Sushantp's Weblog

Co-Founding Effect Labs – bringing dream to reality – mix of passion, hard work and big Dreams :)

sushantp — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:58:56 +0000

I was out of blogging arena for past few months… the title should give some hint on what I was busy with. I with my two friends has set up an IT consulting firm called Effect Labs (http://effectlabs.com) which focus on Silverlight and Sharepoint based custom application development.

Journey:

Since my Microsoft days, it was there somewhere but due to several things going within and around, it just didn’t came out then. Though to keep myself ignited I joined a services start-up so that I see the services side of the software industry and explore various opportunities.

That was the time when I and my friends joined together and we were hardcore thinkers of the product development in the area of Tourism, Media Studio, GPS based systems, Controls making company, Silverlight based CMS system, Job portal industry, Online test platform and actually various other options and opportunities. We all had our own thinking for the products and we finally came close on a few. But due to lack of funding and recession hitting at the same time our conversations didn’t went well with the investors. This left us thinking again.

Since all three of us had really good experience with the services industry and had different expertise with some common technologies to work with. This made us think seriously in the direction of setting up an IT services firm and helping businesses with the custom processes where we are good and some of the cool things we do here. One of us being highly creative with programming and playing with Silverlight it came out really well to be used as one of the pillars, Another being highly experienced with SharePoint custom development and integration with Silverlight it came out as another pillar and ASP.NET\MVC\jQuery\JSON\WCF etc is common across us so this helped us concentrating on Microsoft technologies as well as playing the common work area.

These pillars helped us setting up a plan where we keep out instinct of being on the product side up too but just putting say a small holding time. We planned to start with Services offerings, working parallel in developing customized solutions as these work well in form of packaged services products like Silverlight controls, media kit etc Setting up these two and establishing good process and name among clients would take a bit of time but would help us leveraging out strengths to product development too.

There are many things if I talk about service offerings but I think its already a lot written above about the company so I will write things what I feel like about a company. Just to showcase the offerings in a splash here it goes – custom process setup using TFS 2008 – complete project management and collaboration with integration of VS, TFS, Sharepoint, SSRS etc and customizing TFS process templates according to a company or project needs, Custom application development using various Microsoft technologies like ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET MVC, C# 3.5, WCF, WPF, Expression Blend, Silverlight (Prism, Caliburn), Sharepoint etc. and various other technologies, platforms and tools like Photoshop, jQuery, Ajax with JSON, javascript, Ext-JS etc. We bring in high quality and great user experience in the works we do and have done. There’s much to say here but lets put a stop now.

I follow and would suggest one thing – Think what you do and do what you love. This is really very important and separates you. If you are reading this I would say to ask yourself a question – am I happy doing what I do today? (you cant be satisfied since it stops progress) If the answer is YES then you are on the right path but if it NO then this is the right time to think and find out a way to do what interests you because it gives a lot of pleasure and ultimately you progress the best in your interest area.

I hope this journey would be extraordinary and keep me on my toes always. There a long way to go and a lot of patience at this stage is required. We are fortunate to get a good start but still have seen hard time during this last 3 months – Patience and self motivation are key in this practice.

I have taken up the role of Techno\Business person in the company where I do coding, learn and implement new technologies, come up with working demos and finding process\software optimizations etc as well as looking into business expansion, doing strategic partnerships, maintaining business relationship so that we get recurring business etc There’s a lot involved actually.

I would now be writing a mix of both technology and business in due course. Hope the experience would be good.

Thanks.

Using IFrames for multiple file uploads and using jquery to communicate between main document and iframes

sushantp — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:51:33 +0000

In this post we will look into how we can use iframes to do multi file upload and also how we can use jQuery to communicate between the main document and a specific iframe (among many iframes).

So, the scenario here is we have a page with multiple file upload depending upon some data. We will use a repeater to deal with the data and hence we get ‘n’ rows of file upload depending upon the datasource. The iframe elements are kept inside repeater as shown below. Here we will see how we can trigger specific iframe events and then try to do validations and data communication between the main page and an iframe using jQuery. The communication is done with the help of accessing current pages elements and then setting the iframes hidden element with the values we got on the current page. The set values are then used by code behind of the iframe file upload page or the javascript of that page. So, in another way we achieve both file upload and parameter passing in this type of scenario.

multiple file uploads

Code Example1: Page = Main.aspx

Code Example 2: Page = Main.aspx, Code = jQuery

Code Example 3: Page = Photoupload.aspx

<%@ Page Language="C#"  AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="PhotoUpload.aspx.cs" Inherits="PhotoUpload" %>

There is some javascript too in the photoupload.aspx and it depends on how you want your particular file uplaod to work or else you can write me for that. In the code behind I have done thumbnailing and also taken care of reuploading new file using the same fileupload button.

So, once we are done with file upload in the Main.aspx I can write an event for ‘btnUpload’ button of photoupload.aspx page so that the event is catched at the parent page and some sort of validations like atleast on file is upload or so etc can be done and appropriate error message can be shown.

I hope this will be helpful to you. You can write to me at sushant.pandey@gmail.com in case of any queries or source code.

bye for now.

-Thanks

TFS 2008 Tips and Tricks: Enable Get Latest on Check Out

sushantp — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:19:41 +0000

In this post we will look into how can we enable get latest when doing check-outs while using TFS 2008. In case of a general development team where multiple devs are working on a project and modifying different portion of it we cant have exclusive locks most of the time as it restricts the capabilities of parallel or fast sequential development. So, in this type of general scenario we see the requirement of automatic get latest when somebody checks out a file as it would help in later merging of the file with server version.

TFS 2008 provides us with this option in team project settings -> souce control -> to select the option of get latest on check out. To find this option go to Team Explorer, if Team Explorer is not visible along with solution explorer then go to visual studio menu and under view you can find team explorer. Click it to open team explorer which will show all the team projects assigned to you. You can find source control link under team project too but this is not what we have to use here instead we have to find the source control by right clicking team project name as shown below:

Now when we click on source control the below window gets opened where we have to click get latest on check out option as outlined in the image too:

Hope this helps in case you are looking for it too.

bye for now.

