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Showing posts from September, 2009

Grids and ASP.NET (vb)

Manually filling rows of data in ASP.NET controls can be a bit unintuitive. I’ll go over a few things I learned recently. I’m writing up this posting off the top of my head, so I can’t say for certain the code examples are correct in syntax. Use the template field in your grid view as it’s the most flexible to deal with as apposed to using asp bind field tags or other means. <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="A Column"> <ItemTemplate> <a href="http://address"><%# Bind("dbField") %></a> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> The example above is a column template field with the Bind() function call. Bind() is a special function that can be used to link data that the template field has access to within the grid row. You can also use Eval() which just prints the data and does not hard link the control and data like Bind() does. Also take note of the # in the asp tags <%# %> this is shorthand for...

Short-circuit conditionals in VB.NET

I’m in a situation now where I am required to write programming code in VB.NET. Which brings me up to a simple programming construct that I came upon by writing code like I would in C#, but getting a different expected result in VB.NET. In C#, using the && operator in conditionals is *by default* a short-circuit type conditional. That means when the first term is evaluated, the additional statements won’t be processed at all if that first statement was not true. The main benefit is something like this: Say, you want to check a listbox for specific values… if(lb1.selectedIndex > -1 && lb1.selectedValue.compare(“value text”) == true) { code to run } If the list box has no list items in there (eg. a selectedIndex of -1), the second condition will never be checked. If C# did not short circuit after the first term resulted in false, a program error would occur because the second condition would not have anything set for the selectedValue property. Oddly enough, in VB...

ChatGPT is a new, and faster, way to do programming!

Currently ChatGPT is in a free “initial research preview” . One of its well known use cases at this point is generating software code. I’ve also just used it to write most of this article… Well, actually a future article about cleaning up SRT subtitle files of their metadata faster than I have been by hand with Notepad++ and its replace functionality. Update: I recorded a screencast of writing the SRT subtitle cleaner application loading and processing portion. I relied heavily on ChatGPT for code. It was a fun process! https://youtu.be/TkEW39OloUA ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language model that can assist developers in a variety of tasks, including natural language processing and text generation. One such task that ChatGPT can help with is creating an SRT cleaner program. SRT, or SubRip Subtitle, files are commonly used to add subtitles to video files. However, these files can become cluttered with unnecessary information, such as timing lines or blank spaces. To clean...

Blogger Notable theme pop-up header issue fix (thanks to Gemini Pro)

I've made a few half hearted attempts over the years to to fix Blogger's Notable theme's rendering of the pop-up header that shows up when you scroll down the page a decent amount and then pull back to reveal that secondary header. On Chrome mobile I noticed a gray box that forms next to the magnifying glass icon. I never looked in detail on Chrome desktop, but it had an issue as well which I'll detail below. If you are looking for a solution and don't want all of the extra talk about how I was able to find it, here it is: .centered-top-container .sticky .main_header_elements { overflow : hidden !important ; } I decided to try using Gemini Pro 2.5 to see if it was capable of finding the issue and giving me a fix. Turns out that it was able, but it took a bit of collaboration back and forth to find the actual problem. Here is a modified article I asked it to give me based on our debugging chat (it was very colorful in the article which I scaled back a lot, ...

Theme error in 2010s Android App after AppCompat Migration

I plan on releasing a lot of my old work as GPL open source, but most of it has aged to the point that it no longer functions, or if it does work it’s running in compatibility mode. Basically it’s no longer best practices. Not a good way to start off any new public GPL projects, in my opinion. The current project I’m working on is an Android app that calculates star trails meant to help photographers get or avoid that in their night time photos. For now I’m going to skip some of the import process because I didn’t document it exactly. It’s been mostly trial and error as I poke around Android Studio post import. The Android Studio import process… Removing Admob Google Play code before the project would run at all. After removing dependencies, it kind of worked, but when running it in the emulator it shows a pop-up message saying that the app was developed for an old version of Android. Going through the process of updating code to match current best practices… I had the IDE convert the ...