Carl Karan Nayak

To stay true to what Prof. Rasala and I had discussed with regard to the beta blog software, I was required to provide support for auto completion of the tags text-field. Whenever a user starts to type into the tags text box, the user should be provided with suggestions for already existing tags. This way the user can select one of the pre-existing tags, rather than add an additional tag that differs from a pre-existing one (maybe, by a single character).

For this I have used the Auto Completion extender in the AJAX toolkit. Using this extension from the AJAX Toolkit, I am able to provide the user with suggestions for tag strings as the user starts to type into the tags text box. The suggestions will provide a match on the characters that the user types into the text box. These tag suggestions will be a comma delimited list.

The Auto Completion extender gets its suggestions as a string[] by making a Web Service call to a method that resides within my application. The call to the web service takes place asynchronously. The code for the web service method can be viewed via the sources server in the following locations "\Server\AutoCompletion.asmx" and "\App_Code\AutoCompletion.cs". The code is pretty simple and self explainatory, hopefully you don't have any trouble when you're implementing it in your application.

At the end of the Web Development course for spring '08 I had submitted an AJAX experiment which wasn't fully functional, namely my "Edit Customer Table" experiment. Essentially I wanted to update a data source using a DetailsView in a ModalPopup extender. Towards the end of the semester I had approached Professor Rasala with my problem, we tried working towards a solution, but couldn't find one, given the short time that we had and the lack of my experience with C#. At the time I had just started working with C# and my C# coding skills were essentially based on mentally cross-compiling C# code from Java data structures. Hence I wasn't able to come up with a solution. But over the last 5 months I have been working on C# on my Co-Op, so my C# coding skills have improved significantly.

Yesterday I decided to revisit my broken experiment and fix it once and for all. I decided to completely re-implement it using LINQ and what do you know in less than 4 hours I had fixed my experiment. Using Sources Server you can view the LINQ code implementation in "App_Code\CustomerDAO.cs". You can view the demo here.

Currently my website has custom error mode turned on. This would mean that, any error or exception that occurs on my website would redirect the user to a custom error page which displays a user friendly message. But this would mean that as a developer I would not be able to keep track of errors due to environment, exceptional cases and especially my coding bugs. Logging the actions of your applications is very important especially when you develop new features or develop very difficult logical business. But it is also important when users use your applications to understand the critical issues or problems. So I have decided to implement logging within my website.

To implement log operations Apache developed an opensource library for .Net developers and I have used log4net to create and manager my "Log". Log4Net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. And the Logging Services provided are intended to provide cross-language logging services for purposes of application debugging and auditing.

You just need to perform a few steps to get Log4net up and running within your asp.net application. You can read this blog and perform the steps, they are simple enough. Since I do not have access to this log on the remote server because I do not have administration privilidges unlike Prof. Peter Douglas. I will not be able to access this log and hence I have created my custom log as well, which can be remotely accessed when I log into my website as an "ADMIN".

As an administrator I can view the contents of my Rolling File Appender. This module is accessable only to users with adminstrative privilidges. As an admin I would be able to Turn "ON/OFF" logging and serialize/deserialize the state of logging to a file. I will be able to view the log and fix any coding bugs that exist on my website.For details on how you can implement logging I would suggest that you have a look at the following files by viewing them via Sources Server:

1) Global.asax
2) ViewLog.aspx.cs
3) web.config
4) \App_Code\CommonClasses\Message.cs

When I first started working with Silverlight back in January '08 the version of Silverlight was 1.0. After which Microsoft came out with Silverlight 1.1 which was really troublesome and I could never get any of the examples to work. During the end of the semester Silverlight 2.0 beta had been released. I put up some demos using Silverlight 2.0 and they worked. Off late I see that the browsers no longer support it.

All of my silverlight experiments are broken because the browsers do not support silverlight applications that were built using older versions of silverlight. I will not be correncting these experiments for now because I would have to do this, maybe every time Microsoft comes out with a new build of Silverlight and decides not to support its older versions.

I saw this cool widget called Snap Shot, which allows you to preview the destination webpage on a mouse hover over the destination URL. I thought it would enhance my website is a user was able to preview the destination pages for external URLs.

All you have to do is go to Snap Shot, register yourself and your website. After which they will provide you with a script that has to be embedded on your webpage/s. After your e-mail address is verified you should be able to enjoy the ability to preview webpages from within your website itself. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I have made my own custom Captcha implementation which would require you to enter the characters displayed in a captcha image. I have done this to prevent the posting of comments by BOTS on my BlogEntryViewer, Contact Me page and MyGuestbook. I will increase the number of captcha images from time to time to improve the effectiveness of the Captcha code.