-Sushant

jQuery: Get formatted Date from returned JSON data

sushantp — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:09:35 +0000

Recently I was working on using client side template to show a tabular data and one of the columns was a date field. The return data was an enumerable type i.e. List of objects containing the System.DateTime (date) field for representing date. When I looked into the date column in my client side grid on browser I was surprised to see the resulted date in form of “/Date(998667000000)/” (the date data might not be exact as I have put how it looks like) which of kind of unexpected and then led to find how to get javascript Date object from the JSON returned date.

So, In the returned data we get JSON serialized date which is in ticks and hence causes problems at the client end as we can’t treat it as javascript date. Eval() fails in coverting it and returns error saying that the format of date is not correct. Now, to resolve this I liked this approach. Use the reviver function which can be used while doing JSON data parsing with JSON.parse function. You can look at http://www.json.org/js.html to know more about reviver funciton.

[from json.ord]
var myObject = JSON.parse(myJSONtext, reviver);

The optional reviver parameter is a function that will be called for every key and value at every level of the final result. Each value will be replaced by the result of the reviver function. This can be used to reform generic objects into instances of pseudoclasses, or to transform date strings into Date objects.

[/from json.ord]

So, here is a sample jQuery ajax call implementation which can be used as part of any event in your javascript file and would work for you. The pre-requisite here is to have JSON.js file included so that JSON object is understood by the interpreter and it doesnt break client side code.


//methodName -> The WebMethod name you want to call from ajax
//paramArray  -> Array of parameters which will be converted as JSON params in this function
//successFunction  -> name of successfunction to be called if ajax call succeeds
//errorFunction-> name of error Function to be called if ajax call fails

function ClientProxyDateFormatted(methodName, paramArray, successFunction, errorFunction) {
    var pagePath = window.location.pathname;
    var paramList = '';

    if (paramArray.length > 0) {
        for (var i = 0; i < paramArray.length; i += 2) {
            if (paramList.length > 0) paramList += ',';
            paramList += '"' + paramArray[i] + '"' + ':' + '"' + paramArray[i + 1] + '"';
        }
    }
    paramList = '{' + paramList + '}';
    $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url: pagePath + "/" + methodName,
        contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
        data: paramList,
        dataType: "text",
        processData: false,
        success: function(msgg) {
            var msg = JSON.parse(msgg, function(key, value) {
                var a;
                if (value != null) {
                    if (value.toString().indexOf('Date') >= 0) {
                        //here we will try to extract the ticks from the Date string in the "value" fields of JSON returned data
                        a = /^\/Date\((-?[0-9]+)\)\/$/.exec(value);
                        if (a) {
                            var dt = new Date(parseInt(a[1], 10));
                            //getMonth return months with index 0 so you need to add 1 to get the correct month value.
                            return dt.getMonth() + 1 + "/" + dt.getDate() + "/" + dt.getFullYear();
                        }
                    }
                    return value;
                }
            });
            successFunction(msg);
        },
        error: function() {
            errorFunction();
        }
    });
    return false;
}

This seemed to me as a good problem and hence I think it would be useful to you in case you are facing similar issue. Let me know if it helps or doesnt help

bye for now.

-Sushant

jQuery: Get the checked and unchecked items from list of checkboxes

sushantp — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:47:34 +0000

In this post we will see the use of jQuery in finding the count of checked and unchecked items from a list of checkboxes along with their count. This is also one of the common problems I faced and looked into how to use not selector and also found that count comes as not expected many a times so whats the reason behind that.

Let’s take a look at a generic example page where we have a list of checkboxes inside a table enclosed in a div (you can use any other scenario like a div having a list of checkbox elements only or a combination of checkboxes and other elements in it).

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>





    
    
    <% if (false)
       { %>
    
    <% }%>
    


    
    

        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
    
    

    
        
            
             test
             chk boxes
            
        
        
            test 
            test 
            test 
            test 
            test 
            test

test	chk boxes
test
test
test
test
test
test

Since everything is present in UI so I am not giving the code behind as it would be default without any changes to verify how the above is working.

Here are few lines to take a look upon:
//show count of all not checked checkboxes only
1) alert($(“#testTB :input:not(:checked)”).size());
//show count of all not checked elements
2) alert($(“#testTB :not(:checked)”).size());

In the first one we get the count of all non checked checkboxes only because it uses an addition filter of ‘input’ tag type which is how checkboxes get rendered in html. In case we dont use it as in 2) example then we get all the elements inside div testTB which dont have checked attribute so it return all the tr, td etc elements along with input elements thereby increasing the count of return set.

This is a simple example but would help you in case you are trying to find the non cheched elements and getting unexpected count. The reason there would be that all the checkboxes are not inside one container and hence you would have to use the input tag type. Also you might have to consider addition filtering in case the same container contains other input elements as then not will filter those also in result set causing unexpected count. Som the gist is that either you do the wrapping in such a way that these checkboxes are clubbed together or else you need to use additional filter to find the right result set.

Hope this helps!

bye for now.

-Sushant

ASP.NET – Fill and Show Dependent drop down list on Client side without server control and Postback

sushantp — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:38:08 +0000

In this post we will look into filling dependent drop down list(s) on client side without using server side asp:dropdownlist control and autopostback, which is the common way we see around. We will be using jQuery at the front end to do the drop down list marp-up generation and adding data to it. We will be using WebMethod to retrieve JSON data from the server where we can return simple data types or any Enumerable data types like List etc so it fills the regular or common way of server side implementation where we use a service method or so to retrieve object collection from DB or from application code itself.

