Although I am a developer on Windows platform, mainly with .NET framework, I still try to keep up with what is happening in Linux community. Among all the major Linux distributions, Fedora Core is my favorite, and Ubuntu comes next. One of the reasons that I like Fedora Core is there are many developers supporting it by building many useful applications for this distribution. Another feature of FC that attracts me is that it makes […]
We have been using Bugzilla as our bug tracking system for quite a long time, but recently my department decided to switch to OnTime by Axosoft because it meets our needs better, for example, OnTime has the ability to separate defects from features and incidents, and to generate professional-looking reports, etc. After the decision was made, I was assigned to make the switch as smooth as possible. The biggest challenge I had was to find […]
HashTable is ideal for creating lookup tables because it can very quickly find the value of an item from a large collection of items based on the item’s key. However, it may become an overkill if the collection is relatively small, say about 10 items or less, because of the overhead of HashTable. In this case, ListDictionary is a better choice than HashTable. ListDictionary is a simple implementation of IDictionary with a singly linked list. […]
One of our applications started giving an error this morning like this: The remote server returned an error: (503) Server Unavailable. The stack trace shows that the application was trying to parse a template in XML format and encountered an error on the DTD file. When the line of DOCTYPE was commented out, the error went away and the application came back running. Here is the DOCTYPE of the application: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML […]
Just before going to bed, I turned on my computer to check my emails and to check my blog stats, which is my daily routine before the day is out. I noticed that WordPress 2.3 is released. This version is named “Dexter” for the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon. I am very excited about this new version, and cannot wait to upgrade my current version. Unfortunately, it’s about mid-night now, and I should be in […]
If you use the TableAdapter Configuration Wizard in Visual Studio 2005 to create a strong-typed dataset (as described in Scott Mitchell’s ASP.NET 2.0 Data Access Tutorial – Creating a Data Access Layer), you will be asked if you would like to save the database connection string in the configuration file. If you choose to save it, it will be placed in the <connectionStrings> section. But what if you want to change the name of the […]
Have you ever had this problem that you need to type some special symbols in Visual Studio .NET text editor? Such as ©, ®, ±, à, À, and the list goes on. Of course, if you are working on an ASPX file, you can always use the HTML editor and type in their HTML names or HTML numbers, and Visual Studio .NET will automatically convert them to those special symbols (VS 2005 does a much […]
One of the important tasks when working with Cascade Style Sheet is picking a good color for an item. I always like to assign a color value with the hexadecimal form, but the problem is I can’t memorize those hexadecimal values. Visual Studio .NET IDE has very good intellisense support for creating/editing CSS files, but it only support named colors. What I need is some color palette on-line like this to help my pick a […]
There is a SQL Server Agent job in our server that runs a DTS package to transfer data from one database to another. However, when I checked the job history, I found out the job never ran. The error message that I got from the job history is like this: The job failed. Unable to determine if the owner (<Domain\Account Name>) of job <job name> has server access (reason: Could not obtain information about Windows […]
Here is the scenario: One day, you found your available hard drive space is very low, so you opened up Windows Explorer and selected all folders under C drive to see the total of the used hard drive space. You subtracted the total used space from the total hard drive space to see how much space you still have. Then you found a big and significant discrepancy between your calculated available space and the free […]