Check how your web site looks in different browsers

If you have ever developed web sites you know how difficult to get them to look correctly on different web browsers. Given the no of web browsers and operating systems available it is very difficult to test on all sites. Now http://browsershots.org/ provides a free service where you can enter the URL of the web site and it will take the screen shots of how the web site looks in each browser. The downside is you wont be able to check the dynamic behavior of the site (JavaScript etc..).

Great site to find singhala song chords

If you are into playing the guitar you will find the following site very usefull http://chords.orgfree.com. According to site statistics it has 257 songs now and its growing. If you have chords for songs please share them.

Threads and Cultures

When you create a new thread  you would expect it to inherit the culture information from the original thread since this is the sensible behaviour because you want that thread to access the correct resources and use culture specific formatting etc... But I discoverd in dotnet this is not the case. This also applies to the BackgroundWorker component. So every time you create a thread you have to copy the culture info from the original thread. Strange ......

SQL Server Sri Lanka User Group - July Meeting

We had the SS SLUG july meeting on the 18th. I did a session on SSIS Custom components and dinesh priyankara conducted a session on transaction management. The presentations and samples can be downloaded from here.

MissingManifestResourceException

I came through this strange exception today while refactoring a windows forms application in VS 2005. This was a VB.NET application.  I had to move a usercontrol between projects and doing so I changed the namespace. Suddenly I was getting a MissingManifestResourceException when the control is loaded. The strange thing is there were some other user controls in the same namespace and they worked fine.

Then I inspected the generated assemblies using reflector and discovered that the failing controls resource didn't have any namespace.

After a bit of googling I found this blog entry http://jameswho.blogspot.com/2004/06/missingmanifestresourceexception.html#links this entry suggested changing the default namespace. But I always keep it blank and specify the namespace in each file. Scrolling through the comments there were some suggestions to remove any class or enum declarations that came before the control class. This was exactly the problem I had, there were a couple of enum declarations and a delegate before the control class; after moving them to the bottom of the file it worked fine.

I think this is a bug in visual studio that you have to watch out. It is always a good practice to have only one type in a given source file.

ASP.NET 2.0 CSS Friendly Control Adapters

They have released the CSS Friendly control adapters 1.0. If you have ever looked at the code generated by ASP.NET 2.0 controls like the menu and were shocked by the huge tables and inline CSS they generate then these control adapters are for you. They replace the table based layout of the controls with with CSS based implementations using lists/div's/span's and styles. This decreases the amount of markup generated and reduces the page size. Using style sheets also lets you easily change the layout of the controls.

ASP.NET control adapters let you customize the rendering of server controls without writing a new control from scratch of deriving from existing controls. Adapters can be applied based on the user agent and are configured using a browsers configuration  file in the App_Browsers special folder. This lets you integrate the CSS friendly adapters into existing web sites with minor or no modification to the existing pages.

The source code can be downloaded from http://www.asp.net/cssadapters

Logic and Reason: All I've Got Against Moderate Religion

Interesting read...

Logic and Reason: All I've Got Against Moderate Religion