Livin' the life...

While perusing the ASP .NET site a day or two ago, I came across the "CSS properties window" addin (to VS 2005), in the Sandbox projects section. After reading the description I thought it looked fairly OK so I downloaded it and after giving it a whirl, I'd give it a (y)!

Essentially it's just a addin that enables you to edit CSS in-line styles and style sheets much more easily than in native VS 2005. Two of the features I particularly like are:

1. It allows you to edit styles of multiple elements
2. It gives a nifty window to work with that can be manipulated just like the Solution Explorer, Server Explorer or Properties windows.

The only thing I don't like about it, .. which is something I don't like about VS 2005 in general, is that I think MS should use Hex for colours instead of using colour names, (as you can see an example in the pic above/to the right).

To view more about CSS properties window and grab the download file, check out the official site.

One gotcha though is that: "The CSS Properties Window doesn't work with Visual Web Developer (I believe this is the free version). You may use it with Visual Studio 2005 Standard edition and above."

The road to success is not straight. There is a curve called Failure, a loop called Confusion, speed bumps called Friends, red lights called Enemies, caution lights called Family. You will have flats called Jobs. But, if you have a spare called Determination, an engine called Perseverance, insurance called Faith, a driver called Jesus, you will make it to a place called Success.

Thanks for the mail J!

Here are a couple movies I would like to watch sometime soon..

Yea.. I know, I heard about Eragon being a waste... and yes, I can't believe I haven't watched Night at the Museum yet either! Soon though.. soon! I wonder if DVD rentals are still around that rip off price of $5...

So I went from "waP Plans" to "waP on the waY", and now, I'm posting "waP uP and running"!

I'm stating all of this to say that I've finished the wap site and it's available to all (but only from your mobiles). If you've got the net set up on your mobile, type in http://wap.jasonnurse.com .

Mainly, this site is to act as a "central" news point to supply information "on the go". It contains news from Barbados and the World, but not only that - i.e. by location - it has news by genres from Christian to Humour, Science to Technology. All at your fingertips! I've also included 2 other small features which I found "neat" and useful, however I'll leave them for you to find out. . By the way, you can see a pic I took of the site on my mobile on the left.

To ramble a bit on the development of mobile sites in .NET, I must say that it is really quite simple and fairly easy to learn, given the right resources (sites, msdn library, software mostly).

Sadly however, there are some drawbacks I must note.. First, I don't think any improvements were made on the development tools/controls/documentation in moving from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0. So really I can't help but think that I'm working with "ancient" technology.

Secondly, the asp net forum.. to help me through my work on the site, I posted a couple what I consider, "n00b questions"... to this date, I'm still waiting for a reply. Doesn't seem like that "Mobile and Handheld Devices" forum gets much attention at all.

Finally, somehow.. .NET does not recognise my mobile as a mobile device.. This therefore rules out the use of "nice" properties such as IsMobileDevice (for redirects).

Anyway enough of that.. hmm, I think that overall this is my third "Personal Project" thus far... the other two being the Photo site and the Mashup. Three personal projects in a couple months? Hmm.. I can't say that's a bad average.. I wonder what else I'll be able to get myself into now! Well.. besides the updates of the other 3 projects.. *eek*!

I assume that by now most of you have caught up on Chad Vader... but if you haven't and you've lost touch, I advice you to check out their latest release (part 7) below. Frankly thus far, I've liked the story vibe, it's pleasant, funny and nothing lewd (YET THEY ARE DOING WELL! Power to ya!). I can't wait until the other release(s).

Chad Vader: "you will be... you .. will be..!" Lol!

I DID IT!! ShutDownDay was somewhat of a smooth run for me.. I can comfortably say that I did not use my pc on Saturday. There was no online chatting, no checking email, no blogging, no developing, pretty good eh? I think so.. I'm sure some people that know me will be quite impressed as I'm always at the pc normally..

Anyway, moving on.. Instead of the pc, I spent Saturday sleeping, watching tv, attending a meeting and also hanging out with some pretty jovial folk. All in all, it was a nice day, got home after midnight too! . Sad to say though, I did browse the net from my mobile a bit, just read a bit of news.. So I can't say that my hands are totally clean. !

I think that's it for now... see you next year ShutDownDay - 24 March!

Think you can go without your pc for one entire day? This is the concept behind the site ShutDownDay.org. The site starts off, "It is obvious that people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?"

Well the day for this "great shutdown" is 24 March.. I'm actually considering doing it! 24 full hours without touching a computer ..hmm.. at least.. it's a Saturday..

