Mischa Kroon : Things to try, General

Another free webeditor - Aptana

Mischa Kroon — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 07:26:00 GMT

Aptana is a free / open source project built on the eclipse RDT environment.

It's main focus is on javascript.

For which it brings a nice code completion / information interface and delivers hints and code completion for:

Javascript
CSS
and HTML

There are also quite a few videos about how well it supports the different Javascript libraries out there.

You can check them out here.

Some links and tutorials about Django

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 11:17:00 GMT

2 Articles about Django from 2 different people:

Django: first impressions - overview with links

Django: first impressions - technical overview

The first one covers a lot of ground through it's links and is a pretty good starting point for Django.

The main upside of Django is that it gives you a very nice Admin interface with almost no work + it has a pretty nice template language.

Reading and writing excel files and other Ado.Net tutorials

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 30 May 2006 10:06:00 GMT

I've known for some time now that it's possible to use Ado.Net to read from Excel files, I didn't know it was also possible to write to them.

At least I have found a workaround by using SQL server and registering Excel files as an external resource.

Reading and writing from excel.

Other Ado.Net tutorials.

I have no idea how this performs but it should be an interesting alternative to using the

Other methods of exporting data to excel.

Developments in Ruby - Part 1 - Editors

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 09 May 2006 12:53:00 GMT

Ruby's star is rising fast at the moment.

It's star is rising fast it even has the thought leadership at the moment according to Don Box.

IDE support is rising for it as well in the form of free editors and paid editors alike.

RadRails is going strong in the Eclipse camp, this isn't really a Ruby perse editor but an editor made especially for Ruby on Rails.
Which is also playing a very big part in getting Ruby out to the world.

The editor is good but there is still a lot of room for improvement when your main issue for productivity is a key combo to switch views.
Which in this case means switching from controller to view to model since we are talking about a MVC framework with Rails.

It is a great feature though :)

A new player in the field is, Sapphire in Steel which is an editor plugin for VS 2005 which hits a bit closer to home for me :)
They already seem to have a first draft of a debugger running, code completion and quite a few other things are also on their roadmap.

Looking very promising....

In the commercial arena, it looks like: Arachno Ruby is hard to beat.

But this isn't all, there are also some project underway for getting Ruby running on our sweet lil CLR.
Hopefully I will be able to give an overview of whats coocking in this department soon.

Ruby on Rails finally gets it's editor

Mischa Kroon — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 05:18:00 GMT

One of the big things in stopping people from adapting Ruby on Rails is it's lack of a good editor.

Now it seems that this is a thing of the past.

Some people have made it possible to make Dreamweaver mx 2004 into a good Ruby on Rails editor.

The howto for rhtml files.

The howto for intellisence on .rb files.

This is a very big step for Ruby on Rails.

More about Ruby on Rails and comparing it to Asp.Net will come later.

Setting priorities and planning features

Mischa Kroon — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:11:00 GMT

Usually Joelonsoftware.com produces some interesting points of conversation around the blogospere.

His latest posting is a really good (IMHO) post about setting priorities in a project.
One of the good things in having a time based schedule and not a feature based schedule is that you can usually drop a few features which could be called fluf.

For getting to the good part of the post just skip half of it, because the first part is all fluff no stuff.

Anyway here's the post
Which also goes pretty well with this post. About setting a shipping date.

Hope you like it.

Adding search to your ASP.Net site the easy way

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 00:18:00 GMT

This is a great way to add search to a website, and it's so simple that you will probably love it.

The code needed:

string search = string.Format("http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=site%3yoursitehere.com+{0}&format=rss",
HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(SearchText.Text));
RssFeed1.DataSource = search;
RssFeed1.DataBind();

RssFeed1 is a SKM RssFeed control which can be downloaded here.

Only thing to do after this is add some visually pleasing styles and your done.

An example of this in action can be found here.

This idea came from:
Ryan Farley's blog.

