rahul's blog

I spent the better part of yesterday trying to Ajax upload a File using a Web Service and Ext.Net (formerly Coolite). Let me first explain the situation I was working in.

I had a Page that renders to the browser. This page then loads appropriate UserControls from the server depending upon user actions. One of these User Controls allowed the User to upload files to the server, together with some data about the file being uploaded. A naive (and easy) approach would have been to handle the file upload in a normal ASP.NET Postback, or Ext.Net DirectMethod or DirectEvent.

In the first of this series of couple of blog posts (available here), I have discussed the problem of maintaining reference to ExtJs components on the client-side in javascript, and the motivation for creating a new solution to it, than what ExtJs/Ext.Net provide out-of-the box. Well, here's how I have settled down on resolving the issue.

This is one issue that almost all developers of ExtJs/Ext.NET applications face, maintaining client-side references for the Javascript components. The seriousness of the managing the issue effectively manifests manifold, when working on large applications in modular fashion with multiple developers involved, and components being instantized or being loaded from the server on demand.

I am currently working on multiple projects which require me to connect my Windows 7 laptop to different networks in a day. A couple of these networks assign a dynamic IP to the system, when I connect to them, but one of them (Windows 2003 IPv4 Active Directory based) requires me to assign a static IP address to my machine to be able to communicate with the other systems on the network.

While working on a Web application recently, I came across a Javascript gotcha that I shouldn't have faced in the first place.

As a matter of habit, I have made it a point to always declare variables inside a js function with the var keyword. I know many of us consider var optional for declaring a js variable. But how big a difference can this make to your code is best demonstrated by an example. Try clicking the "Click Me" button below, and analyze the output generated:

Well, I discovered this problem and its solution sometime earlier. However lately, a couple of my colleagues approached me for advice with the same issue, and I thought of writing a blog post for the same.

In a nut-shell, the problem is that ASP.NET transfers the data to the client in chunked encoding (Transfer-Encoding: chunked), if you prematurely flush the Response stream for the Http request and the Content-Length header for the Response is not explicitly set by you.

I am currently working on an assignment to convert a Perl/PHP based intra-net project to an ASP.NET web application.

The complexity of the project has been significant as it involves the management of an internal Windows 2003 Active Directory setup for a large governmental organization, integrated with a proprietary ticketing system, and a Sql Server database. The (sometimes cryptic) non object-oriented PHP/Perl code together with a severely limited testing environment have only made the task that more difficult.

Well, it feels good to be blogging after a while. The past few weeks have been really hectic. Did you notice I do not have a single blog post for this month before this post? Well, I intend to compensate the void now, and what better way to begin than to offer some useful downloads for the community.

I have been getting a lot of Drupal consulting proposals for sometime. I will discuss these together with my schedule for the past days in a chit-chat entry, but let's concentrate on the topic on hand.

I recently needed to create a table in Drupal (while working on my next Drupal open source module, Document). It's just too easy outputting a table in PHP using a simple for loop over data fetched from the db. However, I wanted the table to look exactly like a native Drupal table, with sticky headers, ability to sort selected columns, paging etc.

If you have been a regular reader of my blog entries, you would be knowing that I have been using ExtJs/Ext.net for a considerable time now. When I first encountered Coolite (through a Newsletter from Red-gate Software), I was pretty impressed, and it took me a while to understand all its nuts-and-bolts and its integration with ExtJs. And after I had some experience using these two frameworks, I believed I had in my arsenal the most comprehensive web frameworks for Ajax applications built.