What about you? Think you can do it? I encourage you to hit the web site, tons of people have already voted on if they could do it or not.. and people have done a number of videos on youtube.

I'm... thinking HARD on it though, probably go to the beach or drive around or visit friends or family or something.. hmm.. they never said I couldn't browse the net from my cell.. lol

Ok folks, I'm here to deliver on my promise and.. finally, release the first version of the 'My Mashup' Project (you can see a screen shot there on your left). I thought that now would be a good time since ASP AJAX has been 'out' for almost a full two months and thus, any release problems would have already been addressed (in forums, blog posts, etc.).

One 'gotcha' about this release though is that you need a username/password to peruse it. I originally intended it for "public viewing" but have decided for now to limit it to persons I know or who request login details. For those of you who wish to view My Mashup just drop me an email or IM me and I'll be glad to set you up.

Truth be told, I am rather excited about this!! I remember, one of my main goals with this project was to make postbacks (or more simply, page refreshes) a thing of the past and.. I've successfully done that but still have been able to produce what I think is, a very interactive and useful web site/app.

I'd be glad to hear what ALL you people think especially the techies amongst you. Two things to note though:

1. Before you view the site, check the Release Notes (there's a link at the bottom). 
2. The Project seems to like "a bit" of your bandwidth.. I'm not sure but ADSL is required suggested. For those of you who check the site, please let me know reaction times etc. Thanks.

Issue to lookout for...

This weekend I recognised that a new release of the AJAX Control Toolkit (release 10301) was available so with the idea of "possibly more stable controls", I rushed to get it. As I dropped the DLL in one of the projects, I immediately was hit with the following error:

"Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

The stack trace went something like this..:

[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]
AjaxControlToolkit.ScriptObjectBuilder.RegisterCssReferences(Control control) +316
AjaxControlToolkit.ScriptControlBase.OnPreRender(EventArgs e) +222
System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +77

Fearing that there was something else I needed to implement or add, quickly I checked the SampleWebSite and browsed the AJAX forum for information.. That.. was largely unsuccessful.. so I turned to search engines and within about 10 minutes I located the problem..

It seems that unlike with the 10201 release, the HEAD tag of the website must contain a runat="server".. And once I added that, the site worked just like before! (Or well.. from what I've seen thus far anyway.. )

If you're interested in the post I found online that gave me the solution to this exception refer to the "Bug in the latest build of the Toolkit TabContainer?" thread.

Titled: The Best Video You Ever Made (My Super-cool Talent!)

LOL!! Ezzzzyy Ramal!

Check out this site.

Well Billy had told me about his new single (named Champions) and I even had tuned to 96.9 the morning he was on air at its debut, however only yesterday I got a chance to really listen to it. This was partly due to a friend reminding me and also the 1/2 page write up in the Friday Newspaper! (The Heat.)

Now.. my "review".. hmm.. it's somewhat of a "jiggy" track.. reminds me a bit of "Big Pimping - Jayz".. As usual with Kincaid's music I like MOST of the lyrics except (in this case) the constant mention of Rum and "trail load of girls".. (for some reason I think most people include lyrics about girls just to make the song catchy and relate to the 'playa' in all of us! Not sure if this is the case here..)

However, when I look pass that vibe, it's a true Bajan/West Indian track! I honestly love to hear music that I can relate to lyrically-wise and Kincaid does it every time. Whether it's about the white sand (I remember the BROWN sand I saw in UK on their "beaches".. ew!), the "slamming dom(inoe)s" -always a favourite of us islanders-, the white ladies ... (lol, that part is soo funny), not sure about "everyday being a holiday" though.. !

All in all though, nicely done Kincaid, because it's a jiggy track, you can listen to it a couple times at once.. I think right now, this is the 10th time I've played it for the morning..!

Oh, by the way, want to hear the track? Check out Billy's Official site. The track automatically beginnings to play. Enjoy!

Happy moments, praise God.
Difficult moments, seek God.
Quiet moments, worship God
Painful moments, trust God
Every moment, thank God.

Nice way to start off the weekend, don't you think?

Lately I was having some problems trying to customise a GridView control to use a dropdownlist. After playing around with the TemplateField for a bit and then consulting my pal Ramal, I finally deduced how to include a dropdownlist and two-way bind it nicely. Admittedly however, this took too much time.

I'm now posting to refer you to a site that gives a good example of how to use the TemplateField in the GridView in the event that you are in the painful situation I was in a couple weeks ago.

So, here's the link to the article - Using TemplateFields in the GridView Control (in VB and in C#)

Well there are two ways I know of these (select) parameter values can be set but I've come across a third this morning, so I thought I'd share (all).

