tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-207695392008-08-15T10:31:28.418+02:00Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-39625579508371316372008-04-08T13:02:00.005+02:002008-04-08T14:23:36.670+02:00

Yesterday, Google announced it's entry in the cloud computing game. Amazon Web Services has long been the only serious player (with S3, EC2 and SimpleDB), but now the other large online powers are lining up. Microsoft has unveiled a number of online components that would fit into a comparable image (SSDS, SkyDrive, BizTalk services). Expectations were that Google would open up it's BigTable

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-22997086090609399512008-03-28T18:09:00.003+01:002008-03-28T18:25:10.760+01:00

Just to keep myself from figuring this out every time again. ;) When building a URL from a base URL (say: http://www.teuntostring.net/blog/2008) and a relative path (say: ../../blog/index.html), the .NET framework supports us nicely with the Uri class. Just say: Uri baseUrl = new Uri("http://www.teuntostring.net/blog/2008"); Uri abs = new Uri(baseUrl, "../../blog/index.html"); This works

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-16215612427677023182008-02-19T18:13:00.007+01:002008-03-10T10:13:54.018+01:00

In dit stukje ga ik je overhalen om te solliciteren bij funda en lid te worden van ons team. Ik denk namelijk dat funda voor een ontwikkelaar één van de leukste, uitdagendste en inspirerendste plekken is om te werken. Funda is het bedrijf achter enkele websites, waaronder funda.nl. Funda.nl is het soort website waarover iedereen een mening heeft en die voor veel Nederlanders op de short-list

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-66368010299993842542008-01-25T09:25:00.000+01:002008-02-10T17:09:56.256+01:00

Selenium is a really nice tool to do web (regression) testing. With Selenium Remote Control, you can run tests from your C# unit testing code and perform tests on a "remote controlled" browser instance. Very nice. Recently one of my tests suddenly failed after adding ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels to the page. The problem turned out to be that after a Click, we normally issue a WaitForPageToLoad

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-61946992992274969012008-01-12T19:34:00.000+01:002008-01-12T23:15:41.506+01:00

Sometimes you just run into a piece of technology that is so cool, that you wish you could make up a way to use it in a professional setting. Exhibit from the Simile project at MIT is such a technology. It brings a certain class of web application to the masses. Displaying data in compelling user interfaces that allow for searching, sorting, filtering, etc. used to be the domain of database

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-87950580829558749482007-12-16T23:30:00.000+01:002007-12-16T23:40:13.672+01:00

Suppose you have a fairly high volume, database intensive, ASP.NET website. Chances are that you have multiple front-end webservers in a loadbalanced farm. The front-end scales nicely this way. Depending on your load and the complexity of your queries, sooner or later, your database will become your bottleneck. Among other tricks (such as reviewing your queries, upgrading hardware, partitioning

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-28135639801312663322007-08-17T14:31:00.000+02:002007-08-17T14:45:28.973+02:00

Sorry that this took so long. Many people have reported that using the Reporting Services Extension for SharePoint Lists gives an error when used against WSS3 or MOSS 2007, the latest incarnations of SharePoint. For a long time, I couldn't find the time to fix the problem. I did not have a developement environment with Reporting Services anymore, so setting everything up again was not something

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-49438396290138827132007-07-26T11:57:00.000+02:002007-07-26T12:40:06.887+02:00

One of the nicer features of SharePoint are Surveys. They allow you to create a set of questions (both multiple choice and open) and have users of the site fill them in. It allows for selections from a set list, rating scales (where you rate a number of items along ascale from, say, 'not at all' to 'extremely') and even flow logic (where the outcome of one question causes certain questions to be

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-19227550663255644322007-05-28T17:18:00.000+02:002007-05-28T17:24:51.998+02:00

Here it is! My new book(let). I finished the content quite some time ago, but then had to create a nice cover and do all of the promotional blurb text etc. For some reason, I wanted to do it all myself this time. Took me quite some extra time, but I feel really proud now. I am also really impressed by the printing quality delivered by Lulu.com. Printing on demand is really ready to compete

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-3616704888420916772007-03-28T19:50:00.000+02:002007-03-28T20:48:26.462+02:00

Some people have recently asked me about using my Gantt chart web part on WSS3 or MOSS 2007. I assumed that it would just work, WSS3 being more or less backward compatible with WSS2, but alas. It turns out that the web part itself works just fine, but the MSI installer that worked like a charm on WSS2, fails tragically on WSS3. So I just packaged the web part in a WSS3 solution. You can download

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1168717063728667312007-01-13T20:32:00.000+01:002007-01-14T22:54:46.214+01:00

Sending an e-mail from code in .NET isn't very hard, but you will have to configure an SMTP server. When your code runs inside SharePoint (WSS 3 or MOSS 2007), this shouldn't be necessary, as SharePoint already knows a working SMTP server (it uses this to send out alert e-mails and other mail). To use this and bypass the configuration bogus, send e-mail using this snippet: using

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1168418331388836612007-01-10T09:30:00.000+01:002007-01-10T09:41:13.333+01:00

Someone asked for the sources of the GanttChart web part. While I intend the part to be available for everyone free of charge, I haven't decided on any formal licence yet. I promise not to sue you if you use this code, both for commercial and non-commercial uses. You have no permission to remove the link to my blog from the editor interface, though. Everything provided "as is". Download the

