TECH - Things to Remember

I was trying to write a simple dialog program with Visual C++ just to refresh my C++ knowledge and Windows Programming. C++ is the language that I truly wanted to master, but yet I don't really have any time to sit down and to use it to write program, not even in my work, where I'm using C# most of the time because it is easier and faster to develop a program with it. Yet, I still find that it's very fun to write a program with C++ because of all the extra procedures and rules that we need to follow. During the course of writing that simple program, I encountered 2 things that I need to note it down, otherwise I'd have forgotten about it again. 1 - Adding DDX (Data Exchange) member variable that associated with a control when developing the dialog box program What happened previously when I was learning to write a windows application with MFC from Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++, I learned about the usage of DDX member. Yet, over here, I couldn't get any v...

Virtualization has been such a popular method nowadays to run different operating system in one computer. With this, we could have a Windows Vista desktop that could run Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Linux, etc at the same time. This is such a brilliant piece of software engineering. There's a lot in the market nowadays either it's commercial or open source that could do virtualization, even Microsoft is aiming at it too. I'm using VMWare to create a few virtual desktop to host different OS for development and testing purpose. It was fine until recently when I'm trying to create 64-bit virtual desktop. I tried to create a 64-bit virtual desktop on a 64-bit server, a very powerful server (dual Xeon processor with Hyper Threading, 8GB memory), that I thought it should be easy, and again I was wrong. Although it's powerful, VMWare tool that I used was giving me warning that the server could not create the 64-bit virtual desktop. I was puzzled bec...

Previously I have dealt with the problem of positioning in the web page. Yet there's another thing that I'd like to deal with, which is to layout the controls nicely. At first I thought of using the HTML table to segment the controls properly, but I have a problem with that. Once it's rendered into HTML, it may looks pretty with IE6 and IE7, but the positioning will definitely out with Firefox because of the absolute positioning. During developing the content page, I drag a few HTML tables into the page, put all into relative positioning, and align them properly. Then, in order to add the controls into the table, I'll just drag the control and move it to the desired table (highlighted with blue frame), and it will align to the top left corner of the table to show that I drag to the right place. Note here, that the controls within the table are all absolute positioning. I can't use relative positioning here because the alignment process will not work. So once ...

It is much easier to build a website nowadays with Visual Studio 2005 because Microsoft has made the web development similar to windows application development. Of course, it may still not as good or as rich features as compare to Adobe (if they still have the web development software), but yet for simple development, it's good enough. Using Visual Studio 2005, we could create a master page, which will be the main frame of the page, and we could create as many content page as we want that would reside within that master page, brilliant! (Top Gear word) However, there's 1 problem. While placing the controls into the web page, we could use absolute positioning to move them to the desired location. Then, we could align those controls as well by few clicks. This works well in normal page, but in a content page, it doesn't. The controls will appear on an undesired location once the web page is rendered. In order to fix this, there's another positioning called relative ...

In ASP.NET, 1 new thing being implemented is called the PostBack event. This is an event triggered whenever there's a response from a user that will need immediate action to be taken on the server side, either be a redirection or disabling some interface control. This is a welcoming event for me because I know how hard it is to make a web page to be user friendly, especially when I need to make all the buttons to be disabled when certain selection is done in JavaScript. It is pretty difficult for me and sometimes certain JavaScript codes don't work on certain browsers. With this PostBack event, I could just write everything in the back end codes instead. Of course, there are some drawback to use the PostBack event as I'd assume, because everytime a PostBack is triggered, the page will be reloaded with the Page_Load event, and there's a communication being made with the server, so the server will be heavily loaded. The thing is, though the server will be heavily load...

I have this experience in C# that although an object is not NULL, if it's an array or a string, it doesn't mean that the length is equivalent to 0. In C# NULL and 0 length are 2 different conditions and both have to be deal with. Because of the above, I've tried to check on DataSet to see if the same would happened. I'm using Stored Procedure and Microsoft Practice Pattern Enterprise Library to get the DataSet. At first I thought that if there are no matching result, than the DataSet should be NULL instead. Then I have a hunch that might not be the case because of the experience that I mentioned above. So I do a check by having the Stored Procedure to check for a result that does not return a matching result. My guess is that although it's empty result, the DataSet will still be instantiated/created by the method. The test result proves my guess, because the DataSet is created/instantiated, and it has a 0 row count. Note that it happens with the Enterprise Li...

Yes, another hurdle of the day that I encountered when I was testing the process flow of a registration website that I was in-charged with. In classic ASP, there are 2 methods that could be used to transfer/redirect to another page: Server.Transfer - What it does is that it will transfer all the state information like Session, Application, and all Request collections to another page, which the page will have the same Session ID as the previous page. Response.Redirect - Another method that would widely be used I believed. This method will stop all processes that are executed and then proceed to connect to a different URL. This method will not transfer the current state to the new URL. The above methods can be executed from the ASP file with ease. Since ASP.NET has both methods provided to us, I would assume that it would behave the same. Yet, I was wrong. ASP.NET is a totally new technology with an ASP.NET page ties with a background code written either in VB.NET or C#. Much like c...