet in the rooms which is a pain in the butt, so I was wishing I had one of those 3G modems. I had heard of hacking the iPhone to make it a 3G modem, but now I find out it's legit! It's called Internet Tethering. Here is an article that I followed to set it up.
http://blog.cameronlaird.com/2009/06/easy-internet-iphone-tethering-with-telstra.html
Make sure you read all the comments etc. before getting started as some of the links are mixed up. I got mine working with the telstra.internet not the telstra.iph one. Also I am using the USB connection as bluetooth would just chew up the phone battery.
It's nice and fast and means no more need for those 3G dongle things.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
I just bought a new laptop, and because I am studying Music Technology part time at university now, I decided to get a Macbook Pro so that I could use Apple's Logic program for music projects as well as run all my development apps like Visual Studio/SharePoint/SQL Server etc.
Setting up the dual boot with Mac OSX and Vista 64bit was no problem at all. (Andrew Connell has a great blog post about this http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2008/07/10/Triple-Boot-Goodness-on-the-MacBook-Pro.aspx)
I have quite a few Virtual PC and Virtual Server images that I use for training as well as software development, but I was wondering if it would be possible to have the same VM's run from either the Mac OS or Vista?
Well, you can exclude VPC right off the bat. They did have a Mac version, but it is now discontinued and I'm not sure if the same .vmc could be opened in Mac and Windows anyway.
VMWare has Fusion for Mac, but it costs a few bucks.
So a collegue of mine recommended I try Sun's FREE VirtualBox, which runs on damn near anything.
So I did, and I have to say, I am amazed at this product. Not only was it easy to install and configure on both Mac and PC, but it runs my existing VPC images as is (well after uninstalling the MS Virtual Machine Additions and installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions)
And the bonus is - the exact same image can be started up in either the Mac of Windows OS - perfect for my situation.
Plus I was getting weird scrolling lag issues in VPC that completely disappeared in VirtualBox. Everything is stable and rock solid.
VirtualBox also has a really nice feature called “Seamless Mode“, where your guest OS applications are not run on a separate window, they are run in their own independent windows on the host OS desktop. You have to see it to appreciate it.
Anyway, I'm totally impressed and it has been a long time since I've been able to say that about a piece of software, especially a free one.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
In a lot of the web applications that I write, there is a need to stream a report back to the browser as a PDF. With code something like this:
//response to user's web.
Response.Expires = 0;
Response.Buffer = true;
Response.ClearContent();
Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "inline; filename=" + "output.pdf");
Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
Response.BinaryWrite(outBuf);
outStream.Close();
Response.End();
Now that I am playing around with the Ajax Toolkit (specifically the ModalPopupExtender) in Visual Studio 2008, it has become clear that you really need to control whether you want asynch or full postback.
If your button that produces the report is in an UpdatePanel, and you are manipulating the Reponse to stream the report back, then you will probably want a normal postback.
This is accomplished by adding a Triggers element to your UpdatePanel as below:
<asp:UpdatePanel ID="UpdatePanel2" runat="server">
<Triggers>
<asp:PostBackTrigger ControlID="btnApplicationOK" />
</Triggers>
In this case the button btnApplicationOK is inside the UpdatePanel so it's default behaviour is to perform a partial (Ajax) postback and it will not like you manipulating the Reponse, so you will get an error like the one below. The fix is to add the PostBackTrigger as mentioned.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
This has happened to me in the past - sometimes randomly, sometimes consistently. After a quick search I found that all you need to do is make sure you select "Workflow" as the type of code you want to attach to, as described nicely in this article:
How to solve Visual studio crash on attach process for debugging a sharepoint workflow
Thursday, October 30, 2008
I was having trouble with a custom ASP.NET 3.5 server control. It was getting a run time error as I dropped it on the winform. The problem was a bit tricky to debug but
this article got me going. The article is written for VS 2005, but it worked for me with VS 2008.
Friday, October 17, 2008
I'm just about to try and design a web application around the new
ADO.NET Entity Framework (comes with
Visual Studio 2008 SP1). This
crib sheet from
Amirthalingam Prasanna, along with the
MS Quickstart example, look like a good place to start.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
I see that there is now a CodePlex project based on my original posting of cascading dropdown lists for SharePoint
Thanks maiden123!
http://www.codeplex.com/CustomFieldControls
Monday, August 18, 2008
While setting up my SQL Server 2008 RTM image, I needed to create a demo using PerformancePoint.
After installing PerformancePoint (by the way, I had to point it to a SQL Server 2005 instance for it's own databases, it didn't like 2008) I went to connect to an Analysis Services 2008 data source. I got an error, something about data source not found. I wasn;t sure if this was going to be a problen with 2008 cubes in general.
After some investigation, I realised the problem was not with connecting to SQL Server, but rather PerfPoints own web service. In IE, I browsed to http://localhost/WebService/PmService.asmx. There was an error message “could not system.web.extension version=1.0.61025.0.“
A couple of articles talked about some workarounds,
http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/2007/11/pps-data-source-connection-problems.html
http://hassansyed.blogspot.com/2008/02/ms-performance-point-connection-issue.html
But they looked like a bit too much hard work. So I tried installing ASP.NET Ajax 1.0 from
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ca9d90fa-e8c9-42e3-aa19-08e2c027f5d6&displaylang=en
and everything is sweet now. PerformancePoint Dashboards working fine connecting to SQL Server 2008 cubes!
Sunday, August 17, 2008
I am trying to set up two instances of SSRS 2008, one in Native mode and the other in SharePoint integrated mode. I tried to make the default instance Native and then created a second instance in SharePoint Integrated mode. However, there seems to be a problem with the new Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint. (Well for me anyway. I'd be interested if others have had the same problem) After installation no Report Services Integration items showed up in SharePoint Central Administration, although the new content types did appear in my MOSS site. So I was unable to tell SharePoint which instance I wanted it to use.
Also, the add-in installation seemed to trash all my Site Collection Administration settings in all my WSS sites. Very bizarre! They came back on any site collections that I deleted and recreated.
So anyway I tried a couple of different things to see if I could get it working. I switched the instances around and made the default instance SharePoint Integrated mode, and tried reinstalling the Add-In. This still didn't seem to solve the problem.
The next thing I tried was to uninstall the RTM Add-in and install the RC0 version of the Add-In. (Well the Report Builder 2.0 RC0 seemed to be working fine, so I thought, what the heck I'll try it)
Well, the Report Services Integration items showed up right away, allowing me to configure the thing! Now it's all working fine with SSRS RTM, but SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint RC0. Not entirely sure why! But at least it's up and running :-)
