Chillisoft Blog
 

I’ve been working on an application that uses Habanero and Visual WebGui (VWG) to provide a simple website that lets a department manage a list of facilities. At Chillisoft we use test-driven development to build robust applications, and we attempt to get our business, logic and presentation layer as close to 100% test coverage as possible.

I was writing tests for a section of code that calls through to VWGContext.Current.Session, which effectively allows you to store and retrieve session variables in the same way you do in ASP.Net. The trouble is that Current returns null because no web environment has been launched.
Continue Reading »

Learning to use keyboard shortcuts is a double-edged sword.  On one hand, you get fed up with how hard it is to pull off a task and you feel a certain sense of triumph when you find a shorter way of doing a repetitive task.  On the other blade, becoming more efficient in what you do is part of the service to your employment contract.  You’re getting paid to perform a quality service as quickly as you can.

So what then is “the most useful keyboard shortcut you never used”…
Continue Reading »

Active Reports provides the XMLDataSource option for sourcing your data from xml.  My knowledge of all its ins and outs is not substantial, but I ran into two significant problems in a recent project which led me towards an alternative, innovative approach.
Continue Reading »

Our client required a modification to an existing web solution that displayed confidential results in html format, which could be printed from the results page.  The data was sensitive and was being forged, so we looked at adding a watermark.  This required moving across to using reporting rather than html, so we started building up a report structure.

I was very pleased to find that Active Reports provided a WebViewer control, especially since it gave you the option of either displaying reports with an ActiveX option or with a Adobe Reader option.  My assumption was the latter required extra processing to convert a document to PDF first.  However, the ActiveX option requires the client user to have internet access to download the plugin, whereas the Adobe browser plugin can be installed from a downloadable installer that can be run on any PC.
Continue Reading »

I’m currently using Excel XP (2003) and having been learning some tricks to get data out of HTML tables into an Excel document.  I stumbled onto a cool feature last night…

Go to the Data menu > Import External Data > New Web Query.  What you get is effectively a web browser that lets you enter a web page or even login and navigate to a page of your choice.  The browser places little icons next to the tables in the web page, allowing you to copy that data across to your Excel spreadsheet.  This option also comes up when you have justed tried to paste table data and get the little popup to do with formatting.

Also, if you’re interested, I see that in Firefox you can CTRL-Click on individual table cells and copy out the data from just those cells.  I’m sure you’ve found like me that it can be tricky copying just the column or row of data you need from a web page, and this might help you one day.

Having wasted time trying to figure out how to merge two forums in our PhpBB3 forum, I’ve posted a brief post pointing out how to do it.  Basically, I wanted to merge two forums into one, moving all the posts from the one forum into the other.  After moving each post manually, I found out that you simply have to choose to delete a forum in the admin control panel, and the next screen gives you the option of moving all the forum’s posts into another.

Let’s not beat about the bush - Visual WebGui has helped to usher in a new era of web development.  Of course we should be giving credit to the advances offered by AJAX, Silverlight and the other Web 2 technologies, but perhaps VWG has managed to encapsulate these advancements into a package that is useful to .Net developers.  The unfortunate reality right now is that VWG is a relatively new technology and we’re still in a position of gauging how well it works in the real world, rather than the safety of our development offices.
Continue Reading »

To be honest, I don’t have a full understanding of how FastCGI and Passenger work, but I provide this information given the possibility that someone might experience similar problems.  We have a Ruby on Rails based site hosted on Dreamhost, and we recently froze Rails to version 1.2.5 after having trouble with 2.1.1.  In order to make the process of restarting the application easier, I selected the option to use Passenger (mod_rails), which allows you to touch the restart.txt file in the tmp folder in order to restart the application (which is useful when you frequently make changes to the core code/controller files).
Continue Reading »

When you explore best-practice version control structures, such as the trunk/branch/tag structure used in subversion, you’ll understand that there is value in nailing down your application to a specific version of its dependencies when you launch live.  We experienced exactly that when we launched our company homepage using Ruby on Rails.  Having designed it with Rails 1.2.5, all was well.  One day the credit crunch hit us too … our site went down, but Wall Street was not to blame.
Continue Reading »

You could hardly describe the excitement we felt, walking into a client’s state-of-the-art building, ready to present what we knew to be state-of-the-art software.  We had a winner!  We had designed a web interface using the close equivalent of Windows Forms, which means you get much of the Forms functionality and you develop in half the time.

