Omar AL Zabir Blog

Today we purchased an iMac (Intel Dual Core) in order to test
Safari 2.0 support for Pageflakes. My first impression, I
am totally blown away by its performance. The UI is unbelievable
well done and the visual effects you see are 10 years ahead of
time. I was comparing OS features of Mac OS X 10.4.X.X with Windows
Vista. To be honest, I am suffering from inferiority complex now.
Windows Vista is so lame compared to Mac OS X. Vista copied all OS
X’s concepts for which at least I feel ashamed whether Microsoft
feels or not. But it did not make anything better after copying.
Normally Microsoft copies others ideas and makes them really better
in all possible ways. But Mac OS X is so seriously better than any
other OS. The widgets you see with the OS X are mind
blowing. Vista side bar goes nowhere near to it. Also the
concept of switching to regular mode and widget mode is by far the
best idea. We normally don’t want to occupy desktop space with
widgets. That’s why in OS X, the whole screen switches to widget
view when you press middle button.

OSX kernel is made from Unix. So, it’s
seriously powerful and stable. The command line tools are very
feature rich. Those who love *nix command line, will feel at home
in OSX. Vista still offers those poor command line tools from
Windows XP/2003. Nothing improved much.

If somehow OSX can run Windows apps like Visual Studio, MS Word
etc, I will undoubtedly switch to OSX. Even Windows Vista won’t be
able to compromise me.

Best of all, you can buy an iMac with Intel Processor and use
dual boot to run both Windows and Mac OSX. So, when you work, boot
on Windows. When you want to have fun, go to OSX.

I am blogging from One Note 2007. This is so super cool. By the
way, those who haven’t seen One Note 2007 should definitely try it.
It’s really good!

Do you know that you cannot set Cache-Control: max-age header in
ASP.NET 2.0? No matter how many combinations you try, you will
always end up with “max-age=0” for sure.

I found solution to the SetMaxAge problem in HttpCachePolicy.
Here’s the code of the function in HttpCachePolicy
(decompiled):

public void SetMaxAge(TimeSpan
delta)
{

if (delta < TimeSpan.Zero)

{

throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException(“delta”);

}

if (HttpCachePolicy.s_oneYear < delta)

{

delta = HttpCachePolicy.s_oneYear;

}

if (!this._isMaxAgeSet || (delta < this._maxAge))

{

this.Dirtied();

this._maxAge = delta;

this._isMaxAgeSet = true;

}
}

Someone is setting maxAge already to 0. So, if I assign a higher
value it does not get set.

I am not sure why the “(delta < this._maxAge)" condition is necessary. If I somehow set a lower maxAge, I can never increase it!

So, I have made an HttpModule which does this:

void context_EndRequest(object
sender, EventArgs e) {
if (HttpContext.Current.Items.Contains(“SetMaxAge”))
{

FieldInfo maxAge =
HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.GetType().GetField(“_maxAge”,
BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic);

maxAge.SetValue(HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache,
(TimeSpan)HttpContext.Current.Items[“SetMaxAge”]);

// SetMaxAge does not
work.
//HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetMaxAge((TimeSpan)HttpContext.Current.Items[“SetMaxAge”]);

HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Public);
HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(5));
HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetRevalidation(HttpCacheRevalidation.AllCaches);
}
}

If someone sets “SetMaxAge” to a Timespan in the Context.Items,
it will get set to the response and the end of the request. This
ensures, no matter who does what with cache object, maxAge will
definitely be set.

Although this is not a Atlas specific problem, it seems to be a
problem in ASP.NET 2.0 itself.

Now I can cache AJAX call responses on the browser and prevent
roundtrips.

Pageflakes won the Web
2.0 Award for #1 Start Page. See the “Start Page” category
from:

http://web2.0awards.org

#2 is Google’s IG and #3 is Microsoft’s Windows Live.

Pageflakes is developed using ASP.NET 2.0 and Microsoft
Atlas.

Here’s what Pageflakes say:

Pageflakes is your personalized Internet. You can add what you
like and remove what you don’t like – and it’s totally simple. What
you see on the site right now is just a selection of a few standard
modules (“flakes”, as we call them) that allow you to read blogs,
do web searches, create a to-do list, check your Gmail account and
read the latest news. Normally you’d have to go to a different web
page for each of those things. With Pageflakes, you have it all on
one page! And it’s all free.

Note: You can now create public sites and share your page with
your friends! Setup a personal site very easily and collaboratively
work together

StickOut is a desktop sticky note application with multi-user
support and Outlook integration. It is a .NET Framework 2.0 Windows
Forms application that uses .NET Remoting to communicate with other
StickOut users and exchange sticky notes with them. It uses the new
.NET Framework 2.0 IPC Channel for communicating between Microsoft
Outlook and the StickOut process. The Outlook Add-in allows you to
stick anything out to the desktop from Outlook including e-mails,
notes, tasks, appointments, etc., as sticky notes. Care has been
taken to reduce the memory footprint of a .NET application
significantly and to make a fast and smooth user experience. This
article chronicles my first day of planning the application,
through subsequent design, development, testing, and deployment
days, revealing the evolution of the application, and the
complications I dealt with at each step. You will read about lots
of .NET tricks, deployment and versioning problems, Visual Studio
tricks, and some other non-development–related tricks that
might help you to boost your daily development work.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnwinforms/html/stickout.asp

Hope you enjoy it!

Introducing Google Analytics.
Sophisticated. Easy. Free.

Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how
your visitors found you and how they interact with your site.
You’ll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and
initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more
visitors.

http://www.google.com/analytics/images/intro_small.jpg

This paper addresses some
of the questions about customizing grid display that are commonly
asked in newsgroups, on Web sites, and in other developer forums.
The techniques described here are sometimes quite simple and at
other times somewhat involved. In each case, however, they address
a question of how to go beyond the basic functionality of the
DataGrid control.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/vbtchtopquestionsaboutaspnetdatagridservercontrol.asp

Topics:

Model-Driven Development is a hot topic in the developer
community, but many still don’t know how to make it work in
real-life projects. By offering developers built-in guidance,
tangible architect makes Model-Driven Development finally
accessible to everyone. I have been working on a new custom UML
designer for making the design process a lot easier than using
generic UML designer. It will be released soon. Check out the cool
app:

www.tangible.de

How to run scheduled jobs from ASP.NET without requiring a
Windows Service to be installed on the server? Very often we need
to run some maintenance tasks or scheduled tasks like sending
reminder emails to users from our websites. This can only be
achieved using a windows service. ASP.NET being stateless provides
no support to run some code continuously or to run code at
scheduled time. As a result, we have to make our own Windows
Services in order to run scheduled jobs or cron jobs. But in a
shared hosted environment, we do not always have the luxury to
deploy our own windows service to our hosting provider’s web
server. We either have to buy a dedicated server which is very
costly, or sacrifice such features in our web solution. However,
running scheduled task is a very handy feature especially for
sending reminder emails to users, maintenance reports to
administrator, run cleanup operations etc. So, I will show you a
tricky way to run scheduled jobs using pure ASP.NET without
requiring any windows service. This solution runs on any hosting
service providing just ASP.NET hosting:

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/ASPNETService.asp

If you find this article useful, please vote for me.