Archives

Archives / 2004 / February

  • [Java] Java taglibs are quite useful

    1 Comment

    My adventure down the Java road continues and it's starting to look like something. The little project I'm doing makes use of JSP pages and instead of using Servlets as the controller, I've dived into JSP taglibs.

    Taglibs work somewhat like ASP.NET user controls, but they are not as powerful. Each taglib class represents a HTML-tag and you can specify different attributes for it, quite similar to user controls, but very different in implementation. The biggest problems I've had so far is working with the taglibs in my jdev 9 editor. Sometimes my taglib classes doesn't show up after using the jdev wizards, etc. I'm thinking of trying out Intellij or NetBeans instead, but I don't know how well they handle taglibs.

    God what I miss DataSets when working with Java and JDBC!!

  • Nominated to the Swedish .NET Awards

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    One of the web projects I architected has been nominated to the Swedish .NET Awards in the Web Services category. Cool, free food and drinks I hope, and I know there's gonna be some kind of show afterwards :)

    The project itself isn't very that large, but parts of it is pretty complex. All the business and data logic is separated from the front web by firewalls and we make heavey use of SOAP attachments to upload and send Word documents to the back end. The worst thing was the COM interop with Word... I hate it. If you're not careful and catch every possible error, you end up with a terrble list of orphan WINWORD.EXE processes...

    Wish me luck, the cermony is held by Microsoft on the 3rd of March. I'm sure we won't win, but it's still action, isn't it :)

  • Installed Linux, MySQL and Tomcat...

    2 Comments

    Going to do a small job for a friend of mine, but it has to be done using Java and a bunch of open source stuff. So a couple of days ago I took an old, dusty puter I had lying around in a corner, 333Mhz and 256MB or RAM and started to install Red Hat 9. 2-3 hours later I had everything I needed in the box. The Red Hat install was very smooth and found all the old stuff I had in the machine. DHCP configuration and everything worked at once.

    The worst problem was getting the correct Java SDK downloaded and installed, then configure Tomcat and MySQL correctly. I still have to figure out how to autostart them... probably some weird config file or other in some strange user directory...

    MySQL works pretty fine with the J/Connector driver. The manuals suck, but you shouldn't expect anything else from software you don't pay anything for. Thank God for Google and good friends to help you sort out all the strange stuff with MySQL and Tomcat. All in all, it runs pretty well on that old machine. We'll see what happens when I try to deploy the stuff I'm coding in JDeveloper on my Windows machine over to the Linux box. Things will probably not work at once, even though it's a J2EE appliation (did I hear anyone say "write once - deploy everywhere"? Yeah sure ;)

  • Viewstate problems in web farm

    2 Comments

    The second time I'm involved in a large ASP.NET web project with a web farm and load balancing with no afinity (no sticky sessions), and the second time we're experiencing problems with viewstate errors :(

    Again, I had to go through the code and look for Server.Transfers, identical machine keys etc. all according to the KB articles regarding this problem. But everything looks OK in the code! Things work perfect on a single box, and even on the load balanced testing machines, which has exactly the same configuration, hardware etc. I hate these problems! I heard somewhere that the viewstate problems could happen when the ASP.NET pages were compiled at different times, so what we did yesterday was to remove all temporary compiled ASP.NET files and touched the machine.config files at the same time. Now things seems to run fine.

    The first time we had a few problems with the case sensitive Server.Transfers, and we upgraded to .NET Framework 1.1 and problems were solved. This application I'm talking about is still running on version 1.0 and we cannot yet upgrade it to 1.1 until it's been fully tested and so on... I'm not sure it will help, but it looks like Microsoft fixed more than a few viewstate errors from version 1.0. Tried once to disable the viewstate MAC checking, other strange things started to happen then, like form posts that didn't generate postbacks... *yikes*

    Does anyone have any experience to share? The application consists of a large number of ASP.NET pages and quite many assemblies.

  • [Refactoring] ReSharper EAP is Open

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    Old news for some here maybe, but anyway - the ReSharper (C# refactoring and other goodies) plugin for VisualStudio.NET 2003 is available for download now.

    ReSharper is developed by JetBrains, Inc, and will contain a number of features that we see and love in the IntelliJ editor. I've just downloaded it and will try it out later today. It doesn't contain more than one refactoring so far, but has a number of other goodies in it that is worth trying I think.

    Quote from the IntelliJ forums at http://www.intellij.net/forums/thread.jsp?forum=7&thread=76005&tstart=0&trange=15 :

    "We have opened the EAP for our new product for C# development: ReSharper.

    EAP M1 (build 64) is available at http://www.jetbrains.net/resharper

    Please use the following credentials to access the ReSharper EAP site
    (    http://www.jetbrains.net/resharper):

    User name: eapuser
    Password: eapuser

    --
    Oleg Stepanov
    Software Developer
    JetBrains, Inc
    http://www.jetbrains.com
    "Develop with pleasure!""

  • Oh, so slow

    5 Comments

    I finally got the Longhorn and Whidbey DVD from Microsoft! It only took them 2,5 months - yay ;)

    Anyway, installing VPC went smooth, but MY GOD how slow the Longhorn build is! I knew it was slow from all the reports, blog posts and articles some of you had submitted, but this is hurting my stomage :o Perhaps I installed the wrong ISO? I installed the file LH_USA_4051_X86CHK_PRO.ISO  - is that the right one? I wish the readme could have been just a bit more informative... guess I'll have to dig around the longhorn sites out there and see what I find. Can anyone be so kind and tell me if that's the right one? Perhaps I installed the build with a gazillion debug-lines in it, instead of the build with just a million debug-lines... ;)

    My box has a 2 GHz pentium and 512MB memory, I gave VPC half of it, and I know it might need more, but still... well, I guess I will have to take it. Besides, once you've set your eyes on that desktop clock...you...can't...take...your...eys...off... eeeeeekkkkk!!!

  • The Last Samurai - better than I thought

    1 Comment
    I saw the movie "The Last Samurai" last night, and it was way better than I thought it was going to be. IMHO it's the best movie Tom Cruise has been in. Lovely props and some nice moves with the sword by Tom. Nice to see realistic ken (japanese sword) techniques for once in a movie...