1. You can setup a ControlParameter and link it to a control at design time. Like shown below where we have a link to the PlayerID field of the dropdownlist.:

<SelectParameters>
<asp:ControlParameter ControlID="DropDownList1" Name="PlayerID" PropertyName="SelectedValue"
Type="String" />
</SelectParameters>

2. In situations where the value that the DataSource is linked to does not relate to a control on the form but rather to some code e.g. the the current month (accessible programmatically via Now.Year)... You can do two things:

(a) Don't add the select parameter to the asp page but instead create it at runtime probably in the page load event.. below I use the Add method to add the parameter and set its value i.e. Now.Year.ToString.

If Not Page.IsPostBack Then
    ObjectDataSource1.SelectParameters.Add("myparam", TypeCode.String, Now.Year.ToString)
Else
    'Do nothing or you will be adding to the parameter already present
End If

One note about this however is that you'll have check for postbacks (as I've done above).. if there is a postback you'll have to skip re-adding the parameter. Yea... I know this method isn't good at all.. but in some situations where the parameter doesn't need to be frequently updated, it can be an option.

(b) If the parameter value isn't that important and security of it isn't a priority, you can go the lond-winded route.. i.e. Create a "holder control" e.g. a label or textbox on the asp page, then in the Form Load event, set the parameter value to the Label.Text property... THEN, use option (1) and create a ControlParameter and bind that parameter to the created Label so you get something like below:

<SelectParameters>
<asp:ControlParameter ControlID="Label1" Name="myparam" PropertyName="Text"
Type="String" />
</SelectParameters>

This should work .. but also remember to set the Label.Visible property to "false".

3. Now to the one I found this morning on the asp.net 2 site. This one is rather simple and I tried it a second ago and it works well. This scenario is where you need to set a parameter value in code like in (2) above. The approach? Simply... use the DataSource_Selecting event... like below:

Protected Sub ObjectDataSource1_Selecting _
(sender As Object, e As ObjectDataSourceSelectingEventArgs) _
Handles ObjectDataSource1.Selecting
    e.InputParameters("myparam") = Now.Year.ToString
End Sub

And.. that's it! When the DataSource goes to fill itself with data, it comes to this event and picks up the input parameter.

K ta!

ASP.NET 2, Web.config, security, aspnetdb.mdf related..

MembershipPasswordFormat Enumeration describes the encryption format for storing passwords for membership users. By default though, pass is hashed using SHA1. See the documentation for it at the official MS site.

FINALLY! I've gotten around to setting up http://wap.jasonnurse.com - my mobile access site. Don't.. go rushing there now though, I've only parked a temporary page! I hope to get around to this rather soon as I already have a good set of ideas.

By the way... look out for a certain Project to be finished and accessible rather soon!!

OK, I'm not a big fan of Barca or Real.. but I was told this game was GREAT.. So I checked for the highlights on youtube and here is the link for the Barca-Real 3-3 draw that was on Saturday.

Looking at that.. I don't know how we (Liverpool) contained that Messi boy.. wow.. By the way, did I mention he's only 19?

At some point, we all were kids... so some of us would've experienced the following...

Lol. Funny? Yes .. however, somehow I doubt that cameras are allowed at school.. That's probably why one can see some guys on the lookout at the window and door of the classroom.. Then again though.. what's the sense being on lookout if you're going to post the vid (which clearly identifies the participants) on youtube for "the world" (possibly including teachers) to see? Anyway... Funny? Yes!

Thanks for this link Di.

Hmm... this post is just to serve as a little note that "98.1 The One" seems to have given up their original site i.e. http://www.981theone.com/ for a spot that more falls under the CBC web site. So if you're like me and have the site there bookmarked, you'll probably want to replace it with this link.

Enjoy! This is especially for you Bajan folk studying overseas.

As I sit here working on My Mashup, something that I remember learning during my recent studies popped into my head, .. it went something like this.. "when doing websites one must remember that usability is important.. one should not bundle functionality on JavaScript (as it may not be enabled on the browser), and colours and images should not be paramount (as there are some users who may have text only browsers etc etc)".. (this also links in with disability legislation.)

One question... with "bad boy" AJAX on the scene.. what happens with all this usability talk? ...

Looks like everyone better keep JavaScript enabled, usability take backseat (.. at least here). 

Well well well... who would've guessed this.. If you look there to your left, you'll see the draw for the Champions League Finals that took place a little earlier today in Athens (Greece is about 6hrs ahead of Barbados, 2hr ahead of UK).

As I look at the list though, I really am not too too sure of the biggest match-up.. although I bet almost everyone would say it must be the AC-Bayern.. I think ManU will have the edge over Roma and possibly Chelsea over Valencia..

