Every project should be well documented and Visual Studio has the option to enforce XML code documentation by generating warnings when there is a comment missing, a parameter description missing and such. It can be enabled per project by enabling XML documentation file option on the Build tab.

There are however cases, when it is not necessary for XML docs to be present.

Ever tried running some piece of application compiled for the 64bit platform? After a few years there finally are more and more applications fully (I think) benefiting from the extra 32 bits.

So I am exploring OpenLink Virtuoso, which in it’s open source variation comes as a humble downloadable zip. Runs fine on my laptop but didn’t work at first on my VPS. Why? Because msvcr100.dll was missing. The commercial flavour of this server comes with an installer, which does include all required dependencies.

We are currently refactoring a web application, which uses ObjectDataSources extensively. There are places in our app, where they are used for sorting grids, but there is a problem. We switched from DataTables to collections and now an exception occurs:

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The data source ‘ods_DataSource’ does not support sorting with IEnumerable data.
Automatic sorting is only supported with DataView, DataTable, and DataSet.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with Semantic Web techonogies. Currently I’m trying to choose tools for editing the ontology and more importantly instances. There are a number of tools, both commercial and free including my favourites: Protégé, NeON toolkit or Top Braid Composer. Each of those have some problem. NeON is nice but desktop only, Top Braid is not free and Protégé is very complex. Not to mention it comes in versions 3.x and 4.x with different set of functions which only makes the confusion grow…

There are times when you need a quick way to debug Linq to SQL. Inspired by this answer to a StackOverflow question I easily combined log4net and Linq to SQL. This way I avoided the console, which is not an option in the case of a web application.

One of the common mistakes developers make when working with Web Forms pages is using client-side validation, while not checking the validation result on server-side postback.

This mistake is easily noticeable with CustomValidator as it only works on the server’s side. Also when Javascript is disabled you would quickly run into trouble when trying to rely solely on client-side validation.

Nested transitions

As described on Hammet’s post, Castle Blade view engine extends Razor’s syntax to allow nested transitions. Those in turn give Blade a great deal of flexibility. The given example being usage of the new FormHelper.

Hamilton Verissimo currently develops a next version of Monorail, which uses a new view engine called Blade. As much as I’d love to use Monorail 3 in the (near) future, Spark is bound to stay my view engine of choice.

Recently I created a small on-screen keyboard. I may present it on my blog some time later. For now I’d like to share my experience with IE behaving different than other browsers (yet again).

The on-screen keyboard is a javascript class, which when created adds itself to document’s DOM. Doing that it also creates itself some styles. Those styles are also updated when keyboard’s properties change.