All things .NET and beyond favicon.ico 2011-02-03T11:14:53.4896008+00:00 Ian Warwick Ian (Fluxtah) Warwick's blog http://www.fluxtah.com/ DasBlog Idea Lightbulb App for Android http://www.fluxtah.com/PermaLink,guid,e27ec3a5-d026-4e6e-a7c2-ece09452399e.aspx 2011-02-03T11:13:23.39+00:00 2011-02-03T11:14:53.4896008+00:00 Fluxtah
I just released my Idea Lightbulb App for Android, the android market information page is here
https://market.android.com/search?q=idea+lightbulb

Its a silly app you can stick above your head and indicate that you have an idea, you can set a sound and time delay, or make it light up when you shake it :)
 Android Balance App http://www.fluxtah.com/PermaLink,guid,b6a8f5c4-3aff-47c2-9323-224c666e783c.aspx 2010-10-27T21:00:03.444447+01:00 2010-10-27T21:00:03.444447+01:00 Fluxtah
Hi,

I do not have a website yet for Balance but here is some info if you happen to get here from the Balance market page.

How secure is balance?
  • Your details are stored with 256-bit enterprise level encryption
  • You can opt to include only some of your details by checking the 'prompt me' option when setting up an account, this means balance will prompt you for these details each time you check your balance
  • With some services, you have no choice but to provide some details on prompt, ie:- Barclays PIN Sentry
  • If you provide an unlock code then an encryption key will be derived from this, making your details even more secure
  • Your details are never sent to a third-party, connections are made directly to your online banking website, over the same security that they use (SSL)
Will balance support more features in the future such as statements?
I wrote balance because I was bad with my finances, I needed to make sure that I had enough money to survive from one month to the next and I had a bad habit of buying stuff without checking my balance, so primarily this was the main goal of balance, to simply display my balance! :)

If demand arises and my app does not get pulled off the market, I might add this feature.

If you have any suggestions or questions please email me and fluxtah at hotmail dot com and I will update this list.

Cheers!

Ian

 Get selected menu item name in Joomla http://www.fluxtah.com/PermaLink,guid,a59729ca-4433-4e52-bb27-a0db92281c53.aspx 2010-03-07T19:18:27.743554+00:00 2010-03-07T19:18:27.743554+00:00 Fluxtah 
          $itemid = JRequest::getVar(
'Itemid' ); $application = JFactory::getApplication();
$menu = $application->getMenu();
$item = $menu->getItem(
$itemid ); return $item->name;
Fibonacci in C# http://www.fluxtah.com/PermaLink,guid,73917a6b-9f99-4ca2-94fb-d253359594b4.aspx 2010-03-01T12:26:57.4207015+00:00 2010-03-01T12:26:57.4207015+00:00 Fluxtah

First 16 numbers of the fibonacci series 

          
            void Main(){ for(long i=0,
n=0, a = 1,
b = 0;
i < 16; i++, Console.WriteLine(n), b = a,
a = n,
n = a + b);
}
SharePoint User Controls and Web Parts http://www.fluxtah.com/PermaLink,guid,d0dc280e-2600-4617-b32a-967223e4ade3.aspx 2009-12-17T11:34:00.2491613+00:00 2009-12-17T11:34:00.2491613+00:00 Fluxtah
Its common practice to use a user control in a web part via LoadControl(...). By doing this you get the ASP.NET designer experience when working with .ascx files.

After seeing some implementations of encapsulating a user control in a web part, I created a version that uses a generic base class that has the benefits of giving strongly typed access to the user control, the class is as follows.
publicabstractclass UserControlWebPart<T>
: WebPart where T : UserControl { ///
<summary>///
The control in the ASCX file///
</summary>protected T
UserControl { get; set; } ///
<summary>///
Path to the ASCX file///
</summary>protectedabstractstring UserControlPath
{ get; } protectedoverridevoid CreateChildControls()
{ base.CreateChildControls(); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.UserControlPath))
{ this.UserControl = (T)this.Page.LoadControl(this.UserControlPath); this.UserControl.ID ="uc"; this.Controls.Add(this.UserControl);
} } protectedoverridevoid OnLoad(EventArgs
e) { base.OnLoad(e);
EnsureChildControls(); } protectedoverridevoid Render(HtmlTextWriter
writer) { if (this.UserControl
!=null)
{ this.UserControl.RenderControl(writer);
} else {
writer.Write("UserControlPath
is an invalid path, it must point to a valid .ascx file"); } }
To use this class you can just subclass it and implement the abstract property to define the path to the ascx file as follows.

publicclass MyWebPartUserControl
: UserControl { } publicclass MyWebPart
: UserControlWebPart<MyWebPartUserControl> {     protectedoverridestring UserControlPath
    {         get { return"~/_controltemplates/my.user.controls/mywebpartusercontrol.ascx";
}     } }
The MyWebPartUserControl is the code-behind for the ascx file specified for the abstract UserControlPath property, this file requires a fully qualified assembly path to work correctly within sharepoint as follows.
<%@
Assembly Name="My.Assembly,
Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1234abcd1234abcd" %> <%@
Control Language="C#" Inherits="My.Assembly.MyWebPartUserControl" %>

