rahul's blog

Today's the end of a financial year (atleast here in India), so I thought I should write a post related to this sector. Now considering that I have a hardcore technical background, it shouldn't come as a surprise if the post rather gets techno-financial. So here's how it goes.

If you have ever worked on an eCommerce product or platform and have written custom code to provide integration with any Payment Gateway, you would know its a pain to write code to integrate with a Payment Gateway, and subsequently having to modify, adapt or debug it after it has been pushed to production.

Finally I am back blogging after half an year. Its been some good time since my last blog entry, but here I am and let's get down to business without much fanfare :)

While working on a project, we recently came across a requirement to be able to digitally sign pdf documents in C# code using a public/private key pair and later be able to verify the signature. Basically we were working on an online e-Tendering portal for a semi-government organization. The organization wanted to accept documents from its Vendors online through a portal and be able to verify that the documents indeed originated from a particular Vendor.

Its been a good time since I have blogged anything directly related to Ext.Net (I have written ExtJs blog posts in the interim, but nothing that relates primarily to Ext.Net). I finally got an opportunity today to break my silence on Ext.Net.

I just fixed a configuration issue on a production site built with Drupal 7, what I would rather call a design bug with Blog module in D7.

We had last month delivered a D7 based site to a client, with ability for various authorized users to create and maintain their blogs on the site using Drupal's native Blog module. And in the morning today, I received an email from the client stating that one of the user's had created 3 blog entries and everything works fine, except that when we visit the user's individual blog page at:
http://example.com/blog/uid

Seems like ages since I last did any serious blogging, feels good to be back. That too with an interesting solution to a common problem with ExtJs.

I have often seen end-users complain about non-intuitiveness of buttons in ExtJs toolbars. They simply look like static labels, not clickable buttons until you hover over them.

Last time I was developing for Microsoft Exchange, I was seeing a wierd exception in our application trying to send an email using Exchange (the application uses EWS Managed API to interact with Exchange).

The exception message went something like this when it was shown in the browser:

The invalid value '<p>Test</p>' was specified for the 'Body' element.

We had recently integrated Claims Authentication support in one of our enterprise applications. And it soon-after went into evaluation for a prospective clients. We had advised them to use ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) to create the authentication bridge between our application and the underlying authentication repository.

A beginner ASP.NET developer also knows pretty well that each ASP.NET page needs to have a <form runat="server"> tag on the page and that all server controls need to be present inside this tag (although this is not entirely true; you can place server controls outside <form runat="server"> but then they cannot participate in regular ASP.NET functionality like PostBacks, Viewstate etc).

In the latest 7.x version of my Take Control module for Drupal released a couple of weeks before, I added the ability to specify per role and per user base path for File Browser access. Additionally Tokens were allowed to be present in base path for file browser for additional flexibility.