TheWayOfCoding.com

There are quite a few issues in getting classic asp scripts working on vista. I want to quickly go over what I did, so that when I need this information available in the future I have an easy place to find it. So to save time I am just trying to get this written as fast as possible and continue on with my work. Sorry for any typos. Install IIS through control panel -> programs and features -> (left panel) “turn windows features on or off” Once the feature listing window populates: expand the “internet information services” item check web management tools and world wide web services …really I went through the options and selected the majority of them. Key ASP related items to make sure you have selected: “world wide web services” -> “application development features” -> ASP I needed windows authentication, so I needed: “world wide web services” -> “sercurity” -> “windows authentication” After tha...

I have a dual screen setup with two 20″ Dell LCD screens. I recently changed my primary screen to be vertically orientated. The benefit here is that I can see a more “global” view of the source file I am currently editing. The irritating thing I stumbled upon was tabulation in Visual Studio. I changed my tabs to be 2 spaces instead of two (to make up for my primary screen having less horizontal space). The issue that I had was all old source files were stuck with 4 space tabbing. Here is what I did to fix the issue: Tools>>options (make sure “Show all settings” is checked) Navigate to Text Editor>>All Languages>>Tabs In the Tab box, change the tab size to 2 and indent size to 2 select “ Keep tabs ” (this tells visual studio to not change tabs to spaces) Okay, so now the editor now uses two tabs and I can manually fix code I made before using shift-tab . This doesn’t solve my issue of having old source files stuck with 4 spaces as one tab. What I just figured out ...

I recently finished working on a macro program where the software’s interface is COM.  Everything worked great until I wanted to transfer the macro over to a test client computer.  The program I was writing the macro for requires some registry entries, so I assumed that was all I needed to do.  After about 2 hours of having issues I figured out how to get the macro working on computers other than the one I developed the macro on. What happens automatically when developing COM innerop projects in Visual Studio is that the IDE automatically registers the DLL file behind the scenes, so when the program that is going to use the macro starts up, it can find the DLL file (assuming the “register for COM Interop” is checked in project properties). When transferring over the macro DLL(s), the client computer does not have the correct registry entries, so when the program attempts to load the macro, it will fail because it can’t find the macro DLL(s). Things I learned: regsrv does ...

I’ve been working on a program that needs to parse a html file for form data.  So when I was deciding what method to use, a few popped right into my mind. The first being a character by character search through the string.  Parsing through the data and flagging sections that fit the signature of what was being searched for. The second would be automating that by using the built-in string functions to split up the string and drill down until the needed data was extracted. The third, and one I chose to use, was with regular expressions.  This in my mind is the most “poetic” method of the three, which would allow me to make the a robust and reliable function. While I’ve used regular expressions a lot throughout the years. I never seem to remember enough to construct a decent statement. I had recently bought a pocket reference (link below), so I used that to get a statement constructed. It had a total of about 6 pages for C#, but I pretty much got what I needed from it. An...

Edit: I’m having some issues with a second tutorial, so at this point I don’t think this process below is correct.  2nd Edit:  This code should work fine, the issue was when I started using COM objects from Esprit.  There are a few gotchas that need to be taken care of.  I think the primary reason I had issues was due to writing the macro in C# instead of VB (the language the Esprit tutorials have).  I may be writing about it in the future.  If you are interested right now, send a message, or post in the forums. This post will be a little more special interest them most of my posts. I recently started learning how to create macros for a program called Esprit (D.P. Technology). It’s a “CAD/CAM” program. They still use COM/VBA as their plug-in interface, so to write a plug-in in .NET there are a few things that need to be taken care of. Their tutorial that comes with the program goes over setting everything up, but It misses a few steps. Well more likely...

I’ve been working with server side scripts that rely on xml files to define the structure of the site.  It seems quite fast compared to using a database and also makes direct changes to the structure easy.  My post here is about how to use the DOM in VBSCRIPT/ASP.  Some aspects of how the DOM works are a bit “wiggy” in my opinion, but I’ve figured out a lot of it so far. Here is a quick example on how to parse a file (VBSCRIPT/ASP): function parseXmlFile(filename, byRef emptyVarToFillWithXmlObj)     dim completeFilePath, functionSuccess, filePointer          completeFilePath = getFullPath() & filename          ' Convert the xml file into an xmldoc object     ' First check to see that the file exists     set filePointer = server.createObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")     if filePointer.fileExists(completeFilePath) then         ' Initialize the xml object ...

Here is a screen shot of the old site.  It served me well for the two years or so that I had it running on blogger.com.  The great thing about blogging is that I can save bits of important information in one place that I can later come back and utilize. The secondary benefit is that other people can also gain something from my writings as well. Now that I’ve taken the plunge to into the world of incorporation, I have had a strong desire to improve my web presence.  My first project being this website revamp. Here is a list of the steps necessary to get from blogger to a custom wordpress blog: – Install wordpress on my computer’s local server ( WAMP ).  This is quite easy if you have messed around with developing websites before.  The major steps to that are 1. create a database (wamp has phpMyAdmin preinstalled, so doing SQL stuff is easy) 2. create a new SQL user that has permissions on the new database.  Once the database is setup, extract the wordpress ...

I was at a monthly .NET usergroup meeting yesterday. Larry Clarkin ( http://larryclarkin.com/ ) was there, and he was kind enough to give out quite a few copies of Visual Studio 2008. I was one of the ones who needed a copy. Never had the justification to buy it personally. Actually I am using 2005 at work too, but anyways… He talked about Silverlight 2. It has quite a few unique features that make it interesting enough to start “playing” around with. The most interesting aspect to me is the subset of the .NET framework embedded into the Silverlight runtime, which in turn means you can write Silverlight programs in C#/VB.NET (as well as a few other languages). Another plus is that it has built-in form controls. Put those two together and it could be interesting to make some rich web applications with not much difficulty. All this time I though it was just a Flash clone. Check out silverlight.net for more of the specifics.

I mentioned about wanting to start a business in my previous post. Well it looks like I might have my chance. While it isn’t exactly what I was thinking of in my previous post, I foresee many opportunities to flex my programming muscle in this endeavor. Plus, I will be starting up with a good friend, so there is a good chance our motivation will actually produce some results. A piece of software I am starting to research/design/create will be an internal application we will use to automatically extract some government provided public data. The current issue is time. With the amount of data and the requirement of using their web interface, it is not worth the time needed to do it by hand. The only other option would be to buy the data from the government, but that’s just an unnecessary cost seeing as there is a free option available. So I will be writing a program in C# to automatically access a few websites and download the needed data in chunks. I have never delt with .NET’s we...

A common practice with search forms is to have them submit when the enter key is pressed, instead of requiring the user to use their mouse to press the submit button (or using tab key to tab to the submit button). Update: I attempted to find a solution for working in Firefox, but the code I added has not been tested personally. Here is a simple way to do that in JavaScript: First, define a input box: <input name="txtsearchentries" id="txtsearchentries" type="text" size="13" value="" /> Second, create a function to be placed in the head area of the webpage: // see if the user pressed the enter key  // while using a specific control  function submitSearchOnEnter(variable) {     if (window.event) {         // keyCode = window.event.keyCode;         // this doesn't seem to work in Firefox,          // so try the code below...          keyCode = event.keyCode ? event.keyCode :...