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Have you seen “Google search” crashing!!!

Even the master fails sometime – the best example is the error I got from the google search.

image

update: When I tried to contact them via error@google.com I got a “Mail delivery failed” error :)

Posted in General, Google.

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User experience makes applications stand-out

stand-out
What makes your application different from others? I strongly feel the user experience that you provides plays an important role to be successful. Some of us might have felt that(at least myself), you woke up one day with a brand new idea but later you realize that somebody had implemented that an year back. Which is a frustrated feeling, I have been to that situation so many times. So even if that idea exists already, how to make that idea a successful one.

Say if you are going to enter in to a world where there are n number of similar applications, how will you attract the users? A great example may be GMail, IMHO they entered to the party when Yahoo and Microsoft where ruling email market. But now GMail is much popular than other email service providers. One reason I could think of for this success is the experience that you get as a user.

Not sure whether anybody has noted this or not but today when was about to send an email to my friend, I got a message box saying “Did you mean to attach files?

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Yes, GMail reminded me to attach the file. I was surprised to see this, GMail has intelligently scanned what I have typed in the email message and gave me suggestion before sending…. WOW!!!!!. I checked whether Yahoo mail has got this feature, not yet. That makes GMail stand-out from others.

Posted in General, Google, Personal.

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Asp.Net MVC – Fluent Html helper for FlexiGrid

There are so many free JQuery Grid plugins out there, in that I liked FlexiGrid just because of it’s look and style. In order to use it in your MVC application you may have to put the Javascript code into your view, which requires the property names of your model in order to generates the Grid columns as well the search options etc… as everybody knows when you deal with hard coded string as the property names in any code, it is error prone.

In order to avoid this problem I thought of creating a html extension which is tightly coupled with your data that is going to bound to the Grid. Which helps the developer from writing any javascript codes(I know those who hates(not me! :) ) writing Javascript code like this extension).

This project has been uploaded to – http://code.google.com/p/mvc-fluent-jquery-plugin-controls/. You could find more details from there.

Posted in JQuery, MVC.


JQueryUI Datepicker in ASP.Net MVC

Technocrati code : M2U2PWSNTKW3

Datepicker is nice and cool plugin for displaying the calendar with ease. It is very easy to use JQuery plugin, it comes as part of JQueryUI library, so if you want to use this – first download JQueryUI from http://jqueryui.com/download and also download JQuery(http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery) if you haven’t done yet.

image 

For e.g. if you have a form like one below

<% using(Html.BeginForm()){%>
  <fieldset>
    <legend>Event Information</legend>
     <p>
        <label for="EventName">Event Name:</label>
        <%= Html.TextBox("EventName")%>
            </p>
            <p>
            <label for="StartDate">Start Date:</label>
            <%= Html.TextBox("StartDate")%>
            </p>
            <p>
            <label for="EndDate">End Date:</label>
            <%= Html.TextBox("EndDate")%>
            </p>
            <p>
                <input type="submit" value="Save" />
            </p>
  </fieldset>
<% }%>

and you want to attach datepicker to “StartDate” and “EndDate” input fields,

Continued…

Posted in .NET, CodeProject, JQuery, JavaScript, MVC.

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Logging execution time using AOP

Download the source code for this tutorial from  – http://www.rajeeshcv.com/download/ProfilingSample.zip

What happens if your client complains that your application is running very slow!!! or in your load/stress testing you found that some functionalities are very slow in executing than expected. This is the time where you go for profiling the execution, to analyse the root cause of these issues.

So how we could develop a profiler, where we don’t have to wrap our normal code in a profiling code.

Before going to create the profiler, we have to decide where to put the profiled information. In this tutorial, I am making use of Log4Net as underlying layer to store this information. If you have not used Log4Net before, I suggest you to read http://www.beefycode.com/post/Log4Net-Tutorial-pt-1-Getting-Started.aspx as a starting point.

With the help of AOP (Aspect-Oriented Programming) we could do the profiling task without interrupting the actual code.

AOP is a programming paradigm in which secondary or supporting functions are isolated from the main program’s business logic

Source : Wikipedia

So in order bring the AOP functionality into this application, I am going to use a third party library PostSharp  which I believe this is one of the best that is available in the market. Please download it from http://www.sharpcrafters.com/postsharp/download.

So, now we have got the basic things to start with and now let’s start coding….

Start a new solution in visual studio and add a new console application project to it. Then add the below references to the newly created project

  1. Add reference to the Log4Net.dll
  2. Add reference to PostSharp.Laos.dll and PostSharp.Public.dll (Please read http://www.sharpcrafters.com/postsharp/documentation/getting-started to get the basic installation procedure)

Next, create a new attribute class called “ProfileMethodAttribute” – this class is responsible for doing the profiling work. Make sure that you have decorated this class with “Serializable” attribute

Continued…

Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, CodeProject, MVC.

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