TECH - Things to Remember

While I was working on a new online web service for my company, the initial idea is to process the request that came in immediately, and have the response to be posted back immediately as well. It does not seems wrong, but in reality this is not a practical way to do. Indeed that nowadays the Internet has given us a lot of freedom in accessing a lot of information almost instantly. Thus, it would be normal to judge in such a way that if I could get my response back within a few seconds, then why i.e. your service can't do it? There are a lot of factors that we need to deal with. In my case, I need to deal with 2 major issues - the time taken to process the request, and the time taken to send out the response. Both are affected by external factor, i.e. mail server, how fast it could send out the email. I used to think that there would be mail server software out there some where that could do something like allowing third party software to do extensive processing, of which case

I've been working with online services since the first day I joined Handisplay. Back then, I was working with classic ASP as the front end, while writing the back end code using Active X (in DLL format) written in C++, my favourite yet hard-to-master programming language. Since then, I've tried to work with different kind of programming languages and technologies: Java Servlet, JSP, SQL Server, MySQL, Linux C++, and now ASP.NET with C#. Looking back since the first day that I stepped into the real world, there are a lot of things that I need to pick up on my own, of which I'm sure everyone would agree with me. What I have learned during my time in university was just basic fundamental, of which it was useful enough for me to expand on it. Though I've heard a lot of people saying that the university should teach certain programming languages, yet the reality doesn't seems to work that way. The reason is simple, as the technology is advancing in a considerably fa

In the new ASP.NET 2.0, there is a control called ReportViewer, which could be used to display a report. It provides a lot of in-built functionality that could ease website development, such as sorting, page navigating, printing, and even exporting it into Excel. As mentioned above, ReportViewer is used to display a report. It acts as a container to display a report with RDLC extension (.rdlc), much like a web brower is used to display web page in HTML format. One container can be used to display report file, but it cannot used to display more than 1 report at the same time, unless it's a nested report (report within a report). RDLC is basically a template, where we could drag and drop the desired controls to create our own report. The underlying language is actually XML. The process to develop a ReportViewer is quite straight forward, but it can be very complicated at time as well do deal with. In Visual Studio 2005, the ReportViewer control is placed under the section Data