This was all possible of course with our dev version of Habanero 2 (soon to be launched), where you can create a user front end that can switch between Windows or web with a change of your control factory.  It truly is revolutionary, and if you’re a web developer you’ll know.
Continue Reading »

An interesting suggestion was raised recently at our offices about how to lay out blog posts.  Word Press provides a feature for you to show only a portion of the blog post on the front page, so that you have to click something like “Click here to read more” if you want to read the rest of the post.

When you think through the readability implications, along with the blog context, it seems like there are pros and cons either way.  Let’s have a look at them.
Continue Reading »

A unique, zero-risk opportunity has arisen for vendors to sell their goods online to the South African market, with integrated credit card payment and courier delivery. There is no setup cost and you can be given a unique login and begin listing your products almost immediately. Charges are based by commission on sales.

The Online Shop is accessed through the new site www.canoesa.co.za. The site is targeted at the South African canoeing market, including the thousands who race in big events like the Duzi and Fish River Marathon. Any vendors who sell through the shop will be able to tap into this market immediately, since the online entries pass through the site. The possible range of products suitable for this market is huge, including health products, camping equipment, sporting goods, books, media, event bookings, clothing, vehicle supplies and much more.

Should you wish to arrange online sales for anything from event bookings to tractor mowers, and you need a way to sell these online, you may find the new online shop will serve your needs perfectly.

For more information or to get the ball rolling, contact Chris Hide at 083 636 0872.

After 5 months of development, www.canoesa.co.za is now live and ready for the canoeing world. In fact, the site is an upgrade of the previous KNCU site, with much of the same functionality. The existing KNCU site can still be accessed at www.kncu.co.za.

The big new feature is the Online Shop, which allows paddlers to pay for multiple race bookings at a time and track their purchases. In addition, race organisers can easily arrange for the sale of additional items for a race (branded t-shirts, overnight camp stays, meals) and flexibly assign free products to be handed out at the race (with the ability for a paddler to choose options like shorts size as they book online).
Continue Reading »

At the point of implementing a shopping cart, it becomes clear that writing your own is a lot of labour. From designing the front end, getting the tree heirarchy to work, integrating delivery, discount bundles, payment processing, order notification and managing speed of access, let alone the whole administrative backend, it makes sense to integrate a third party package.

We had a big problem though: our cart was no ordinary one. It had to integrate into an existing ASP.Net application and support a range of products that required extra logic.  We would also be using a local courier company (using web services) and payment handler.
Continue Reading »

The following code provides a workaround that allows you to simulate a scheduled service in your ASP.NET web application.  This is useful for running routine tasks like a scheduled email or file cleanup.

Original credit for the concept goes to Omar Al Zabir, who posted an article on CodeProject at: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ASPNETService.aspx.   An improvement was posted by the user “dselkirk”, and the following code is a slightly simplified C# adaptation.  See the article for an explanation of how the code works.
Continue Reading »

The search for a simple way to achieve this turned out to be a study in how to get yourself out of a straight-jacket. The more I read, the more perplexed I became. Of course, this kind of problem is intrinsic to the weaknesses and limitations of web interfaces, and frankly, I can’t wait for Web 2.0, AJAX and Silverlight to change the way we do web. Form programming is so much easier and more intuitive than the hoops we jump through on the web front.
Continue Reading »

Just a word of caution with using ASP.NET’s RadioButtonList.  I was adding radio items at code level, creating a RadioButtonList object, then creating individual RadioButtons and adding them to the list’s controls.  Firstly, a RadioButtonList is not composed of RadioButtons, but of ListItems.  Secondly, you don’t add the ListItems to list.Controls, you add it to list.Items.  After that it works fine - have fun!

I’ve run into this problem a few times when doing all my cross-browser checking.  I do most of my web design using Firefox, so when I finally remember to go and check how it looks in Internet Explorer … shock and horror because there are little 2 or 3 pixel spacers under some of the images.
Continue Reading »

My present website project requires one site design to cater for two URL’s, so that each URL would make use of the same set of pages and functionality, but with different looks, menu links and user security profiles.  I processed the different avenues for achieving this in my mind and had already figured out that the easiest way to change the looks would simply be to change the stylesheet in the master.   However, it was suggested I take a look at Themes & Skins.
Continue Reading »

As part of our liaison with Virtual Card Services, we needed to supply specific form information. The real catch came in where our site was using a master page and ASP has a feature where every child control gets renamed in order to prevent potential naming conflict with controls in the master. Without the specific ID names we specified on our input elements, the VCS site wouldn’t get the information it required.
Continue Reading »