I've got my boys (i.e. Pool) to beat PSV and this is not just because I'm a fan but if one takes a peek at the group stages where Pool played PSV twice, you'll see that we won the game at home 2-0 and got a 0-0 draw in Eindhoven.

One thing though that you should note is that the winners of Game 2 play the winners of Game 4. Therefore provided that Pool and Chelski win their games, they will face up again in the semi-finals! Anyway, I won't go into that too much as I'm sure David Villa will ensure he has something to say about it all.

Before I head off, if you want to check out a replay of the draw, see this site.

Heys! As you would remember, I had some problems with my PC lately so I had to reinstall a lot of my programs. In continuing with those installations, today I headed to the Mozilla site to reinstall Firebug (.. helps a lot in my JS debugging).

As I browsed though the listing of Add-ons searching for Firebug, I stumbled upon what I consider a pretty cool addition to the FF list of beauties i.e. Cooliris Previews.

I could ramble a bit about it here as I do with most programs however I think that I'll let the official site handle that job. I really don't think I'd do it justice.

Anyway, it has my full recommendation! (until I find something amis ..) Well done Cooliris Team!

Wait... as I read a bit more on the Cooliris site, I noticed the following statement, "We are about to release the IE7 version for Previews." (Ref) ! IE users, be happy! (Darn.. this IE thing messes up the topic of this post.. oh well.. ) 

Further to this post, and assuming that you're using special tools like me to have formatting even in Textboxes that hold currency amounts (this is in the Insert and Edit item templates).. one may also have to make changes to FormView1_ItemUpdating and FormView1_ItemInserting events. This will be just like mentioned in the previous post i.e. that you will check for the "$" sign and remove it if it is present to avoid the "Input string was not in a correct format." exception.

PS. Roy Makaay just scored the Fastest Goal In Champions League History against Real. I think they clocked it at 11 seconds. Wow!

Well, we did it! We have knocked out the defending Champions, Barcelona out of the Champions League. BRILLIANT!!! Check the highlights below.. it's short, only 2 mins.

AH.. and for you people who want the extended highlights version, you can check out: First Half and Second Half.

Hmm.. so from yesterday we have Pool, Chelski, Valencia and Roma advancing. It'll be interesting to see if we'll have two more English teams added to the mix today or possibly we'll end up getting some representation in the last 8 from the Dutch (i.e. PSV Eindhoven)?? Other than that possible "upset" by the Dutch, I expect AC, ManU and Real to progress.

Time will tell though, time will tell.

Quick post on an error I was getting for the last hour that has made my night somewhat of a rush! This is related to ASP.NET 2, VS'05, FormView, ObjectDataSource, applying Data formats to fields.

I was trying to delete a record using a FormView and I kept getting the following error, "Input string was not in a correct format."

As I reviewed the stack trace I saw the following:

System.Number.StringToNumber(String str, NumberStyles options, NumberBuffer& number, NumberFormatInfo info, Boolean parseDecimal) +2752771
System.Number.ParseDecimal(String value, NumberStyles options, NumberFormatInfo numfmt) +119
System.Decimal.Parse(String s, NumberStyles style, IFormatProvider provider) +37
System.Convert.ToDecimal(String value, IFormatProvider provider) +50

So naturally, I figured it must be a conversion problem (from String to Number). Possibly a string that I have in the form being converted to a number (int or decimal) before being passed to the database. Since I only had one int/decimal I was dealing with in this form, it was easy to find.. - it was a currency field.

Now I had formatted this currency field using "<%# Bind("price", "{0:C}") %>", or more specifically {0:C} for currency (it renders the amount with a "$" sign prefixed). As I investigated some more, I recognised that the problem here was that the entire "$<number>" was being passed to the procedure.. therefore when the attempt was made to convert it to a number to send it to the DB, it failed as "$" can't be converted.

To avoid this problem, you can do two things, forget about the {0:C} formatting... which is really not an option (as it is always nice to show the currency sign), Or in the FormView1_ItemDeleting event, simply remove the "$" from the parameter. (Remember this event is called before the parameters are passed.)

I honestly believe there should be some other way to do this though, so I'll look into it a bit. This thing really should not be an issue.

It was a tough decision between the vid below and this one.. but I think the following edged it out by a smidgin..

(Btw, the description for the vid above is "Sesame Street parody of V for Vendetta" )

When I was a kid, one of my favourite cartoons was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I believe I watched all the movies and I also had a small collection of books on the mutant heros.. I'm sure at some time they won your hearts over too..

