Session keep alive in jQuery style 27 April 2012 Guus-Beltman When you want to keep the session alive when a user is visiting a page without refreshes, there is a technique to make this happen. This is for example useful when you have a survey page with a long list of questions that will take a while to answer completely. The technique is simple (best solutions mostly are simple). You need to notify the server that the client PC is still browsing the page. All you need is a client side script that sends a Ping message behind the scenes and a server side page that handles that ping request. First the server side: since the request doesn’t need a G... [More]
Add IntelliSense for custom jQuery libraries 27 April 2012 Guus-Beltman Developing, jQuery, Visual Studio When you have worked with Visual Studio, you know the power of IntelliSense which helps you speed up coding. It works well with VB/C# languages, but it can also be useful for writing JavaScript / jQuery. When writing JavaScript only basic suggestions are shown: As you can see, only ajax.js, dhtml.js and ecma.js are mentioned. I have my own lib scene.dataservice.js in the VS project, but that doesn’t show up here. There is a simple trick to make this work. Just add <reference path=”<your_favourite_script>.js” /> as a comment, and see the magic: Hope this hel... [More]
Developing with DevNullSmtp mailserver 16 April 2012 Guus-Beltman Developing, Utilities, Visual Studio When you are developing a .NET website with e-mail functionality you often want to test the mails your code is sending. Often you can use a SMTP mail server within the domain, but you’re always have to worry about not sending test e-mail to the outside world. Alternatively you could setup your own mail server somewhere, but getting everything in place and configured is not always easy. Lately I started using DevNullSmtp mailserver for developing mail applications. It’s purpose is simple: catch the mail sent to port 25, log the message and destroy it (hence the name DevNull). It ha... [More]
SSD performance loss 14 April 2012 Guus-Beltman Hardware Recently my laptop is getting slower and slower. The startup is pretty fast, but when using Visual Studio and compiling code it slowwww. First I thought that I needed to clean up Windows and check VS extensions, but after a while my SSD drive was my main suspect. After running some tests on my SSD with HD Tune my feeling got confirmed: It’s fine when reading data (roughly 190 MB/s average). So that’s what I see when booting up Windows. Writing data is a different story. It tries to be fast, but something is bothering, look at the spikes.. That’s probably causing VS to be s... [More]
Fun extension for Visual Studio: achievements 06 April 2012 Guus-Beltman Since a few days I have installed the really fun extension: Visual Studio Achievements. It brings the game element of achievements to you IDE. Like earn 5 points for ‘Save a tree’ achievements: 5 points - Print source code. My boss told me to. I swear! See the complete achievement list on the channel 9 site. You can install it via the extension manager: After installing you have to enter your channel9 credentials for keeping track of the score. Directly after some coding you’re notified when achieving something: Have fun coding! Ps. You can find my achievements on this page.