Please find the code snippet below which represents aspx page code behind file and app code file where collection is returned which can be replaced with a service layer call querying DB to get the collection back to presentation layer:

1) ASPX Page with jQuery Code


<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>





    
    
    <% if (false)
       { %>
    
    <% }%>

    

    


    
    
    
        
        
        
        
    

    <%----%>

2) Code behind C# file

using System;
using System.Web.Services;
using System.Collections;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

    }

    [WebMethod]
    public static IEnumerable FillDD(string selectedDDItem)
    {
        //Instantiate your service class or call your service layer method directly in case it is also static
        lib serviceLib = new lib();
        return serviceLib.getDDValues(selectedDDItem);
    }
}

I have used App_Code to represent service layer method:

3) App_Code\lib.cs

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;

/// 
/// Summary description for lib
/// 
public class lib
{
	public lib()
	{
		//
		// TODO: Add constructor logic here
		//
	}

    public List getDDValues(string currentValue)
    {
        //use the currentValue to get dependent DD values from DB
        //I am putting them here hardcoded to reprenst the same.

        List listString = new List();
        listString.Add(currentValue);
        listString.Add("Sushant");
        listString.Add("RampGroup");

        return listString;
    }
}

Overall this code results into a beutiful animated dependent drop down showing and fading from ui depending upon the selection of first drop down. This overall is more performant that the postback as round trip is save with partial trip and also the mode of data transfer is thin JSON. On the client side rendering of this JSON data, it can be achieved either by using jQuery as shown in my example or else using jTemplates and then setting as data for the template. I will share the code in another post with use of jTemplates which can be of great help in scenarios where server side data controls like repeater or data grids are used and which can be replaced by the usage of jTemplates and doing a client side binding of the same with thin JSON data.

So, If you are looking into doing a AJAX and JSON call this example can help you along with an implementation of filling a dependent drop down.

Hope this helps!

bye for now

-Sushant

HD View and Microsoft ICE – Generating and viewing high resolution Panoramas

sushantp — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:19:35 +0000

HD View is essentially an image viewer which helps in viewing high resolution images\very large images. Microsoft ICE is a software which can be used to stich multiple images to generate a very large panorama of the degree of gigapixels. Since you can have panorama of this degree hence you can achieve a full 360 degree view of subject.

This is a Microsoft Research project which uses capabilities of your graphics hardware to provide image smoothing and high level zooming to get a 3D illusion. HD View is available as activeX browser plugin for Firefox and IE. Having good graphics card helps in getting the full power of HD view. I tried installing it on my system where I didn’t had very good graphics card still I was able to get a real good view of panoramas. You need to have Direct3D installed (which gets installed as part of DirectX). You can get more details about HD View from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/hdview/hdgigapixel.htm and http://hdview.spaces.live.com/.

Here is a view of zoom details from http://www.yosemite-17-gigapixels.com

hd view

HD for Silverlight is also available on codeplex which is a Silverlight application to show HD View. You can download it from http://www.codeplex.com/HDViewSL. I tried the cool commandline tool hdmake to generate a high quality image. I downloaded Photoshop plugin of HD View and currently trying my hands on it. I will update about it in another post once I get something subtantial out of it.

But overall it looked very pomising and encouraging to me to see my panoramas with HD view with great details.

- Bye for now.

Publish post from Microsoft Word 2007

sushantp — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:21:13 +0000

Let’s take a look into on of the utilities\feature of Microsoft Word 2007 where you can write, edit and publish new or old posts to variety of blog service providers including wordpress and blogspot. In this post we will go step by step setting an wordpress account in my word document blog publish utility. This is actually called offline blogging or desktop blogging where you write a blog on some application offline and then publish them to web\blog service provider or providers at once whenever you want.

When you open a Word document click on File menu to find more options present there and then you can see a publish option present as shown in the image below:

You can then see another document getting opened with new menu items as publish, home etc and a pop-up window for creating a new account would come. You can setup word publish to work with wordpress, blogger, community server, sharepoint blog, typepad etc. This can be seen in the image below:

Once you select the blog service provider for setting an account you will proceed to the new window. I selected wordpress and then entered the blog url along with the credentials to use my wordpress account\data here in the offline mode. It works by the medium of webservices to get the data for you or load your data to your blog server provider. You can also provide your photo or imager server url to use the post images from.

Now, we are ready to write a new post in our word document and publish from the same page menu. We can get our older posts, review it, edit it and then republish the same. Click on Home page in the menu shows your blog home page, you can manage different accounts and then using it can publish the same post to multiple providers.

Hope this will help to some of you!!

Happy Blogging…

Group by All – keyword in t-sql

sushantp — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:09:27 +0000

There is a problem I came across some time back where I was having a table with names (including duplicates) in it and had to get name, count(name) as an output with a where clause to eliminate some of the entries. Major output requirement was to include the eliminated name entries too in the output and show name, 0 for those entries. Please find below the problem and solutions in detail:

Problem: There is a table having ID and Names like below and I need to return Name and Count of each Name.

Table: The table named Names looks like one provided below:

ID	Name
1	Sushant
2	Pandey
3	Sushant
4	Sushant
5	Scott
6	Scott
7	Pandey

We can get the required output by using this query: Select Name, Count(Name) from Names group by Name

The output will look like:

Name	Count
Sushant	3
Pandey	2
Scott	2

Now the real problem comes when we have to use a where clause which filters some entries. Clause is ‘where Name like ‘%S%’‘so if we use this clause in above query we would get the below result.

Name	Count
Sushant	3
Scott	2

(Query: Select Name, Count(Name) from Names where Name like ‘%S%’ group by Name).

