Jimiz.net – Jim Becher on the web

I found a great site for creating custom QR codes. 

I had a project a few years back where I had to generate QR codes, so I wrote my own engine.  Then I used the .net framework to impose images on top of QR codes using GDI+.  The qrhacker.com site does a great job of putting the elements I did a while back into an easy to use site.  

The issue I had with the program we wrote, is that depending on the QR code generation the logo or icon you placed over the image would cause the QR to not render.   What I like is how they let you know when you may have caused the QR quality to be out of range.    I have just a generic version that generates a QR code based on size quality at tilde32.com/qr.aspx.   

QR codes have come  along way in the past two years.   Part of the reason I created my own generator is that I could validate the quality and also have control when needing to batch the QR generation.  Here is the previous post on some discussions on QR codes  – http://jimiz.net/blog/2010/12/qr-code-generator-2d-barcode/

I love to see a great 404 page when things go wrong.  The twitter fail whale has become a great example of how to make a statement  on an error or 404 page.   It has become an art of both design and communication when you do something like a 404 page.

Here is a great list of interesting and great 404 error pages.

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/60-really-cool-and-creative-error-404-pages/

The fact that the Huffington post wrote an article on this topic means that the common non-technical person also understands what a 404 (page not found) error is. Or at least they know what it means to them

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/11/best-404-error-pages-ever_n_456767.html

Unfortunately I’m not that up on design and will have to update jimiz.net 404 error page.

Hanselman has published his most recent Ultimate Developer and power tools. I’ve been a follower of this list for a long. I realize that I have a lot of these tools. I found a few gems in here that I need to check out.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2011UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx

One of my favorite tools builtwith.com was out of commission today. It was showing a 503 error Service Unavailable.
The builtwith blog mentioned that they were working on the issue. It looks like they are back and running now. I feel for the team, I’ve been there. It’s not fun. Their twitter post explained it: https://twitter.com/builtwith.

Another cool thing about builtwith.com is that it is written in C#. http://blog.builtwith.com/2011/12/15/what-is-builtwith-built-with/

I am a fan of using my iPad for note taking. I noticed today that Microsoft Onenote is now available for the iPad and iPhone.

Head on over to iTunes and download
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onenote/id478105721?mt=8

After trying out the application is works great. However, it does not sync with my work OneNote. It syncs with your skydrive. I am going to have to see if I can sync with my corporate onenote through skydrive.

Let me know what you think of this application.

I have seen some great online resources recently for .net development training.

Pluralsight is a fantastic resource: Some are free : MVC controller

http://www.pluralsight-training.net/microsoft/players/PSODPlayer.aspx?author=scott-allen&name=mvc3-building-controllers&mode=live&clip=0&course=aspdotnet-mvc3-intro

For beginners this one is fantastic:

http://mottishaked.com/training/dot-net-tutorial

Remote PC support has come a long way.  It used to be a long phone call and people would explain what they were seeing.  Then we added remote desktop sharing tools like VNC.  Now many sites and applications have these features.    I have discussed remote desktop sharing / support apps before - http://jimiz.net/blog/2008/07/open-source-applications/

Since then I have tried many versions.  Go2MyPC, webex, livemeeting, dimdim, view, and many more.   Recently on a family support call I decided to try two new ones.   I have recently been using go2assist (from citrix) however I decided to let my subscription run out and go back to open source.

Two players in this space.  join.me – a simple web site to allow you to share your screen. It was simple to use but not as intuitive as I would have liked.

I ended up using Microsoft’s SharedView.  Since I already had a live /hotmail account and so did my family member who needed help the requirments to use this tool were already set.

They basically went to http://connect.microsoft.com/site94  downloaded the application and ran the 3 step install.

After it is installed you can run the app and get a tool bar on the top of your screen.  Steps are simple.  Login, start or joine a session.    I was able to walk them through starting a session and quickly join them via email address in about 1 min.  If you are starting the meeting you just click the start a new session and you are presented with a link to email or a password to share (SIMPLE)

Thank you Microsoft for this great tool.   It is not as clean ad go2assist but very practical.

I just had to re-install windows phone 7 sdk.  I wanted the features for Mango 7.5.  However to get the install I had to uninstall the previous version (beta) I had.

Now 3 reboots later  I’m ready to role.

There is a great post from Scott Hanselman regarding  node iis. It is the implementation of node on iis.  Node is basically a serverside javascript.   It is very interesting to me how this could be used.  I wonder if the performance of this would allow you to skip the overhead of a .net page load, similar to a handler.

Here is the article:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/InstallingAndRunningNodejsApplicationsWithinIISOnWindowsAreYouMad.aspx

I plan on testing this next week and will report back with any thoughts or issues.

