Visual Studio

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.

No doubt Visual Studio provides extensive Unit Testing framework. Plus there are feature-rich third-party frameworks (e.g. NUnit) available for Unit Testing your .NET code.

However, I was disappointed by lack of .NET support for Assertions. As you might be able to recall, Assertions guarantee that a given expression evaluates to a true value. If it doesn't, the Assertion fails and languages have their own ways of dealing with failed assertions.

As before, I deeply appreciated the Ext.Net (also known as Coolite) extensions over the core ExtJs (both server-side and client-side), and how well they integrated with ExtJs, making them look-like part of core ExtJs itself. And this time, it was the turn of the Ext.Net's Notification class to get me to make such a statement.

I was having considerable problem figuring out a way to specify the connection parameters for my Crystal Reports at runtime that used the Pull model for stuffing data. The problem was that I needed to use a different runtime connection than what was configured for the report at design time. And everytime I did so, the report threw up the form asking the user to fill in the connection parameters (I was using ASP.NET web-based reports but the approach below works on desktop also). Needless to say, this was utterly unprofessional.

I blogged yesterday here, regarding fetching the total Number Of Pages in an ASP.NET web-based Crystal Report in the code-behind. My original motive for doing that was replacing the default Crystal Toolbar with a custom one.

This is the first of a couple of blog entires I am writing for web-based ASP.NET Crystal Reports. Both of these blog entires concentrate on having more control over the actual Report Generation to be able to replace the default Crystal Report toolbar, with a custom one, that integrates better with the overall design of your web application.

Working across timezones can have its own stupid issues. I faced one of them just now.

I finished working on the initial production setup of a client ASP.NET website, and uploaded and installed it to a remote server based in United States (in the Eastern Time zone). I am based in India (with Indian Time Zone), which is 10:30 hours ahead of the server time on which the site was uploaded.

I recently had a situation where many of the controls on my ASP.NET form (with a mixture of ASP.NET, custom & Coolite controls) needed size adjustment depending upon the language in which the form was rendered. Translation of content itself was not that such big a problem with ASP.NET's wonderful support for Localization based on locale-specific resource files.

I tried many options, and I am presenting 3 of them here, that can prove useful in various situations:

Almost all of us must have encountered the following message in the Output window while getting a batch (.bat) file executed in Visual Studio as part of the build process for some project.

"" is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Atleast, I used to get (till now, when I found out its reason & eliminated it) this message randomly for my different projects. Because this message caused no harm, and the build process continued smoothly, I almost always looked over this message.