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1166543230996378542006-12-19T16:37:00.000+01:002006-12-20T19:09:38.863+01:00

Recently, I have been working on a project where we created a fairly straight-forward web site for anonymous use on the internet, using WSS 3.0 as our platform. In earlier versions of the sharePoint product, this was not possible, as it did not (really) support anonymous use and the only authentication scenario was using windows user accounts. This restricted the use of SharePoint to a strictly

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1162561555635614882006-11-03T14:35:00.000+01:002006-11-07T14:04:04.836+01:00

Update: I have enough proof readers now. Unless you really, really, really want to join, don't bother volunteering anymore. Thanks to the people who are helping out! I took a few days this week to finish my work on the 'web parts book' I have been working on every now and then for the past year. I was hard to keep my focus on it; respect in hindsight to the editors at WROX who hurried me into

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1155807246642777652006-08-17T11:34:00.000+02:002006-08-17T12:16:52.896+02:00

This thread on ASP.NET forums called my attention to a fact about ASP.NET 2 web parts that I had never noticed before. When you set AllowClose on a web part to False, the web part infrastructure will hide the Close verb from the user. The setting will not only prevent the action of Closing with an exception, but will also hide forbidden options in the UI. However, when you set AllowEdit to

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1153411410790860742006-07-20T17:50:00.000+02:002006-07-20T18:09:08.316+02:00

Many people have (politely) asked me to provide an installer with the Gantt chart web part, because they were not comfortable with editing configuration files and placing dll files in the GAC manually. Over the past half year, I have been promising these people that I was working on it, but that it would take some time. Well: rejoice! I have just uploaded the MSI installer for the web part. And

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1147353034806416572006-05-11T14:22:00.000+02:002006-05-12T09:20:12.693+02:00

"I might as well put it out there to trick myself into finishing it" I have been working for a wile now on a book on the Web Part Infrastructure in ASP.NET 2.0. I had been working on this before, when the software was still beta1, but somewhere along the way, I lost interest (and discipline) and I stopped working on it. Now, I have taken the old chapters, the old sample code, converted it and

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1145635090740106752006-04-21T17:28:00.000+02:002006-04-21T18:06:47.426+02:00

The Web Part Infrastructure in ASP.NET 2 offers a very neat system that allows users to configure and personalize parts of a web page, dragging the web parts to their preferred position, etc... When you are administering a web site that works with web parts, you'll soon want to know how many of your users actually personalized their page. And what settings did they use? Surely, you can find this

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1145457025769445162006-04-19T15:17:00.000+02:002006-04-19T16:32:13.226+02:00

In the new version of the SharePoint extension for Reporting Services, I added a feature that may need some explanation. All reports that use the extension will automatically have a parameter called SiteUrl. This parameter can be used to override the site URL that is configured in the connection string. If you leave the parameter blank, the value from the connection string will still be used. One

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1145451370850965352006-04-19T12:15:00.000+02:002006-04-19T15:08:32.663+02:00

I'm back! Had a great time in Egypt, had a first rank look at the total solar eclipse on March 29th. I feel like going to work again.... So, let's start with something that has been requested a few times during my vacation: how about using the Reporting Services extension for SharePoint Lists on SSRS 2005? I received some reports from people that it didn't "just work", so I installed SSRS 2005

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1142606462565896712006-03-17T15:32:00.000+01:002006-03-17T15:41:02.800+01:00

I will be leaving for a 4-week vacation this weekend. I'll be traveling through Egypt, seeing a solar eclipse, desert, oases, temples, pyramids, the lot... But I will not be online, so I will not be answering any questions or comments for quite a while. Sorry 'bout that.

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1141311499549802062006-03-02T20:14:00.000+01:002006-03-02T17:59:53.876+01:00

About 6 months ago, I published an article about writing a reporting services data extension to query lists in Sharepoint sites. The article focussed mainly on "how to extend MS Reporting Services", but from the many responses I received, I reckon that many people are building production solutions around the sample presented in that article. As a matter of fact: I did so myself. I created a

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1141307159830006042006-03-02T14:01:00.000+01:002006-03-02T14:47:13.970+01:00

I just uploaded a new version of the Gantt chart webpart. It contains two fixes. No more overlapping. In the previous versions, the chart would hide other screen elements when it grew wider. The new version of the part will claim enough space to show itself and push other screen elements to the side or the bottom (as a proper HTML element should do). If you want to constrain the screen space the

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1140259742037352062006-02-18T11:21:00.000+01:002006-02-18T11:49:02.543+01:00

A few weeks ago, I decided to finally get myself a laptop as a experimental development environment. The virtual machine solution got too slow and I didn't want to risk the desktop machine to crash on me (my girlfriend is writing her PhD thesis on it as well). So I decided to go for a relatively small form factor: 13.3" wide screen. This allows me to work on it on the train. The machine I

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20769539.post-1139589015066701082006-02-10T17:18:00.000+01:002006-02-10T17:45:38.240+01:00

Some people were having trouble setting the Gantt chart web part up on their WSS sites, so I thought I'd better show a little how-to. We will create a new list, create a Gantt chart for it. Then we will do the same for a custom created view on the data. This step-by-step guide assumes that you have managed to install the part in your site. Step 1, create a new list based on Task (you can use

Teunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084804713319805149noreply@blogger.com