So, going by the original requirement of including entry ‘Pandey’ also into the result showing count = 0 like

Name	Count
Sushant	3
Scott	2
Pandey	0

We can get this by two ways mentioned below:

Solution 1: We can use union to get the above result. Though it seems to have more computation involved in it.

select Name,count(Name) as [count] from Names where Name in (select Name from Names where Name like ‘%S%’)group by Name union select Name, 0 as [count] from Names where Name not in (select Name from Names where Name like ‘%S%’)group by Name
Solution2: There is a keyword for ‘Group By’ clause where we can use ‘All’ which make groups for all the entries even if they are filter out by a where clause. So the below query results in same output: Select Name, Count(Name) from Names where Name like ‘%S%’ group by all Name

So, after messing a lot I found that the solution lied in just one line query so thought of posting. Might be helpful to you.

Bye for now…

MSR Asirra – Alternate approach to CAPTCHA

sushantp — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:28:20 +0000

We all have seen usage of CAPTCHA(Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) or HIP (Human Interactive Proof) in several website preventing spams for comments or email, protecting web services from bot attacks where programs\bots tries to imitate humans and fool the server systems. CAPTCHA is very well known way of using Alphanumeric character images in a distorted way and random orientation like below:

You can take a look at my previous post on CAPTCHA at http://sushantp.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/captcha-image-code-verification/

There are some issue which people are finding these days that the distortion is sometime such that its not human friendly but computers are able to read that.

There is an alternate HIP solution developing at MSR which is still in BETA phase and has been prototype by other universities too with the usage of images instead of text where a human can do the identification of images.

Here is how Asirra looks like on a page:

Visit http://research.microsoft.com/asirra/ for complete details on Asirra and usage instructions.

To brief about Assira, this is a two way verification where javascript code gets the challenge and if user solves that correctly, gets a ticket from MSR’s server (also a success message\alert could be shown to user). This message is then passed along with form data as hidden field which is expected to be used by code behind and call a MSR Web Service to validate the Ticket. Repeated trials with the same ticket makes it fail.

In all this seems to be a encouraging way and should improve even more with the quality of images which come. Also there might be orientation changes for images for increased difficulty levels when it would come to machines. Also change in image size (random sized images in challenge) could be one of the improvements which we may find in the final versions.

Here is how the code looks like:

ASP.NET Page

<%@ Page Language="C#"
         AutoEventWireup="true"
         CodeFile="asirra.aspx.cs"
         Inherits="asirra" %>





    




     

    

      
       
        

        User Name: 
        Favorite Color:

C# Code Behind

using System;
using System.Net;

public partial class asirra : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (IsPostBack)
        {
            string asr_tkr = Request.QueryString["Asirra_Ticket"];
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(asr_tkr))
            {
                Response.Write("Asirra Ticket Value is not present");
            }
            else
            {
                string queryString = "action=ValidateTicket&ticket=" + asr_tkr;

                WebClient wc = new WebClient();
                string resp = wc.DownloadString("http://challenge.asirra.com/cgi/Asirra?" + queryString);
                if (resp.IndexOf("Pass", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) > -1)
                {
                    Response.Write("Got Asirra Ticket Verified");
                }
                else
                {
                    Response.Write("Asirra Ticket Not Verified");
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Take a look at it and try. You may like it too like me!!

bye for now.

Getting started on JQuery

sushantp — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:39:24 +0000

I started using JQuery just recently and liked it a lot the same time In this post we will take a look at what is DOM, what jquery is and how can one get benefit by using it. We will also look into some tried examples with code. visit http://jquery.com/ for complete information about JQuery.

So, DOM or Document Object Model is language and platform independent object model for representing HTML\XML formats. JavaScript works over DOM though the browser can render a page with different available models. Using Javascript we can play with the DOM of a page and make dynamic changes to page structure and change the browser rendering at run time. A very simple example to it is using Firebug in firefox and clicking on Inspect option. This opens the page DOM in the view panel from where a user can make changes to structure or style there by traversing page tree in any order i.e. parent to child or child to parent and see the effect of change instantaneously on browser. Javascript maintains the state of page by means of DOM.

JQuery is a concise, effective and dev friendly javascript library which allows to take advantage of DOM to its fullest by simplfying the element\object traversal, providing various animation options and simplifying ajax interactions. This library can be seen as a development effort towards supporting RAD (Rapid Application Development) where infact todays most of the developments are heading to. Good News for developers!! Write less do more is what JQuery says to us

One of the cool things is usage of chaining thereby making code development very fast and hence we can traverse a node and its decendents or ancestor nodes just with one line of code. It supports Javascript\XPath expression to select an element (javascript object) or list of elements and then using a object oriented approach shows all the properties, functions or methods working on collections when we use a “.”, we will see this in the examples at the bottom of this post.

We can also see direct method for reading JSON data (javascript also supports it but with eval() where the JSON should be trusted else can cause an attack to your server) in form of getJson() etc. We will take a closer look into using JSON over XML for Ajax call in my coming post about JSON where we will look into using a html control to make a Ajax call and receiving data in form of JSON and then making appropriate change upon successful retrieval of data.

Microsoft announced that it will integrate JQuery in coming VSTS versions though we have already seen integration support in terms of Javascript intellisense for JQuery in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Read http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/21/jquery-intellisense-in-vs-2008.aspx post for complete details. This patch enables Visual Studio to look for “-vsdoc.js” in the same directory where Jquery.js file is linked to. If you find any problems installing it and want to have intellisense support then you can add the code below to get the support

<% if(false) { %>
    
    <% }%>

Some Examples of JQuery usage:

The code below shows example usage of jQuery Slidedown, Rounded corners, Dynamic menu, Drop down value change dynamically, behavior change of anchor tags etc.

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>




    Untitled Page

    

    

    <% if (false)
       { %>

    

    <% }%>

    



    



                Hi this is first paragraph.

                Hi this is second paragraph

        

        jQuery

    
    
    


	Menu 1

	Item 1
	Item 2
	Item 3
	Item 4


	Menu 2

	Item 1
	Item 2
	Item 3
	Item 4





        This is a big Rounded div

So what we see is that everything in jQuery is either a object it self or property or function of that object. The return of a function in jQuery is again an Object hence allowing us to do chaining operations\calls and write real less code to achieve what we want.