Getting to search engine friendly and human friendly URLS ASAP

Mischa Kroon — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 19:38:00 GMT

Ok fast overview, you want to go from:

www.bla.com/bla.aspx?id=12&year=1999&month=2

to:
www.bla.com/123.aspx
or
www.bla.com/123
or
www.bla.com/123/id/12/year/1999/month/2

Here are your options:

URL Rewriting engines:

Simple + Regex through httphandlers: (Article)
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/030522.htm

SES: aka no more ? and &
http://weblogs.asp.net/skillet/archive/2004/05/04/125523.aspx

HTTP Module: ( recommended if your not going for mapping all extensions to asp.net)
http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/archive/2004/11/18/265719.aspx

The following problems arise when you want to remove the .aspx part:
http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/943.aspx
and:
http://scottwater.com/blog/archive/2004/09/08/IIS6_HttpCompress_NotSoFast

The solution seems to be to use ISAPI filters.

Free ISAPI Filter:
http://cheeso.members.winisp.net/dl/IonicIsapiRewriter.zip

This uses PCRE (http://www.pcre.org) for the regular expression support.

Commercial ISAPI filter:
http://www.isapirewrite.com/

Main advantage of this solution, are high class docs.
http://www.isapirewrite.com/docs/

Some information on handling postbacks can be found in this article:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/urlrewriting.asp

A very nice and extensive list of FREE Asp.Net controls

Mischa Kroon — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 12:38:00 GMT

This list contains controls in the category's:

Architecture
Control Collections
Data
Email
Masterpages and Templates
Navigation
Polls Voting / Rating
Portals
Reporting / graphs
User Interface
Website Statistics

Article index:
http://aspalliance.com/652

( 1st post made with bloggie )

Javascript logging to webservice / calling a web service from javascript

Mischa Kroon — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 18:47:00 GMT

There is an excellent article about logging javascript errors through a webservice here: http://weblogs.asp.net/Dr.NETjes/archive/2005/01/15/353713.aspx

This also shows an exmample of how to call a webservice from javascript .

The best desktop search has gone into beta

Mischa Kroon — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 10:06:00 GMT

Yahoo's version of desktop search is based on X1 technology which has a very good product.
It's been under development for quite some time, and Yahoo is bringing this technology to the masses:

http://desktop.yahoo.com/

Say hello to Monad, the new commandline :)

Mischa Kroon — Sat, 30 Oct 2004 12:13:00 GMT

I was browsing Channel 9 for a bit ( a Microsoft site with interviews and video's ) which are encoded with wmv.
Among the video's was: Monad demonstrated.

Which really blew me away in terms of functions / power.

Spoilers:

Access the registry.
Access Active Directory.
Access variables.
Access functions.
Use SQL like filter / order functionality.
Be able to use other programs as output (Excel is shown).

VBScript Code library and reference

Mischa Kroon — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 14:21:00 GMT

While googling when trying to help someone I came across the following:
http://www.psacake.com/web/func/

It has 92 functions for most common VBScript scenario's it seems like a good addition / learning starting point for a lot of people.

Also on the same site is an index of a lot of other usefull resources:
http://psacake.com/web/

LookOut Grab it while you can

Mischa Kroon — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 12:08:00 GMT

LookOut is a 3th party search application for MS Outlook.

Since MS has acquired this software the download link has disappeared but the old location is still active.
The program is free to use and download.

~~You can grab it here:~~ ~~http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/download/Lookout118.exe~~

Update: the link is now dead

Strangely enough this one is working:
http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/download/Lookout120.exe

The first link was taken from arstechnica... guess they didn't update to the latest version ...

And lastly new download link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=09b835ee-16e5-4961-91b8-2200ba31ea37&displaylang=en

How to read /.

Mischa Kroon — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 10:29:00 GMT

An explanation of the moderation system of /. with some tips.

Somehow I just kept on reading /. since I was introduced to it a long time ago, it always kills time and usually in a good way :)

How To Read Slashdot