As I said earlier, we didn’t test our solution to using the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint in all situations. Today we made a start to do so. To indicate our successrate: we now use window.showModalDialog with some extra pages…
Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender. Downside is you never know (for sure) if the popup is positioned inside the visible part of the browser because of things like non-maximized browser, different resolutions and so on.
Today we seem to have solved our issues with the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint. We haven’t tested it in all scenario’s yet, but we’ll get to that. At this point everything looks the way it is supposed to. And it seems to work, too… ;).
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One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this post at The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn’t very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him. It hasn’t been tested extensively, but I think it might be of some use to some of you.
For example, I used longs to store the info. When wanting to calculate huge values, this won’t work of course. This could be improved by using the multipliers divided by for instance 10,000,000 and add the appropriate amount of zeros (7) to the string after calculation, so the numerical value stays a lot smaller. Still, I think it does what it should do at this point. You can find the sourcecode [over here][2], or if you would like te change anything: be my guest. Let me know if you find bugs or add cool features: I would like to know.
As a reaction to this article at Peter Ritchie’s MVP Blog, I thought I’d give my two cents on having a single exit point for methods. Here we go…
When writing code, I always create only one exit point except for the occasional throwing of an exception. Most important for me is to always know where your code (really) stops. In case of long and complex methods there’s a chance you’re going to miss a return statement when scanning through a method. That way you could end up studying code not even applicable to the situation, while missing the real point. I do think there is no real reason to hold on to creating methods with a single exit point other than personal favoritism. This feels the same like using curly brackets with an if-statement that is followed by only one statement. I always use curly brackets, but there are lots of developers who don’t.
One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder) would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!
This weekend we got back from a skiing trip we went on with the school my girlfriend works at. We had a great time! The kids were great, and so were the teachers and the Huski people who were there to teach the kids how to ski and snowboard. If they need an extra pair of hands next year, I hope they’ll consider me: I’d be happy to join them.
I won’t be blogging for the next week. Tomorrow evening, we are going on a ski vacation! I was invited to join the skicamp my girlfriend is going on with her work. A nice opportunity to brush up my skiing skills. Let’s hope we’ll come back in one piece, but I’m counting on it 😉
Just a quick post: Windows Live SkyDrive is now available. It left the beta stage yesterday. You can now store 5Gb of data online, choose who has access to each folder you create and more. There is a maximum filesize of 50Mb.
In a quick AJAX demo I had to create today, I ran into a (somewhat cryptic) PageRequestManagerServerErrorException. I needed a simple form of the Cascading Dropdown{.}, one that doesn’t use a (web)service for its data, but gets it from a simple method. Here’s the setup, and the cause…
With the official release of Visual Studio 2008 coming closer and its release on MSDN last november, there are more and more people asking what the impact of migrating from VS2005 to VS2008 will be and if it will have as big an impact as switching from VS2003 to VS2005 had. The answer is pretty simple: no it won’t. Let’s see why, and what impact it will have.
Until the Zune is available in Europe (when will that be, if ever…), I’m using an iPod. To be honest, I’m pretty satisfied with the product although iTunes still doesn’t feel like a solid piece of software… (understatement anyone?)