There’s a lot involved in playing with jQuery, writing plug-ins for it and utilizing\testing currently available cool plug-ins. Adding your custom plugin to jQuery is a very straight forward and simple process. Take a look at http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Authoring if you want to write your own plugin.

Hope this post would help those looking to start on jQuery.

Keep quering with jQuery

Thanks.

Superblog Directory

Write a Screen Scrapper or Html Scrapper

sushantp — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:34:52 +0000

Today I developed a small app which does what is called as screen scrapping or html scrapping. We will look into specific development and also what these terms mean. HtmlScrapping means to download web page data which is same as what we see when we do a view source on a web page. This allows us to extract different information like link urls, image urls and data of course which can then be saved into a database and is ready for use via text, xml or database itself.

This app when tries to scrape google.com this is how is appears on local machine.

I am sharing the code which you can use and then play with the web page data in your own way:

UI Part:

this includes a button which triggers the web page retrieval, a datagrid to show img urls (can be used to show any custom data) and a literal to display the data\page (you can use label or any control here to display data). This can be customized as per the requirement.

Code Behind (C#):

I am just providing btn_click function as other part would remain same in the code behind file.

protected void Btn_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{

//Create a WebClient object and provide the url to be used
WebClient wc = new WebClient();
string url = "http://www.google.co.in/";

byte[] urlData = wc.DownloadData(url);
UTF8Encoding utf = new UTF8Encoding();
string completeData = utf.GetString(urlData);

//Used ArrayList to fill extracted info which eventually would be binded to datagrid

ArrayList a = new ArrayList();

//RegEx to match img src="". The same can be used to match a href="" also. Needs some modification to include styling where image has been provided as backgroud url()

Regex r = new Regex("img src\\s*=\\s*(?:(?:\\\"(?[^\\\"]*)\\\")|(?[^\\s]* ))", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
MatchCollection mc = r.Matches(completeData);

string value;
foreach (Match mt in mc)
{
foreach (Group gp in mt.Groups)
{
value = gp.Value;
if (!gp.Value.StartsWith(url) && (!gp.Value.StartsWith("img src")))
{
value = url + value;
//This code is up to you to change as the replacement is not as straightforward everytime as it looks below.
completeData = completeData.Replace(gp.Value, value);
}

a.Add(value);
}
}

lbl.Text = completeData;

dg.DataSource = a;
dg.DataBind();

//Saving the retrieved data to a text file on server

StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("test.txt"));
sw.Write(completeData);
sw.Close();

}

Hope this would help you if you are planning to get started on writing a HtmlScrapper. You can play with the data in terms of tags, atrributes and styles and then generate xml which would represent your page DOM.

bye for now…

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tandblekning

Why Do you Leave a Company?

sushantp — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:14:58 +0000

Let’s take a look into this interesting question which almost all us go through, any or many number of times. So, in your career if you have moved from one company to another then you would also have seen one of the many possibilities of moving from a company. I looked into it from satisfaction and role perspective of an employee and a company. Satisfaction – It means different to different people but typically it can be put into a few categories like – Work Satisfaction, Growth Satisfaction (growing within the org) and the Butter part – your cheque.

Get your people involved with interesting and challenging work. Since this is not possible for everybody and every time hence encourage them to look into new technologies and come up with some demo, paper etc which can later be presented and rewarded on merit basis. Growth satisfaction in terms of ladder or whatever you call it is another important area which affects an employee since it gives you recognition. There are quite a lot cross arguments on this too and I too can write negatives about it but still it affects the majority. Give the right people deserving growth – as simple as that. Third area to look at is you cheque or compensation. This depends on the previous two areas too. An employee’s growth should be aligned to company’s growth and hence compensation should be set such that the negative point shouldn’t come to a persons mind.

So, do people change jobs because of getting a salary hike only? I think it’s not the case most of the time because people want to do good work and if they do good work then they expect growth in all terms. So the reasons could fall under any of just said two things. Sometimes you get pissed off sitting on bench and find yourself handicapped as far as working knowledge is concerned. This makes you look for a change. These days Services companies are hiring like anything without giving due joining date to the prospective employee. This helps them to show more strength and hence helping themselves either with new projects or lease land or even SEZs etc. Once the objective is met sometimes a lot of shedding are seen which we have found to be increased in past one year. This creates some sort of fear in fellow colleagues and then an employee might rush for a safer place.

There’s one more perspective which is very important here to look at and which affects to all of us. THE COMPANY means your manager most of the time. Hence the kind of support you get from your manager, the kind of interest you find in him\her for your career plays a significant role in making you stay longer or shorter in a company. The interpersonal skills of a manager needs to be really great and should put employee’s growth as one of the important priority too.

Your best output comes only when you love your work and if you feel emotionally attached with the company and its growth then you reach the height of what people say ‘giving more than 100%’. Once you find a person in this mode then as a manager you need to be very careful because then this mode should not break or the attachment should not go down otherwise it badly affects the performance and might result into a change of job for your employee. In this case the employee needs to be properly rewarded and encouraged for the good work done. Keep the motivation level up of yourself and your employees.

So, In the end I would like to say both an employee and company needs to understand one others requirements and then compliment each others growth because company is nothing but its people and it can grow only when its most important assets – its employees grow.

BarCamp7 – Computation on Cloud 9 (SaaS, PaaS, Virtualization and more…)

sushantp — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:29:47 +0000

Seventh in the series of BarCamp – BarCamp7 was hosted by Amazon Dev Center, Hyderabad on 30th Aug 2008. The theme of BarCamp this time was Computation on Cloud 9 (SaaS, PaaS, Virtualization and more…). There were more than 180 registrations and around 100 participants with 10 sessions including presentations, demos and talks. It was informative in a few sessions but some of the presentations were not so interesting and hence I saw 40% of the crowd moving out by mid event. Anyways, let’s look into the sessions individually –

1) Introduction Session and Cloud Computing by Ramesh Loganathan – Since the event start a bit late hence all sessions were cut down to 20mins. This session was quick and looked into what Saas\PaaS\Virtualization is and what is Cloud. I found this as a good start to BarCamp.