Well, guess what?! THey're back! And back big with a flick hitting the big screens on 23rd of this month! I urge you to check out the Official TMNT Warner Brothers site, view the trailer!

One thing about this site though, it is a perfect example of how powerful a tool Flash is on the web.. To see this site and how transitions are made, the sound effects, the entire design.. it's truly a work of art! Check it out for real peoples, you won't be disappointed!

These days.. everyone is on some network, myspace, hi5, wayn, facebook, msn live spaces wow.. It's amazing.. well then again, that's not right, everyone, except me..

Just at the beginning of this week one of my friends directed me to hi5 and told me just to look around a bit.. so under her advice, I did.. My response? I was shocked at the amount of Bajan groups set up!

There were groups for UWI students, "bajan massive", "bajan msn messenger ppl" etc etc. I think the search returned 208 hits when I searched for "Barbados groups". That's ... crazy...! There're even groups titled Rihanna and... I've found one called The Lodge School of Barbados (BIG UPS to the Lodge peeps!! ).

As I did some browsing, I saw a couple people I knew, mostly old friends or class mates.. either from The Lodge School or UWI.

Anyway, it's good they're on.. and I guess it helps people to keep in contact.. However, if it's so good, why am I not on it? Don't I want to keep in contact with old peeps or link with new people?.. I do. but I.. just haven't found a network I like or.. am really drawn to!.. (ChristianVibes came close though.)

As I browse hi5, every now and then I see some leud pictures.. and I'm really shocked as to what people put up on their sites! On one girl's site, she's on a bed laying down with a tiny shorts a sports bra as a top. Now I mean.. really? Generally, girls on it dress OK (from the little I've seen) but a good set just dress skimpy, I wonder what's their answer to the "Looking to" profile question. *hint *hint.

One other thing that disappoints me about these sites is the POOr POOr graphic design of them. I mean.. gez, it's down right ugly.. And OK, I know that everyone doesn't have an eye for design but it's not only me that thinks this way.. many other sites (1, 2) express this feeling about myspace and the like.

Anyway, enough ranting.. I'll join something sooner or later, but for now, I'm happy with the forums I'm registered with and my blog. Whatever I join though, it will be "top-of-the-line", . Stay tuned!

It's been an issue with me for a wHILE - when I'm looking to do formatting of dates in vb.NET, I always get lost and waste time! Well I've found a site that's GREAT for information.

The site from Macon State College - here it is.

To be honest, that site has functionality in its raw form as relies on the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace (DLL), a now outdated namespace. So, even though I support that site I think you should more use the following formats when dealing with dates...

Assume you wanted to format #12/30/07# from that dirty US date format... (Also assume "aDate = #12/30/2007#"), you'd do the following:

aDate.ToString("dd-MMM-yyyy") 'which would give 30-Dec-2007 as a nice string.

And what if you wanted to format times?

Now.ToString("dd-MMM-yyyy hh:mms tt") 'gives 02-Mar-2007 06:45:15 PM

There you'd recognise that the "tt" gives AM or PM, which ever is relevant. Rather cool instead of using any 24 hour format!

Anyway, enough on that for now but definitely check that site, I'm using this blog post as a Bookmark to it also!

It's Friday!!! and tons of things are flying through my head I'd like to ramble a bit on.

Firstly, youtube. When I joined up on youtube, my idea was to use it to hear music and view some music videos.. especially putting on a playlist and chilling out while doing work or whatever. Of course youtube can be used for tons of other things.. like learning to break into houses, pcs, watching football highlights etc. However, my main thing was music.

Now a couple days ago, I saw a post on tech-barbados titled "YouTube Asked to Remove 100,000 Music Video Clips".. something about some company called Viacom and youtube.. I read it a bit but, brushed it off.. until earlier today when I go to my tube to listen my playlist and I keep getting:

"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Viacom International Inc."

!! Even when I go to listen to this bIG tune -> "Rihanna - Unfaithful".! Ah well. I wonder how youtube is taking this though, it can't only be me that goes there for the oldest & latest music! There must be some traffic drop-off..

I just had an issue with IIS V5.1.. I was trying to access an ASP.NET 2 site via localhost and I got the following error: Failed to access IIS metabase.

To be honest, I had a long day so I'm glad that Dad helped me out with this one.. He came over and found a site which explains this problem and also gave a simple way to deal with it. In "two twos" (as us Bajan's would say - this means.. "in a quick manner"), the fix worked and the site was up and running!

If you ever have this error, I recommend this guy's blog post on it.

In essence though, it seems to be an issue with IIS and ASP 1.1 and 2.0.