SpellCoder

Print support for Facebox and lightbox v1.0

beckham — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:07:00 GMT

Hey, Its been a long time :) i was pretty busy in some work :( along with preparing to come back to Egypt for a small vacation isA .

Anyway, you all know facebox and Lightbox. I wanted to allow the user to print the content of the facebox and lightbox and sadly this wasn't available in facebox and lightbox v1.0 but it's available in lightbox v2.0 but sadly i did some modification to my lightbox v1.0 file and i really was to lazy to redo it in lightbox v2.0 :).
anyway attached is the facebox and lightbox v1.0 with print support.

the final output will be like that

Beckham

Migration to Oxite

admin — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:01:00 GMT

spellcoder.com will be moving to Oxite, so we can actually have a source code to the system to do any modification we need. Community Server just won't do it anymore since this is pretty much a casual community....(read more)

MIX09 videos

tayseer — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:26:00 GMT

MIX conference is my favorite conference. It is always full of surprises, and it is not restricted to Microsoft technologies. It has been a habit for me to grab the links to MIX videos since MIX 07, and I'm keeping this habit for this year too :).Here is the source code to the Python program which grabs the links. It generates two files: mix09_links.txt which contain only the links so you can import them in your favorite text editor, and mix09_title.txt which contain the title of every session and...(read more)

OSLO CTP 2 is out

admin — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:47:43 GMT

Download it here. I can’t wait to see what’s new here. I’ve been tearing my hair own trying to implement Schematron on M....(read more)

Yet another SOA is dead article

admin — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:39:09 GMT

This time from a Microsoft Envagelist. “Seeing that SOA has been one of the most visible and widely talked about technology initiatives of the past decade, the fact that it has been pronounced “dead” would seem to require an autopsy to determine the cause of death and discover any foul play that might have been involved in its untimely demise.” (Denny Boynton) IT Architecture starts looking like a global financial system that are still in the process of melting down. The derivative and...(read more)

Tricking .Net 2.0 to run extension method is considered harmful

admin — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:01:29 GMT

http://www.codethinked.com/post/2008/02/Using-Extension-Methods-in-net-20.aspx This is a common trick that unfortunately has tricked into open source libraries. Don’t do it. It’s bad because this trick will generate warnings in C# ASP.Net web application projects and will fail completely on Visual Basic Web Application Project and Website project. I just filed this to yet another open source library author. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ...(read more)

Fashion Disaster : SOA is Dead?

admin — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:40:22 GMT

“Once thought to be the savior of IT, SOA instead turned into a great failed experiment—at least for most organizations. SOA was supposed to reduce costs and increase agility on a massive scale. Except in rare situations, SOA has failed to deliver its promised benefits. After investing millions, IT systems are no better than before. In many organizations, things are worse: costs are higher, projects take longer, and systems are more fragile than ever. The people holding the purse strings have had...(read more)

Why go Facebook when you can Outlook

beckham — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:32:00 GMT

Facebook to outlook

First, Facebook as a very successful social networking website already contains a lot of information that we need and that will save us a lot of work not only to get this information but to use it as well.

Second, as you already know, we all work in the morning sometimes we don’t have time to turn around and certainly don’t have time to open up a browser window and typing the Facebook URL and start logging in, it seems a lot of time which sometimes we don’t have. But yet we would like to update our personal status on Facebook. So how can I do that without wasting all that time?!

The solution is pretty easy, we all have outlook opened up since the very first second you boot up your computer at work as all work related mails comes through outlook, so why don’t we make it a bit funny and use it to update our status.

The “Facebook to Outlook” plug-in consists of two main features

a. Friends to Contacts.

b. Update my status.

c. Send notification messages.

So in this post I’m gonna walkthrough how to make the first plug-in as the rest is pretty much the same. Okay, let’s go

Friends to Contacts:

As a Facebook user I have a lot of friends on Facebook and those friends already published their information and I would like to have those friends in my outlook contact list. So instead of writing down the information of my Facebook friends I just thought it will be nice to have a button that I can click and it does all the work of getting my friends information and adding them to my outlook contact list.

The bad thing is the Facebook REST services don’t allow you to get the email address of friends but I guess it’s better to just modify an existing friend and add the email instead of adding the entire contact information.

Getting friend’s information from Facebook.