2) Grid Computing and Hadoop by Jyoti from Yahoo Research – This session too went well, a bit longer but informative (at least for a few like me ). This was about Grid computing and what a Map Reduce is, which can be found with Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org ).

3) Demo on Google app engine SDK – This was a quick Demo session from Googlers about writing small app using Google App Engine SDK for development and Google Infrastructure for deployment. Google App Engine come under PaaS (Platform as a Service).

4) Progress – Salesforce introduction – This session was taken by Salesforce to take the audience to a deeper level into the DB changes which they can make.

5) Amloc from 3i Infotech – This was all theoretical session on why 3i infotech chose multi tenancy for their banking solution for their client banks.

6) Demo on EC2 and EBS by a Hyderad based startup – This was all practical and demo based session showing how you actually use an image on EC2 and was one of the best sessions. This was though hit by low internet speed which again was unexpected at Amazon.

This was the last session I attended and then came out. I found Grid computing as most interesting more because it looked into making Grids and looking into search space. Cloud computing is spreading very rapidly because of its core strength – cloud. It can reduce the actual infrastructure cost to minimal in a few scenarios, one of the examples could be testing space where you need large chunk of test machines\server but for less amount of time and once the work is complete the machines are dump and then are required again when some other test pass comes. Here cloud based solutions could be helpful.

Web Aggregation: It’s a one STOP get All

sushantp — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:49:39 +0000

What is there in a shopping mall? It’s a one stop shop kind of thing where you have various options available for whatever you want to buy, of course the mall should be selling what you are planning to buy.

Now let’s move to the internet world which actually is a forest and then we have several websites offering same services. This made people to think on why not try to take the pain of maintaining similar service on multiple site from the user and help them with the concept of shopping mall. The outcome was called Web Aggregation. Its there from quite a while.

Lets take a few examples like meebo which aggregates you IM\Messenger and there you can maintain all you messenger simultaneously. A plugin also comes to add this to your blog so that you can chat with your reader. Blogging has taken quite a good place in our internet life hence we cant ignore the blog aggregators.

Other example could be on the email side where even as of now we can view different email on our desktop client. Though it might also look awesome to have over the web provided the complexity has been handled properly along with nice UI. We find a lot of social websites, travel sites, e-commerce websites and this list is very long to be put here though the point is basically to work on taking them to a common platform and let the user manage them easily on you aggregator.

CAPTCHA (Image Code Verification)

sushantp — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:41:43 +0000

In this post we will take a look on image code matching functionality which we can see in numerous web sites now days. So what is CAPTCHA? Well, CAPTCHA is technique of showing some random alphanumeric text image to user and verify that the user has entered the same text in the verification box or not.

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) came in 2000 and was first developed at CMU for Yahoo.

This is very useful technique to stop abusive comments by bots, spams at a lot of places like any site registration, forums, blogs etc. where bots (automated programes) imitate real user and try to spam your product or any sort of information where you are expecting real users 

In order to have your website, page CAPTCHA enabled you can write the code by your self for generating the random images and then doing post validation or you can get already written code from net. You can either use it as a dll from codeplex where you can add this to your toolbox and use it as a Control and then do some modifications related to randomization of images, styles, orientation etc in your web.config. Here is the link for CodePlex captcha code as well as the documentation (http://www.codeplex.com/CAPTCHAGenerator ).

The second way is to get the code from web and use it. Here you can make some modifications too as per your requirement. BUT in both the scenarios take a look at the license and then only use it. You should not fall into any issues later 

You can also download CAPTCHA from reCAPTCHA by visiting https://admin.recaptcha.net/accounts/login/?next=/recaptcha/createsite and signing in.

Below is a snapshot of CAPTCHA looks like etc.

CAPTCHA Example

ReCaptcha Example.

Hope this will help you. bye for now.

visit my team at http://global.rampgroup.com

IPhone optimized web application development

sushantp — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:29:29 +0000

I got a chance to work on a demo for an IPhone only web app and hence while working on it came to know how we can make optimal use of the screen and develop accordingly. Many a website use IPhone optimized pages and you can find them as iphone.websitename.com like flickr, bank of america etc. We can either play with our CSS to customize our present website to work optimally with IPhone or build a new page which is IPhone optimized.

With IPhone optimization I simply mean that we should be presenting only important informaiton and that too intelligently since we have a small screen with us to work on. IPhone comes with Safari browser hence you can get the same experience opening any website as you do on your pc\laptop. It is just that it is not build specifically for IPhone you normal see full page in the small screen which make you to use the multi touch zoom to expand the page and view the area which you are interested in. This generated the need of building pages which fit in this screen size.

Iphone can be used in both “portrait” and “landscape” mode where the screen dimension becomes 320X480 px and 480X320 px accordingly. We should take care of this orientation change too in our development.

Important points while developing a web app for IPhone:

1) Try running your application on full screen mode this give you more flexibility in terms of space. You need to call a small javascript function from body onload

function initFlow() {

window.scrollTo(0, 1);

}

call this from in order to get you page opened in full screen mode.

2) Using IPhone specific stylesheet. There are several media types which can be used with CSS, including print, handheld, and screen. iPhone ignores print and handheld media queries because these types do not supply high-end web content. Therefore, use the screen media type query for iPhone.

To specify a style sheet that is just for iPhone without affecting other devices, use the only keyword in combination with the screen keyword in your HTML file. Older browsers ignore the only keyword and won’t read your iPhone style sheet. Use device-width, max-device-width, and min-device-width to describe the screen size.