I’m in the middle of writing a Windows Phone 7 application.  It is part experiment and part project that I’ve wanted to do for a while.   In doing the development I have found a few difficult things in developing for WP7.

The application I’m writing requires the use of the network adaptor and also some mapping.  So far the available information for the network adapter is very sparse.   The other interesting component is also that fact that you can’t launch a Map (bing map) task very easily.  You would think this would be a built in feature.

There is a work around that Kevin Marshall has posted (http://blogs.claritycon.com/kevinmarshall/2010/12/07/wp7-tip-pseudo-map-launcher/)

The main idea is that you call out a bing search and utilize the map call:

var task = new WebBrowserTask();
task.URL = “maps:1%20N%20Franklin%2060606″;

or

//task.URL = “maps:37.788153%2C-122.440162″;

task.Show();

The current application I’m working on requires me to publish an MVC 3 Razor web application.  I’m using sFTP as the protocol to my hosting provider.  After the first publish I was unable to run the application.   It kept throwing errors that I was missing assemblies.    The first error I got was that the application was missing the Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure.dll.   I added that DLL into the references and set it to copy local.  Knowing that the copy local would allow me to publish the dll into the applications Bin directory.

This worked for only that DLL.  I then got anther error of another missing dll: System.Web.Mvc.dll.   After this I did a few searches to see what the issue was.  I noticed a few posts mentioning these issues when the hosting provider did not MVC installed.    To get around this there are a few suggestions.    I read Hanselman’s post regarding bin publishing.

At first I added a folder in the bin directory called _bin_assemblies.  I added the following DLL’s. (you can get them as a zip file here)

• System.Web.Mvc
• Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure
• System.Web.Razor
• System.Web.WebPages
• System.Web.WebPages.Razor

I am really starting to like MVC 3 razor.   I’m continually reminded of old school ASP coding.  Even some situations where you wrote in <br> <hr> and other html tags into your business layer.

In the current application I’m working on I’m calling a system call and returning it as a string vs an object.   The reason is that the parameters are rendered then I send them back to the view.  To do this I first tried to do a line break “/r/n”.  The View and razor engine did not interpret this properly.

@myclass.PingIpAddress(“127.0.0.1″)

The “/r/n” was interpreted and did have a line break in the page but that was not shown as a return on the browser screen.

I then switched the string to contain an “<br //>” for a line break.

This returned &lt;br \&gt;  where the <br /> should have been

To correct the problem of always encoding the HTML you can use the Html.Raw call.  I’m surprised I have not ran into this issue before. (MSDN)

Here is the code @Html.Raw(myclass.PingIpAddress(“127.0.0.1″))

It shows the inline <br>.  Thanks to the google searches that helped me find how to get to MSDN to learn how to accomplish this.

I’m in the middle of writing a Windows Phone 7 application.  In the JSON call and collection I’m using.  I wanted to use a datacontract.  For a bit I could not get my class to recognize [DataContract] and [DataMember] .  I even had a direct reference in the class : using System.Runtime.Serialization;

I’m not sure of the reason but after troubleshooting it for a  bit I ended adding a project reference to System.Runtime.Serialization.    It is interesting that a direct reference did not take inside the class.

I’m not sure if it’s related, but I’ve noticed that in writing for windows phone 7 there are some areas that seem to be difficult to get past these small items

I’ve been really happy with the nuget platform for adding packages to VisualStudio.  If you have not yet tried nuget head on over to nuget.org.  One of the more recent packages I’ve been using is the mini-profiler.

It is a little plug-in (can’t think of another term) that allows you profile a page and elements that are executed.

Here is the blog post that I originally learned of this tool http://www.hanselman.com/blog/NuGetPackageOfTheWeek9ASPNETMiniProfilerFromStackExchangeRocksYourWorld.aspxYou can install the mini-profiler by running the following command in your nuget command prompt

PM>  nuget install-package miniprofiler

Once installed you add 2 elements into your global.asmx.  Once you add those commands you can invoke the profiler around any area of code you would like to profile.

To display on the page you just a jquery command.

Vista and Windows 7 did not come with an SMTP server installed.   They removed this feature after smtp was found to be somewhat vulnerable on XP, and running on way too many developer PC’s.

I’ve been using papercut as a local smtp server when I am developing an application that has to send mail.  Papercut allows you to capture the mail and view it in both the raw content and html.  What a great little tool.s

You can download papercut from codeplex http://papercut.codeplex.com/

I have heard good things about SMTP imposter http://ssfd.codeplex.com/ however I have not used it.