Puting this up so that I don’t have to do as much head scratching next time around. To make a text field in a Crystal report wrap, Right Click the field, Select Format Object then tick the “Can Grow” field and you can then enter the number of lines you want to allow the field to grow too, in my case I set it to 0 then it’ll keep growing.
Category Archives: Programming
AJAX Loading Gif Creator
If you use any AJAX based sites you’ve probably seen the spinning “loading” icons people use to indicate something is loading (like the one on the right). I’ve been looking for somewhere I can get one for a website I’m working on.
I wondered onto this site AjaxLoad via this Stack Overflow Entry which has a web based image generator, its actually very cool. Now I just have to work out how to get the image to work correctly in ASP.Net.
Fog Creek’s new Offices.
I’m a long time reader of Joel on Software, going on +/- 5 years. I don’t always agree with his ideas and I don’t follow his every word, but he writes well and he does have a very successfull company that makes some very cool software. I am though truely envious of Fog Creek‘s offices, I have to admit as a programmer/developer that is the kind of office environment I would love to work in.
Fog Creek (Joel’s company) has had a few offices, if I remember correctly they started out in a little brown stone in New York, then moved into what Joel termed ‘The Bionic Office’ and now finaly they’ve got there new bigger offices.
Here is the post about the new offices, a link to his Picasa album with lots of photo’s of the new offices and finally a floor plan of the new offices on this post about the Fog Creek Open House day.
Warning: If you’re stuck in a cubicle working a horrible, soul destroying job these links may make you cry.
GridView DataFormatString not working in ASP.NET
Was scratching my head for a few minutes when a bound column in a grid in my ASP.Net page didn’t format correctly, for future reference and in case it can help some one here is the solution:
Set your DataFormatString to the right format, for example I set mine to {0:dd/MM/yyyy} to show my date correctly and then (and this is the secret trick) you have to set HtmlEncode to false on the column and your column should display correctly.
Weird that I could only find this after a few minutes of Googling, its not in the help as far as I could see.
XPathMania
Richard @ Owl Says Woot has a post about a tool called Visual XPath. I found a tool a while back called XPathMania its a plugin to Visual Studio 2005 (Don’t know if there is a 2008 version out yet.) that allows you do test XPath Queries inside Visual Studio and build them, has saved me many frustrating hours when I’ve been writing xslt scripts.
I’m going to give Visual XPath a try too… perhaps as a replacement for XpathMania in 2008?
Visual Studio 2008 – Custom Tool Error with a Dataset in a Web Project
I’m busy tearing my hair out, I’ve got this problem in Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition (Not sure if it’s SP1 or not.).
I’ve got a web project that I’ve created a dataset in and now want to add a table adapter too, I do this through the web interface and it appears to all work but I get the following error in the “Error List” window and it doesn’t generate any of the code behind the dataset.
Custom tool error: Failed to generate code. Unable to convert input xml file content to a DataSet. Requested value ‘Properties’ was not found. Requested value ‘Properties’ was not found.
The only hints to the fix that I’ve been able to find so far is this forum posting, unfortunately the fixes in the forum doesn’t fix my problem.
Anyone have any suggestions how to fix this problem?
More demand for PHP Developers?
It’s interesting that it appears there are more jobs for Freelance PHP developers in Cape Town than there are for Freelance C# developers.
I’m surprised by this because I assumed (incorrectly it appears) that there would be more PHP developers out there as its been around a long time and its “free” and most coders have used it at one time or another. Obviously though finding a “good” PHP developer is probably as hard as finding a good C# developer, perhaps even harder given there are so many out there, there may be more “bad” ones.
Maybe I should spend more time sharpening my PHP skills than my C# skills?
What happens when the framework vanishes?
This is a response/comment to Richard’s blog entry about 3 Things to Learn from LINQ to SQL
How many times have you done work based on a particular technology only to have it vanish or be completely incompatible in the next release?
You don’t want to know how many “legacy” apps I have to support that only work in 2003 and .NET 1.1 because the library or two I used is no longer available or is completely in compatible. Continue reading
Owl Says Woot?
So this is a shout out post to some friends of mine…
Richard (a friend in the UK at the moment) left a post on this site with a link to a website… I was curious, clicked it and suddenly found their (Richard & Rachel)? rather cool website about programming and stuff. I’m a sucker for reading coding blogs…
PS: Cool name too….
Writing WordPress Plugins
I’m currently working on a little side project that involves doing lots of customisations to WordPress. (What exactly I’m up too will have to remain a secret for the moment, sorry customers orders.) I’ve been working today on writing a new plugin for WordPress that will turn it into what I need for my client, once the plugin has reached a use-able state I’ll start with the theme.
My development environment currently consists of WordPress 2.7 running on XAMPP for Windows (MySQL + Apache + PHP) with NetBeans 6.5 with PHP support. Netbeans works great as a PHP editor and its also a good Java IDE (although I’m not using it as that at the moment for this project.).
My biggest problem has been dusting off my PHP knowledge and trying to puzzle out the WordPress plugin API. There is alot of info on writing WordPress plugins on the WordPress Codex another useful link is this one on how to configure Netbeans for wordpress plugin development, I suggest you check out on the same page the info about creating a wordpress project and importing the source so you can have all the auto-completion goodness. The only thing I haven’t gotten working yet is XDebug so I can’t debug the PHP code or step through it in Netbeans, not sure why its not working but touch wood I haven’t needed it yet.