For example, to specify a style sheet for iPhone, use an expression similar to the following:

3) Use Safari specifc (Web Kit) style keywords to take the best use of rendering and effects. You can find all the styles supported by safari at http://developer.apple.com/internet/safari/safari_css.html and http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariCSSRef/Articles/StandardCSSProperties.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30001266-SW1

4) In case you have different content like you have in FAQ and help page then using fieldset or targeting the div id with # and then using relative and absolute position can make the bottom div not coming on main screen and once clicked will come on focus. You need to push the above content with padding in -110px etc to move it this much on the left side such that it is again not visible on the screen.

5) Use big buttons as people need to use fingers rather than mouse to click.

6) IPhone opens the number keypad if you use “zipcode” in the name field of a input text box rather than default text keypad.

7) Use the OnOrientatioChange event to catch the orientation change of IPhone and use the CSS accordingly.

Rest of the development can be done either wth HTML\JS\ASP.NET etc as you do regularly. You can use IUI library to use pre written javascript for page titles, page size setup etc.

Hope this helps in case you are planning to develop a web app targetting IPhone.

bye for now.

visit my team at http://india.rampgroup.com

Add Flickr Photos on my Website or Blog

sushantp — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:29:00 +0000

I was looking for adding my flickr photos to my website and hence searched flickr. If you want to add a filmstrip or badge to your website you need to have a Flickr account, some photos added to it and then visit http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne to complete a 4 step process of generating strip. It is customizable by default to vertical or horizontal and comes with html or flash type strip.

Once you get the code to be added to you website then add it under any container and if its not as per what you are looking for you can change the style which come with the code and make it as per your choice.

Flickr by default gives you strip but sometime you might be looking for a slideshow or preview mode of your photos on your website or blog. I found pictobrowser (http://pictobrowser.com/) to be doing it really good as well as found a really nice Beta studio called VuVox ( http://www.vuvox.com/) where again you can create customize your picture galery, if you are looking for it too. I am presenting a sample of how a slideshow code generated from pictobrowser looks like:

Flickr photos using pictobrowser

If you want to get a slideshow for youself click on pictorbrowser link in the image above and then you can follow a 3 step process to get your flickr photos on your website or blog. As of now it doesnt work with picasaweb. Vuvox works both with picasaweb and flickr.

Hope this helps in case you are looking for something similar.

bye for now.

keep an eye.
visit my team @ http://india.rampgroup.com/

Ramp Dev Xplode aka RDX – Ramp’s Annual R&D event

sushantp — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:31:28 +0000

Ramp India has started a new culture in itself to promote, recongnize and award out of box thinker by starting annual R&D event. We kicked off the first event Today and its going to be mind racing\grilling 24 hours to come up with a prototype, patentable idea, software , technical article, solution to business problem, process improvement proposals etc.

I found great response from fellow Rampers towards the event and as many as 11 teams registered for the event and all 23 participants seem to be fighting for the Title. Its around 1 AM and still these freeks dont want to take rest. It gives me a pleasure to sense the success of our first step.

People are working on Google Maps annotation with social networking and local services incorporation, Single page Book Mangement System using CMS and presented with Silverlight, Image Folder compression, Toolkit to enable drag-n-drop for Ajax Server Control and making a peronalized home page, Enabling Search from within VS for mouse down and up actions, Categorized Search Engine prototype, Localized intranet chat, Intranet machine monitoring system, Complex RegEx builder and checker etc

I am looking forward to see all of these getting as much completed as possible in this one day and then attend the presentation by all team. I am excited to be part of RDX… lets see who wins!! fingers crossed.

keep an eye…

bye for now.

visit my team at http://global.rampgroup.com

Ramp India’s 2nd Anniversary – 4th July 2008

sushantp — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:03:18 +0000

On 4th of July we completed 2 years as a company and celebrated the auspicious day in style. We went to Araku valley and spend a joyous weekend there. Its a small but strong team which is aiming high and have right skills and focus to achieve it.

I have been the part of this journey from past one year where I have seen a lot of exciting and challenging work and a great set of talent to work with. Let me take this opportunity to describe the last one year for me and from me.

I joined Ramp in Sep ’07 and it has been an amazing journey since then. I found a young, vibrant, fun loving, energetic and inspiring team to be associated with. I came here from Microsoft IDC where I worked for 2 and half years, with aspiration of growing fast, facing new challenges, working in a startup environment and becoming one of it’s pillars in development.

Among all, the best thing which I cherish a lot in Ramp is the amount of freedom an individual has got to present his\her idea, talent and opinion along with the respect which is given to every opinion. It’s all ‘WE’ here because of the believe that we are the ‘Company’ and it’s not a separate entity. This keeps all other factors, which you look for in a company to work at, on the positive side. We always try to set a bar for us in every aspect of work we do because we feel that ‘Scope of improvement is ever’.

I see some really exciting work going on in the direction of Sharepoint Services, LINQ, Silverlight apart from different domain specific ASP.NET\C# development.

I see the coming year to be even more growth yielding and taking us to the next level. I am excited and looking forward for another good innings…

bye for now.

visit my team at http://global.rampgroup.com

Tip for Visual Studio – part 2

sushantp — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:16:29 +0000

This post is about a simple tip in using Visual Studio while creating a new website or project.

Some time you create a blank solution and then add say a website to it. What you see is that the website is shown in the solution explorer but there is no solution. Now you want to add another project but there is no solution hence you wonder where the solution is and how can I add a new project to my solution with the already opened website attached to it.

What happens actually is that showing solution option which is by default turned off causes the solution to take back seat once a project is associated to it. To enable the same go to tools -> options -> Projects settings and find always show solution options.

The image below shows the same:

This helps a lot when you are creating a blank solution, adding a website and other library proects to it and have to later add the solution to a version control system.

