Imagine our surprise when we first started deploying reports some 8 months ago in DotNetNuke and we could never see a ‘spinny’ for any of our reports. Sure when we developed them and did the preview we would get one and when we deployed them on pages outside of DNN we saw it but we could never figure out why, in DNN, it would never show. Until IE8 came out, that is.

IE8 has a wonderful little feature called Compatibility Mode and combined with Fiddler (http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/) we were able to notice that the spinner appeared when the site was switched from Compatibility mode and back to regular but not when the page first loaded.  Forcing the site to load everything again with Alt + F5 seemed to make the spinner appear as well. Watching fiddler while doing this we saw a few things happen. JavaScript files appeared to be reloaded and CSS files appeared to be reloaded. This made us think that maybe some little bit of bad JS or some malformed CSS was causing the ‘spinny’ to not show. So we stripped...

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A great tool for testing the look of your pages without spending the time installing and maintaining a bunch of different computers is Browser Shots (http://www.browsershots.org).  It not automated or as complete as Browser Cam (http://www.browsercam.com) but its free. I like using it for quick tests of pages. I say quick, but you sort of have to babysit the site if you pick more than a few browsers and the pictures are deleted about 30 minutes after being created so if you miss them you may have to resubmit them to see the screen shots.

I remember my Grandmother telling me this story with different animals but the parable was the same idea.  Just sort of rediscovered this in catching up on some reading last night. If have never thought that focus and knowledge were important you might want to read this short page and the pages from Chapter 5 of his book that Jim Collins makes available.

The Hedgehog Concept

Chapter 5, Pages 90-91 of Good to Great

I bring up the whole thing as I find myself distracted everyday from the things I know well (.NET) to the things I don’t know very well and don’t have lots of experience in (PHP, Perl). Simply because a client may hire me based on the right words. After rereading this parable of the Fox and the Hedgehog I am reinvigorated to not try and do PHP or Perl sites, I hate it anyways, and stick with what I know...

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I have gone as Twitter crazy as the rest of the world, go figure I was already a little crazy to start with .

I have been looking for a new outlet for some of my extra programming creativity so I started looking at the Twitter api and ways I could build a site to do things I wanted it to do. Not only do I build something I need/want but usually the technical hurdles teach me new things.

While starting out on this project I had shown the general idea to a few friends online in various disciplines and had 2 of them who were very interested in the plans as a service they could use. thanks to Shama Hyder of Shama.TV and her blog post “How to Fail Proof your Idea: The Ultimate Way to Test” I immediately asked them if they would be willing to pay for such...

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Warning a bit of bad language and bad taste but still funny!

Where I work, yes I sometimes work, full time we have run without ssl for a long time. In some ways it was a lack of need in others it was a lack of understanding of why we need it, not on my part but sometimes management still thinks like its 1970. Finally this last week we have gone through the painful process of putting security on all our public facing websites. Doing so always brings out legacy problems and the little quirks in your code and sometimes in other third party services. One of those quirks turned out to be Google Charts.

Google Charts doesn’t work over ssl it simply redirects to Google.com. We needed a solution to avoid panicking our users with the dreaded "some content came from an unsecured page" warning in the browser. After some research we wrote this little http handler to grab the chart and stream it to the page under ssl.

In order to use the HttpHandler we simply added a class to the App_Code folder but you could easily compile it to its own assembly if you wanted.

Add...

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Funniest thing I have seen in a while and I love Twitter

http://current.com/items/89891774/supernews_twouble_with_twitters.htm

Overview: This software helps its users track the hours they work on projects.  The software appears geared towards consultants that bill by the hour like coders and web developers.


PCFWorks.com Website
VeriTime Time Tracker Pro 7
 

Some users have the wrong idea of why they are forced to log in to a site. Well if you only want to have them log in once and not be logged out while the site is in the browser here is one way. This is above and beyond the 'Remember Login' checkbox and really good for long data entry forms!

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Hosed the web.config upgrading this site to 4.9.2.  A lesson learned back up your web.config file even if you have double checked you are not uploading a new one!