To get started developing applications with the Facebook API, you first need to register your application and get an API key from Facebook which will allow you to connect to their site and download data. Their Get Started page will lead you through the process.

Now that you have an API key, you can start developing. While you can connect to Facebook and get the information manually through HTTP REST calls,

Okay we first need to get the list of facebook friends:

Next, we bind the friends list FriendSelected event, to allow the user to select his friends he wishes to add as outlook friends

Next, we add some code to the SelectedIndexChanged list to allow a user to remove a friend he already selected.

Finally, we write the code to move the facebook friends to our outlook contacts.

and the final output is

Beckham

Day 4: Mg Machine

admin — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:31:07 GMT

Since we are getting MGraph out of Mg, why not use IronScheme as an output since it is basically an AST and already based on DLR and it can be quite simple to have it for general purpose DSL machine construction kit. The other way is through XAML construction....(read more)

Cloud Insanity

admin — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:53:52 GMT

Now this is just branding gone wild. Q: What is Azure? A: Well it’s a new cloud based Windows operating system, Windows Azure and a set of web services called Azure Services. Q: So what are Azure Services? A: They are Live Services, .Net Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services and Dynamic CRM Services. Q: Hmm..so why does Windows gets renamed to Windows Azure and Live Services don’t get renamed to Live Services Azure? A: Because it will make Live Services name too long or… ...(read more)

Day 3 : It’s the machine, stupid

admin — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:57:04 GMT

“So when I look at M's elements, I can only conclude that it too has the same aspects as the well known tooling and building blocks for parsers, grammars and the like available to everyone today: it's complex. With 'complex' I mean: you need proper knowledge about computer languages, parsers and grammars to understand what's going on and how to use the tools available properly. There's nothing wrong with that: if something is hard, well... that's life, deal with it by understanding the concepts which...(read more)

Automatic Admin interface for SQL Server using Django

tayseer — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:51:00 GMT

A problem that we face everyday is creating CRUD interfaced for our databases. Creating a CRUD interface is always a boring and tedious job. Even if you want to initialize your data, you may break something by mistake if you use SQL Server Management Studio, because it doesn't know anything about your business rules. Django - A web framework for Python - gives you the solution. It has an application called "Django Admin" that provides a customizable, production-ready, nice-looking UI on top of your...(read more)

Snake oil and development methodology

admin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:11:18 GMT

For the past 5 years agile development mantra have been drilled into programmers heads and great, now the meme says “no, it’s not working” (read: Decline and Fall of Agile Development) Do you know what this means? A new round of books written why Agile wasn’t that good anyway. A replacement for Agile Development is imminent. How about Kaizen for software development? A new round of books about how Kaizen is different from Agile development methodology and why the authors used it and it...(read more)

JQuery Magic Continues --> Enable Searching and sorting in GridView at the client side.

beckham — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:24:00 GMT

I geuss you heared about JQuery, Which is an amazing JavaScript library that makes it easy to create wonderful web effects in just a few lines of code. As the website says:
“jQuery is a JavaScript library that takes this motto to heart: Writing JavaScript code should be fun. jQuery achieves this goal by taking common, repetitive, tasks, stripping out all the unnecessary markup, and leaving them short, smart and understandable.”
there are a lot of jQuery plugins such as facebox.
there is also a 2 plugins that are very cute and neat:
1- The Table Sorter Plugin
2- The table search plugin.

today i'm gonna use these plugins to allow sorting and searching for the grid view control at the client side ( No Postback)
okay, Let's start,
first of all you need to download the jQuery, Quick Search & Table Sorter plugins.

1- Create a webpage and put in a GridView control.
2- bind your gridview to a data source. in my case i'll use a SQL Data source, that connects to the northwind db and get some information from the [Customers] table.

3- Now the cool part to enable the search into the grid view just add this nice piece of js code

just make sure to add the js files that you downloaded

4- To enable sorting is a bit tricky as the table sorter plugin is working with the standard HTML table with and tags but the grid view renders only without tag.

Okaay, how can we make the gridview renders the tag ??? We can do that by this line of code which tells the grid view to render the header row as tag.

Now to make your grid sortable at the client side just add this line

now you can search and sort your grid at the client.