 Sharepoint missing fields in NewForm for custom list definition and content type http://www.fluxtah.com/PermaLink,guid,6f3b62ba-9f1c-4ebc-a577-4ec46b9f9b79.aspx 2009-12-16T08:38:54.471217+00:00 2009-12-16T08:38:54.471217+00:00 Fluxtah

I created a custom content type and list definition, after upgrading my sharepoint solution I could see the list and content types under the new menu but when creating a new item, the fields were missing from NewForm.aspx

I discovered that it was due to the ContentType definition not having the FieldRefs tag, my content type was defined like this:-

  <ContentType ID="0x01001376F571B0DB9D4E9384D2927DC110CF02" Name="News Article" Group="Vodafone LCD Content Types" Version="0">
  </ContentType>

When it should have been like this:-

  <ContentType ID="0x01001376F571B0DB9D4E9384D2927DC110CF02" Name="News Article" Group="Vodafone LCD Content Types" Version="0">
    <FieldRefs>
    </FieldRefs>
  </ContentType>

Testing for a whole number in C# http://www.fluxtah.com/PermaLink,guid,80e5f632-3cf7-435a-b40a-4fe99849a1a4.aspx 2009-11-25T10:39:40.507+00:00 2009-12-04T08:14:11.3284385+00:00 Fluxtah

I was thinking about this, for some reason, and thought it would be good to remind myself of those little useful bits of code that you never really use much then sometimes wonder how to do them.

So my first tidbit, is to test if a number is a whole number, here is my solution, any better solution than this, answers on a postcard please. 

          
            void Main()
{ decimal decimalNumber = 4.9M; decimal wholeNumber = 5;
Console.WriteLine(Math.Floor(decimalNumber) == decimalNumber); //
Returns false; Console.WriteLine(Math.Floor(wholeNumber) == wholeNumber); //
Returns true; }

 

C# XML serialization and inheritance http://www.fluxtah.com/PermaLink,guid,14c30b90-767b-4c0a-8c14-5354601d5437.aspx 2009-11-13T07:56:37.1916696+00:00 2009-11-13T07:56:37.1916696+00:00 Fluxtah

I wrote a small console application to test if this was possible and it turns out all you need is an XmlInclude attribute on the base type of the sub-types you are serializing.

In the following example Ninja and Customer inherit from Person, Person is decorated with the XmlInclude attribute for both Ninja and Customer. 

          
            class Program
{ staticvoid Main(string[]
args) { XmlSerializer serializer =new XmlSerializer(typeof(Stuff));
Stuff stuff =new Stuff()
{ People =new List<Person>()
{ new Person()
{ Name ="<b>Bob</b>",
Type="Person" }, new Ninja()
{ Name ="Hiro",
Type="Ninja",
Weapon ="Shuriken" }, new Customer()
{ Name ="Fred",
Type ="Customer",
CustomerId ="1234"}
} }; serializer.Serialize(Console.Out, stuff); } } publicclass Stuff
{ public List<Person>
People { get; set; } }  [XmlInclude(typeof(Ninja)),
XmlInclude(typeof(Customer))]publicclass Person
{ publicstring Type
{ get; set; } publicstring Name
{ get; set; } } publicclass Ninja
: Person { publicstring Weapon
{ get; set; } } publicclass Customer
: Person { publicstring CustomerId
{ get; set; } }
Country table data sql script http://www.fluxtah.com/PermaLink,guid,5f1a8d18-251a-49d2-9619-fb34b1ab8892.aspx 2009-11-11T13:07:31.398+00:00 2009-11-13T08:00:46.540572+00:00 Fluxtah

It comes to that point in time when you need a country table in your database and you do not have a list to import at hand, after scouring the web a bit, everything seemed to be out of date, so I wrote a little script to scrape the details from a wikipedia page for the ISO 3166-1 standard for country codes.

I wrote and ran the following quick & dirty JQuery script on that page. 

          
            if($('#output_textarea').length ==
0){ $(document.body).append($('<textarea rows="128" id="output_textarea"></textarea>'));
} document.output_textarea_val ="";
$('#sortable_table_id_0 tr').each(function(idx){ if(idx
> 0){ document.output_textarea_val += "INSERT
INTO country (name, code_alpha_2, code_alpha_3, code_numeric) VALUES("; var cells = $('td', this),
cellLen = cells.length;
cells.each(function(cellIdx){ if(cellIdx
< 4){ document.output_textarea_val += "\""+ $(this).text().trim() +"\""; if(cellIdx
< cellLen - 2){
document.output_textarea_val += ",
"; } } }); document.output_textarea_val += ');\n'; } }); $('#output_textarea').val(document.output_textarea_val);

This script creates insert statements for mySQL and inserts the results into a text box at the foot of the page, in order for it to work you need to inject jQuery into the document, you can do this with the jQueryify Bookmarklet.

I have tested this script and it qualifies for the "works on my machine" certification programme.

The script produces the following output.