Blog List

Merry Christmas everyone. It’s been a busy and fun year in the world of software development. I’ve upgraded to Vista, Office 2007, IIS7, SQL 2005, .Net2, built a media centre and found Virtual Earth and AJAX all in one year!

The move to Virtual Earth Development has been fun. I am very lucky to be working with great tools doing interesting work. No matter how much people complain about web2.0 I think it rocks.

For me it’s less about the social impact or the cost structures and more about getting a really great experience out there on the web. From an ASP.NET background being able to develop sites from scratch using AJAX has been a great experience. I’m now at the point where your UI code sits out there with the client and your web server just has to deal with getting the right bit of data served optimally. No more rendering complete web page because a checkbox was ticked. It just seems so much more efficient all round and the performance shows. Why didn’t we do this earlier is all I can say.

So have a great Christmas and I’ll have some new amazing articles on Virtual Earth in the new year!

Sorting a datatable...just one of those things i always end up looking up...

DataTable dt;
dt.DefaultView.sort = "CreateDate desc";

Always one I have to look up....but if you've got an xsd it's really simple to turn it into a class.  Just use the xsd.exe tool.  Options i usually use are: /c (to generate classes) /l:CS (class in c#)  /n:somenamespace /o:outputdir

You can also use it to go the otherway, and generate a xsd from a class.

A simple example of using this can be found here.

I recently finished up with an Australian company developing an advanced prototype for fleet tracking / reporting. As part of the project I had to propose a mapping technology. Out of all the options available Virtual Earth is feature rich, scales well, has many great resources for developers and is able to be licensed for commercial use. At least it appears that way.

From Australia you find that our local sales team can’t help. You can send emails to the licensing link on the US site but I never got a reply. Now my request was not just for any old map point license, I wanted a per user license with no limit on transactions. This would allow my customers to use the technology in web based business under a very simple model. You charge the customer the base mapping cost from Microsoft plus the cost for the value added service you put on top of it.

I was in the lucky position of having Frank Arrigo send an email on my, and I’m sure others, behalf. I met Jay at our local Australian TechEd and asked him to look into a solution. I ended up in email conversation with the UK map point sales team. I explained what my client wanted to do over countless emails.

Some 5 months later and after 3 months of emails with the licensing team my client was offered a suitable contract.

Now why is this so hard? I understand that there are royalty costs for the map data providers, and restrictions on what we may use the data for, but surely there must be a standard set of packages available. Why does it have to be a slow, case by case, process for something so generic?

In the process I asked and was informed that there is no reseller scheme in place. Clearly I thought it would make sense for a Australian partner to able to resell licenses to their clients who want to use this technology. I’m in the situation where I can prototype an amazing new way to visualise your business data, but I can’t tell you a price! I can only promise a slow tedious process with Microsoft.

We need the local sales team...

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Santa's sled in the form of a courier driver dropped off my xmas present early on Friday.

The Dell 24" is the pick of the developers monitors at the moment. A screen resolution of 1920x1200 is perfect for visual studio. My Dell 9300 laptop has the same resolution but its colours and brightness do not compare. You can pick them up for around $1100. The original release had some issues but this is the v3 model with those problems solved.

I recommend the speaker, it is silver, attaches to the bottom very neatly and means if you ever use it as a tv you get sound.

An interesting issue for people that use a desktop replacement style laptop is how to setup a 2nd monitor. I have been using the monitor above the laptop style configuration for a few years now and find it works quite well.

The monitor also has every video connector you can think of so the idea is it can make a perfect 1080p TV for the bedroom if i ever part with it!

They say the three things a good programmer should get themselves are:

• Really good monitor (eyes)
• Really good chair (back)
• Really good keyboard/mouse (wrists)

Been using a little tool called Fiddler to inspect and play wth HTTP traffic.  I love tools that make things simple for me, and this thing has proven to be super simple to use.  Been using it mainly for inspecting the HTTP traffic etc. but you can do more with it too.

I’ve just finished up with the project I was working on and come January will be ready for a new challenge. If anyone knows of, or is planning, a really challenging project using Virtual Earth, AJAX, .Net2 and SQL server please let me know.

I’m really keen to show just how powerful Virtual Earth is. It has some great applications in Real Estate, Asset Tracking, E-Learning, the Travel Industry and I’m sure many more.

John.

This one always gets me...and have to look it up.  To dynamically add a web user control do use: LoadControl("control.ascx")

Needed to apply mulitple css classes to one element today.  Pretty easy once you know it's just space delimited e.g.

<DIV class="greenbox clearfix"> </DIV>

Had a problem where i had 2 floating divs inside a container box that had a visible border.  It wasn't forcing the container box height correctly.

Found the solution here..(thanks to Holly 'n' John)

To summarise...the CSS class you need is as follows:

clearfix:after {
    content: "."; 
    display: block; 
    height: 0; 
    clear: both; 
    visibility: hidden;
}

clearfix {display: inline-block;}

/* Hides from IE-mac \*/
* html .clearfix {height: 1%;}
.clearfix {display: block;}
/* End hide from IE-mac */

This gets added to your outer container e.g.

  <div class="clearfix" >
    <div style="float:left"><p>some text</p></div><div style="float:left; padding-left:5px"><p>some text</p>
    </div>
</div