Chillisoft Blog
 

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.
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We were experiencing an error trying to compile an application using ASP.Net and Visual WebGui (which builds on top of ASP).  The global.asax file was being marked as erroneous, with the following error:

“Keyword, identifier, or string expected after verbatim specifier: @”

It turns out that the build action setting was wrong on the global.asax file.  Changing from “compile” to “content” cleared the error.

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.
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A few months ago we, were commissioned to undertake a project that required what most of us in the office cringe at, an ASP project, more specifically and ASP intranet project. So after some bad and tedious experiences with ASP just a few weeks earlier but still wanting to do this project, we scoured the interwebs for any tool that could some how help our interaction with ASP. We found what can only be described as a GOD-Sent, Visual WebGUI or VWG as its known. After spending some time using the VWG framework, testing it out and convincing ourselves that it met all our requirements, we made the monumental decision of reviewing our ORM architecture, Habanero, to see how easily we could fit the two together. The task seemed simple enough, all we really needed was to use the VWG controls instead of Windows controls. However after going down this route we decided that a more elegant soultion was required.

And so it began…
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