Visited IE test-drive site in my Chrome browser today and was greeted with a cheery banner:
I guess that “Don’t forget to enable your partial hardware acceleration in the about:flags thingy…” is a veiled reference that IE9’s HTML5 is fully “hardware accelerated”. Still funny.
Update: Since Microsoft is abandoning their “native HTML5” party line the funny logo has been removed as well. Too bad, especially after comparing FPS on speed tests.
Linq2Sql has a great use of stored procedures – it converts them into methods which you can easily call using standardized .NET syntax. For example if you have SP:
ALTER PROCEDURE MyProcedure(MyParam int) ...
after dragging it into Linq2Sql designer you can call it in your .NET code like this:
Dim aResults = MyDbContext.MyProcedure(2011)
but there are 2 caveats. Continue reading →
I am using FeedWordPress plugin on some of my sites to pull data from Google News RSS feeds. It was working fine, but after I moved to a new host, I started to get errors like:
Failed to connect to 2a00:1450:8006::63: Network is unreachable
Note the IPv6. Google have been supporting it for a while and news.google.com resolves to IPv6 first (similar error happens in WordPress admin dashboard in “Incoming Links” section). Unfortunately network of my new host didn’t support IPv6, so I had to find solution to force WordPress to use IPv4. Enter class-http.php. Continue reading →
In the past I described how to perform string aggregates in T-SQL. In this post I will show how strings can be concatenated in LINQ.
I am using ADO.NET data table as a source for the query, but LINQ being LINQ can pull data pretty much from anything so this example can easily be adjusted.
First things first, let’s create the source. As in T-SQL post I am using ol’ faithful Northwind database and getting data from the Employees table:
Dim oConn As New SqlConnection(sMyConnStr) : oConn.Open()
Dim oComm As New SqlCommand("SELECT Country, FirstName FROM Employees ORDER BY Country, FirstName", oConn)
Dim oAd As New SqlDataAdapter(oComm) : Dim oTable As New DataTable : oAd.Fill(oTable)
This will fill the datatable with employees’ first names and countries
Country FirstName UK Anne UK Michael UK Robert UK Steven USA Andrew USA Janet USA Laura USA Margaret USA Nancy
And now we want to group this by the country, combining first names into comma separated string. Continue reading →
When Infragistics UltraWebGrid is not in LoadOnDemand mode, you need to rebind the grid to the data source in PageIndexChanged event for paging to work. What’s neat – before the rebind, grid is still on the old page, effectively giving you “BeforePageIndexChanged” or “PageIndexChanging” event in server-side code:
Protected Sub xuwgGrid_PageIndexChanged(sender As Object, e As UltraWebGrid.PageEventArgs) Handles xuwgGrid.PageIndexChanged
'Page hasn't changed yet, collect data from the old page
'Or cancel the rebind and remain on the old page
'rebinding the grid to the datasource
BindGrid()
'New page is in effect
End Sub
When Infragistics WebDataGrid perform AJAX operations such as sorting and paging – it sends grid data directly to page’s DOM. But it also allows you to send your own custom data via server-side GridResponse object and its client-side counterpart. This feature allows you to establish effective link between server and client to perform custom operations otherwise available only during full postback or partial postback via update panel. There’re multiple cases where this can be used, let’s take a look at 3 most common:
Imagine following scenario: an SSRS report has a dropdown list “lookup” parameter based on a stored procedure. When report runs, user selects a value from the dropdown, clicks “View Report” and report is generated. The challenge is – the “lookup” parameter (and underlying stored procedure) needed to be filtered by another “filter” parameter – and this one is not available in SSRS interface, but instead is passed from ReportViewer control from an ASP.NET application.
In order to successfully implement this use case 2 items need to be addressed:
First in the report itself parameters need to be ordered in such way so “filter” comes before “dropdown”. Parameters can easily be arranged in Business Intelligent Development Studio, by expanding Parameters node, selecting a parameter, and using arrow buttons in Report Data menu.
Second in the ASP.NET application, configuring ReportViewer control (setting credentials, server URL, report path and our “filter” parameter) needs to be done in Page_Init event in the “If Not IsPostback” block.
UltraWebGrid had a very convenient getNextRow() client-side function which returns next row in row collection. WebDataGrid does not have an analog, but it’s pretty easy to recreate the functionality:
function getNextRow(i_oRow) {
var iRowIndex = i_oRow.get_index();
var aRows = i_oRow.get_grid().get_rows();
return aRows.get_row(iRowIndex + 1)
}
This function accept grid row as a parameter, gets the row’s index and return row with incremented index from grid row’s collection.
Infragistics UltraWebGrid offers standard keyboard navigation for record selection. For example you can click a row, and holding Shift key press Down Arrow to select multiple records. This works fine for a flat grid, but try this with grid in OutlookGroupBy mode and you’ll get an error ‘previousSibling’ is null or not an object:
After some digging I found the culprit. Continue reading →
If you’re trying to open an Excel 2003 XML file (SpreadsheetML) in Excel 2010 and getting “The file is corrupt and cannot be opened” error, try opening that file in WordPad (it will open as text XML) and save it back. Now try opening it in Excel 2010 again. You will still get “The file you’re trying to open is in a different format than specified by the file extension” warning, but after that the file should open.