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 ...

The new Windows Server 2008 installation is pretty neat and tidy. Plus, it's even easier to install as compare to it's predecessor. The installation interface looks pretty nice and it looks just like Vista. Yet, in my opinion, there's 1 major problem. After the installation is completed, it will prompt to enter a new password for the administrator account. Unlike in the past that I could just ignore it or simply type a simple, non-complex password to proceed, this would actually disallow me to enter non-complex password. The kind of password complexity is something like "CoMpleXP0ss3w0rD". Yes, it's as complex as this. There is no way to bypass this page as from my experience.

I was trying to work on CustomValidator control for the past few days and I have finally able to use it without facing anymore major problem (IMHO). During the development, I found out that the <script> tag, which can be used to reference to a JavaScript source file (.js extension), could affect the post back event of the ASP.NET page. I have functions written within a JavaScript source file that would be referenced by CustomValidator.ClientValidationFunction properties. I included the source file within the <head>...</head> section with this line of code: <script type="text/javascript" src="formValidation.js"/> It is technically correct, isn't it? Since we are allowed to do <tag_name/> in the XML schema, so I would expect that this would work. Yes, indeed that my CustomValidator object is able to fire the client-side validation function, but yet the Submit button would not fire its OnClick event. So I tried to search for solut...

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...