Hope this helps!!

bye for now.
visit my team @ http://india.rampgroup.com/

What if you have an Idea but Technology involved is not yet ripe?

sushantp — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:22:10 +0000

I found this question somewhere on linkedIn and hence thought of putting my views on this in the current post. Some times this happens that we got some cool idea where we see a good market too but then we find that we are thinking a bit ahead and the present technology involved with our idea is present but not in the beset of its shape, so what shall we do? shall we just plunk our idea or is there something more which we can think about.

In my view, in most of the scenarios the same work could be done using alternate technology (because mostly the new technology would be providing more of automation, some features to help the development along with say some new features about which you are not sure because they are not stablalized).

If the target technology is path breaking whose alternate is not there (very less chance indeed) then also you can go ahead if have a very strong belief on your idea. The best you can do here is to get some patents done on the idea, implementation etc so that you also evolve as the technology and the patents will help you in getting the fruits later.

If the alternate technology is there go ahead use that and complete the product. You can make the development scalable and flexible enough to even adopt the new technology you are talking about later, once it ripe.

Also, when you go about actual working for an idea to a product, at any point of time you always have a lot of options to choose from in terms of both product and technology. It’s more about your firmness and belief for the product or idea, how good the market reseach has gone and how good your business, revenue and growth plans are.

Put in your comments and views too on this.

bye for now.

visit my team at http://global.rampgroup.com

TFS 2008 – Source Control Annotation

sushantp — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:17:59 +0000

This post will look into the Source Control Annotation feature in VSTS 2005 using TFS power tool or in VSTS 2008 using TFS 2008.

The annotation feature gives me the changeset information for each line of a source file. Hover over the changeset give me detail about the changeset as who did the check-in for that changeset and when was this checked-in.

You will find the same changeset numbers for different lines because the annotation presentation is based on the source file perspective. We see the changeset hence for each line of code.

It looks like:

Double clicking respective changeset give me all the files included in it via a file viewable wizard. We can see what the file was and also compare it with the latest ones or with a particular version file.

Main thing to observer here is that you will only see changeset corresponding to the last change for that file and not all the changeset’s i.e. Changeset history. You can always check the history by looking into the history option though.

I find this annotate useful in finding particular changeset details in case the code fails or any error comes even at the line level. If you are debugging a failure you would find it very useful and also your QA team would be happy in case they do some white box testing and find some bug. Bug can be exactly filed for person who actually caused that bug to surface.

I will be blogging on more aspects of TFS 2008 in near future.

bye for now.

visit my team @ http://global.rampgroup.com

TFS 2008 Installation – IIS Settings

sushantp — Fri, 30 May 2008 07:16:25 +0000

This post will look into TFS 2008 installation on Windows Server 2008 where IIS 6.0 has to play a role too. If you are installing TFS 2008 on Windows Server 2008, WSS 3.0, SQL Server 2008 you would need to have IIS 6.0 compatibility mode on as SQl Server 2007 doesnt know about IIS 7.0 and thinks that no IIS is installed on system. This will cause the TFS installation stop at system compatibility check.

Go to Server Manager -> Server Roles -> Add Role -> Select Web Server (IIS 7.0) there. This will install Web server.
Now go to Server Manager -> Roles -> WEb Server -> Add Role Features -> Select IIS 6.0 Compatibilty option and other IIS 6.0 related options from the list.

The figure below shows Server Explorer on Windows Server 2008 with IIS 6.0 enabled as part of Role Services.

Once you are done with the changes, Save them and your SQL Server will now be able to find IIS 6.0 installed on the system. Run the TFS 2008 set up and see if it passes the system compatibility check.

Hope this will help you in case you find installation issues with TFS 2008 on WS 2008, SQL Server 2005, Windows Sharepoint Server 3.0.

bye for now.
visit my team @ http://global.rampgroup.com/

3D Computer and 3D Experience – my random thoughts

sushantp — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:17:56 +0000

3D Experience on your Desktop, Can we make a 3D exhibiting device using software changes or even by using completely different hardware or devices

In this post I will try to put my views, ideas, random thoughts towards having a 3D experience on windows desktop as well as for some apps.

Can’t we treat our desktop as on of the 6 faces of a cube which can help us in taking the current desktop to 6 more dimensions you can say with giving 3D like experience in 2D world itself. A cursor drag at the corners of desktop would cause the other face to slide in or clicking on a arrow button at the corners would do the same or clicking on 2D matrix views of complete cube will take you the particular face of cube which was clicked by a user on the 2D matrix. The hover effect on the 2D matrix will enable the user to view an enlarged image of a particular face of cube. Now am I asking for a windows desktop code to change yes and no, yes to get the experience from the base (Windows), No – you can enable a theme which would do things for you, here you would need to design the other 5 faces as windows just give you one (which you will any how override with your theme.

We can talk of having a 3D experience on your computer screen itself with the help of specially designed monitors where you can use a glass to get the 3D experience of desktop and can switch to normal 2D experience. The mixed mode of this experience would give a user an extra dimension of digital lifestyle experience.

Ok, let’s look at this thought and try to think and put your comments. What could be the shape of monitor, surface if you want a real 3D experience and which technology would you go with? CRT – with electron not hitting the screen rather hitting some gas like helium or other which or some sort of laser experience to give a real 3D experience using an open air tool or a closed window box. I can think of spherical shape would be good to have length; width; height components for any object and would help you to take a look of that object from rear and sides tooJ. This also needs to have great calculations of for proper ratio for relative distance of things as well as the best of graphics, Comp Vision and virtual reality. Let’s see if people are looking into these.

Hologram, looks different from different angles giving the impression of 3D and well orientation change. I know that research is going on in the direction of using Hologram for achieving 3D Computer at all. If we can dynamically put objects on a hologram surface we would certainly be able to get 3D experience going on. This needs a closer look into hologram image and impressions.

Put in your thoughts and comments and lets try to get something useful out of this post

Bye for now.
my team @ http://india.rampgroup.com