Beckham

Windows Azure Overview

admin — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:47:30 GMT

Check out this excellent Windows Azure overview by Dare. The infrastructure looks nice and it makes available a lot of stuff that needed to be configured by hand. But still, the biggest work in making RESTful oriented application in .NET (cloud or no cloud) is still the mind numbing work required to properly provide support for REST APIs via proper error messages etc. Right now the work for parsing XML messages will have to be done by hand (LINQ for XML helps) if you care about...(read more)

Day 2: A Developer Case for M

admin — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:47:41 GMT

I am excited about two things in Microsoft PDC 2008, no it’s not Windows Azure or Windows 7. The cloud infrastructure is nice but cloud is just an infrastructure architecture problem – and frankly I trust Amazon to get this right than Microsoft. I am more interested in technologies that helps making software construction faster and more reliable, either in the way of libraries that bring useful capabilities or new languages that implement concepts that makes programming more fun and productive....(read more)

Here’s some “great news”

admin — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:20:51 GMT

Microsoft is killing LINQ To SQL and apparently WF 4.0 will not be compatible with WF 1.0. Here’s a rule of thumb of using Microsoft technologies. Trust the language guys and run time guys, be wary of everybody else especially the bloody data access team. Man, Matt Warren must be pissed. This is his second or third ORM effort got cancelled for the past 7 years....(read more)

Introducing M Language

admin — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:50:48 GMT

Download this video of Don Box and Chris Anderson running through M language (mp4) They discussed the high level concepts behind M. This is a must watch to get a traction in understanding the M language. ...(read more)

M Enumerator : Day 1

admin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:39:31 GMT

So you have your OSLO SDK installed and your Intellipad running smoothing on your screen. Well, let’s get busy. Let’s remember a simple factoid: module is the basic organization structure in M language. The following code is the smallest unit of M language module Commerce { } In your Intellipad, press ctrl \ and type SetMode(“MMode”) to start your model mode. Off course right now it does nothing. In M, you define a type by using the type keyword and in this example, we are going...(read more)

C# 4.0 Tuple

admin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:01:06 GMT

Finally there is a way on how to use tuple as it ought to be. In C# 4.0, you can do the following dynamic GetTuple() { return new { FirstName : “John”, LastName : “Adams” }; } dynamic myTuple = GetTuple(); Console.WriteLine (myTuple.FirstName); //Look at this beauty Update: Remember that anonymous type is an immutable type. Once you set the value at creation, they cannot be changed. ...(read more)

C# 4.0 Dynamic

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:28:00 GMT

One word, wow. class C { public dynamic myField; public dynamic MyProp { get; set; } public dynamic MyMethod(dynamic d) { return d.Foo(); } public delegate dynamic MyDelegate(dynamic d); } You can find more https://blogs.msdn.com/cburrows/archive/2008/10/27/c-dynamic.aspx, https://blogs.msdn.com/cburrows/archive/2008/10/28/c-dynamic-part-ii.aspx and https://blogs.msdn.com/cburrows/archive/2008/10/29/c-dynamic-part-iii.aspx...(read more)

Join the group

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:37:00 GMT

Join Mdsls group for in depth discussion about Microsoft M language (as part of Oslo technology), including mgrammar, mschema and mgraph. We'll talk smack about Intellipad there as well.

http://groups.google.com/group/MDSLs/

M Language team blog is located here http://blogs.msdn.com/mlanguage

M for Mind Boggling

admin — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:16:00 GMT

The Oslo technology is revolutionary. There I said it. I will dedicate the next four weeks dissecting the capabilities of the M language and the MGrammar languge for DSL buildling. I have been reading through the early language specification furiously and man, this is a real deal. For now, check out the marketing kids' word at http://www.modelsremixed.com/. Download the SDK (a tiny 15MB download) at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/oslo

C# 4.0 New Features

dodyg — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:09:00 GMT

Check out the new C# 4.0 language features here.

They are dynamic type keyword, optional and named parameters, dynamic import and variance.

They are nice but the biggest surprise maybe the IDynamicObject which allows an object to respond to dynamic properties/methods like method_missing in Ruby.

PLINQO: Professional LINQ to Objects

beckham — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:07:00 GMT

PLINQO, which stands for Professional LINQ to Objects, is a collection of Code Smith templates that are meant to replace and extend the LINQ to SQL designers that are included with Visual Studio 2008.

For more information about PLINQO Check out Paul welter's post here.

Beckham