Diary of A Developer

Background I found myself in this mess. I wrote a lovely windows service to handle data replication between two SQL Servers. I know this isn't the best way to go about it, but the requirement came in late into the project and the database design wasn't going to support automatic replication provided by SQL Server, so I had to develop this windows service. Unfortunately, I lost the source code and backup in a robbery incident and I'm left with just the compiled version deployed with a client. Issue A bug showed up which needed to be fixed, but I didn't have the source anymore. I would have had to go through the stress of re-writing the entire code which took about a month to complete initially if I didn't run into this solution. I'm feeling great right now! Solution It happens that there are a couple of projects targeted at de-compiling .NET codes. I found two: 1 .NET Reflector 2. Just Decompile I tried the .NET reflector and it worked like m...

Issue Sometimes in web development, we may want to grant WRITE access to a folder probably for file upload purposes or mostly in my own case, PDF file generation purposes. The challenge however, is that all folders are read only which means your application will always throw errors whenever you attempt a write operation. Solution Locate the folder in windows explorer Right click on the folder and select properties In the securities tab, click edit, then click add in the new dialog box that shows up Type IIS AppPool\ApplicationPoolName (you need to replace ApplicationPoolName with the name of the application pool in IIS that your web app is running under) Click Check Names to resolve the name, then click Ok  Under permissions for ..., check Modify under allow.  Click Ok on all dialog boxes Note Some people will grant Modify or Full Control right to Everyone for the folder, note that this posses a huge security risk and should never be your approach to r...

Background If you ever wish to add WYSIWYG functionality to your web project, summernote.js is probably your best bet! It will convert your textarea control to a fully functional WYSIWYG control with ability to gain access to the content of the control in HTML format. Implementation To change a simple textarea control to a WYSIWYG control, $( '#summernote' ).summernote(); To fetch the HTML content of the control: var sHTML = $( '.summernote' ).code(); Wishing you all the best as you try this out.

Background Today I had a set if divs I created using AngularJs ng-repeat. My challenge was that there was a button in each div that triggered a modal pop-up when clicked. The content of the modal was supposed to be updated from the corresponding element that generated the particular button that was clicked. Hmm... Solution Taking advantage of the ng-click attribute and $index, I added this to the button element ng-click="SetSelected($index)" $index is a powerful reference that allows us to pass the index of the element that generated the current control to a function.  That way, I was able to fetch the correct element from the original array of elements that generated the set of controls!  Isn't Angular sweet?

Background I've always had issues working with diverse date formats using javascript till when recently I found this great resource at www.datejs.com . It was a welcome relief as it could parse almost all the date formats I wanted to parse. Today, however, I ran into a snag! The .isAfter() function stated in the datejs documentation wasn't just working for me. I kept getting error "method not found". Solution After lots of trial and research, I found out that the link posted on the datejs website most recent build is actually not the most recent build and several methods were not available in that. In case you have a similar issue, please download the most recent build from http://www.datejs.com/build/date.js and get your headache alleviated totally! It worked for me.

Background: I had this clever multiselect control for listing items that the user could select many entries from at any given time. I even made it look cool by implementing the Bootstrap Multiselect Plugin by David Stutz. However, when it was time to fetch the values of selected elements, I thought of looping through the elements to pull their values into an array. This would be inefficient and consume a lot of overhead! Solution: Turns out simply calling the javascript val() function on a multiselect returns an array of all values selected! e.g $('#selProgrammes').val() could return ["1", "2", "4", "6"] for example. Isn't it cool!

Background I used to know the grep command in Linux as a powerful file searching utility. Its so powerful that it even helps search the content of files. I had a challenge today, I needed to populate a select control with the ordinals of certain numbers, precisely the number of floors in a building. Because I already have the number of floors in a public variable which is an array object, I do not wish to reach out to the server to fetch this value again, in order to save execution time; especially for end users with slower links. Solution $scope.Hostels is my public array object and it has the following structure: { "ID": 1, "ClientiD": 2, "HostelName": "sample string 3", "HostelLocationID": 4, "Description": "sample string 5", "Gender": "sample string 6", "Cordinate": "sample string 7", "Istertiary": true, "IsSecondary": true, ...