Tod1d's Thought Process

I have upgraded my site from Blogger to Community Server 2.1.

Here is the new blog URL:

http://tod1d.net/blogs/tech

I am a "My Favorite Tools" junky. I love reading about tools that other developers use to make their lives easier. These kinds of lists usually provide some great insights.

Christopher Bennage put his own list together and posted it on devlicio.us.

I am debating on upgrading the production version of a site from CS 2.0 to 2.1. It would be helpful to know which bugs in 2.0 were fixed in 2.1, but I have been unable to find a bug fix list. Someone in the Community Server forums pointed me in the right direction.

Known Issues and Work-arounds in Community Server 2.0

According to the page, "All of the issues below will be fixed in Community Server 2.1 unless otherwise indicated."

I wish I had known about this page sooner, it would have saved some headaches. Live, learn, then get Luvs.

Steve Yegge has posted an interesting article on his take on the good and the bad of the "Agile" methodology. The article also offers a glimpse on how Google motivates their programmers to get projects done.

Compare Google's methods of motivation to the methods used by the company I work for. Google provides free meals. My company is bringing in a couple of massage therapists to provide 10 minute sessions to each employee on a Friday afternoon. Me? I would rather have the food.

A project that I am working on required the dynamic creation of a fax document, populated with data from a database and then sent to a fax server at runtime. I tried two methods for creating the fax document.

The first method was dynamically creating a Word document using Gios WORD .NET Library, which worked as long as you had MS Word installed on the machine that executed my code. Very annoying.

Creating a PDF file on the fly using iTextSharp was the second method I tried and settled on. Here is a description of iTextSharp as given on their website:

iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library written
entirely in C# for the .NET platform. iText# is a library that allows you to
generate PDF files on the fly. It is implemented as an assembly.

iTextSharp works great, plus it is FREE (as in beer). I would deffinately recommend it.

iTextSharp Home Page

iTextSharp Documentation

I am using Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Replication for one of my company's projects. I had never used replication, but it seemed like a good solution to the problem we were facing. The application has been running for about a month now and I am happy to say that I am pleased with Replication so far.

I released version 1.1 of the application this weekend and it included some minor database changes. I needed to add columns to existing tables, create two new tables, update existing stored procedures, and create new stored procedures to support the new tables. This would normally not be a big deal. Unfortunately replication makes adding columns to a replicated table a bit more complex.

Thankfully I found the following article to assist me with adding columns to existing tables that are being published via replication:

Altering Replicated Tables (SQL 2000)

Another oddity is that when I altered replicated stored procedures and updated the Snapshot, the changes to the stored procedure did not propagate to the subscribing database. After monitoring the subscriber for changes for over an hour, I manually updated the subscriber with the proc changes.

It has been awhile since I have manipulated data in a Gridview. I am binding a collection to a Gridview and one of the values contains non-html line breaks (\n). I would like to convert these to html line breaks (<br />). The code below works fine:


I was wondering if there is an "easier"/"better" way of doing this, so I posted the question at the ASP.NET forums. Feel free to post your comments to that thread, rather than this blog entry.

Update

Aaron at ASP.NET provided me with a more aesthitic solution. See the code below:

<ItemTemplate>
     <%# ((string)Eval("Message")).Replace("\n", "<br/>") %>
</ItemTemplate>