Gokulnath's weBLOG

Microsoft Robotics Service for LEGO NXT 2.0

Gokulnath — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 03:51:21 GMT

I’ve explained here about creating Microsoft Robotics Service for LEGO NXT 2.0 and configuring its manifest. When I wanted to create my first robotics service, I had many difficulties and found very few resources over the internet for LEGO NXT 2.0 using Microsoft Robotics, so just thought of blogging about this.

Requirements
Microsoft Robotics Studio – Click here to download. Click here to know more about the studio.
LEGO NXT 2.0

Installation
Microsoft Robotics Studio can be used as a stand-alone development environment or it can be used with any of the Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 Editions, including the Express Editions.

How to create DSS Service?
1. After Installing Microsoft Robotics Studio, open Visual Studio IDE (I’m using 2010).
2. Click File/New Project, you should be able to see Microsoft Robotics under C# like this -

3. Create the project under Microsoft Robotics Studio installation folder (it will be mostly in c:\user\username\microsoft robotics dev studio 2008 r3\), so that the common robotics dlls will be referenced properly.
4. Click OK and you will be allowed to enter your service name, namespace and other details. The most important thing is – you will be allowed to choose your partners from here -

5. Choose the partners one by one from the list and click “Add as partner”. Check the “Add notification port” checkbox and leave the Creation Policy as it is. Lego NXT Brick (v2) should be selected as one of the partners, and the other partners can be selected based on the sensors that you will be using. In case if you want to edit or delete any of the added partners, you can choose the partner from the partner dropdown and perform your actions. Once all the partners are selected, click OK.
6. You should be able to see the auto-generated code now. Build your solution.

How to create manifest using DSS Manifest Editor?
1. Open DSS Manifest Editor.
2. Choose your service from the left, drag and drop it on the editor. You should be able to see this -

3. Search for your partners on the left, drag and drop on “Use service’s partner definition (UseExistingOrCreate)” boxes appropriately.
4. As the sensors in turn use the nxtbrick as their partner, another set of “Use service’s partner definition (UseExistingOrCreate)” boxes will be created for the brick.
5. You need to select nxtbrick service again and drop it on the boxes. If you see a pop like the one below, choose the already created service and NOT “Add a new instance”.

6. To configure the service, click it and then press “Create Initial State” button on the properties window. For the NxtBrick, you need to set the serial port number used for bluetooth connection. For the sensors, you need to set the ports appropriately.
7. Replace this manifest with the manifest created by the service.
8. To start the service execute dsshost /port:50000 /manifest:"C:\Users\username\Microsoft Robotics Dev Studio 2008 R3\MyDemoService\MyDemoService.manifest.xml” in DSS Command Prompt.
9. You can also start the service from the DSS Control Panel. In order to view the control panel, start DSS Node and then go to http://localhost:50000 (default port is 50000, if you’ve changed it use it accordingly).
10. Switch ON your LEGO NXT 2.0 and then start the service. If everything is configured properly, you should be able to hear connecting sound from the NXT Brick.

This is it for now, in the next blog post, I’ll be explaining about adding handlers to the sensors and using the motors.

My Website

Gokulnath — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:57:00 GMT

I have learned a lot on developing my website, about .NET, ASP.NET, Web Design, Servers, Database etc., it’s been a good platform to learn the new technologies and implement them. I have played and been playing many roles in its development, here are them:

Web Designer
Being a creative person, I’ve always liked web designing, graphics, animation etc. This pushed me to create my first version of my website (HTML based), spent a lot of time on it and at the same time learned (self-learned) a lot on designing, good and bad techniques :). When I started working closely with a designer in HHS, learned many good practices on HTML Designing from her. It eventually pushed me to redesign my website. Though I acquired decent designing skills, I didn’t spend much time on designing as I wanted it to be simple and neat. I just followed the good practices on designing, this made my site look consistent in most of the browsers, in different resolutions, colors, point sizes etc.

Network Administrator
Before setting up my site I just had a minimal knowledge on networking - to just share folders, open firewall/router ports, setup static ip etc. But, after setting up my site or in the process of setting up my site I learned a lot about networking technologies/methodologies like Virtualization, Domain Controllers, Backup Strategies, Re-routing Network Traffic, Security, Access Control etc. Initially, I had my site hosted on Godaddy’s Servers, and later on built my own servers and deployed everything on my servers. It was definitely worth spending extra bucks in building my own server and taking business connection (as I my ISP blocked port 80 for residential connections). Its advantages – installed softwares as I wished, and upgraded them as and when updates were released, opened ports in the firewall, changed security settings as per my needs, and many more. My responsibilities as a network admin:-
1. Instead of buying a server machine, I just converted my desktop to a server by installing server 2003 r2, and added RAM (had 4 GB RAM, added another 4 GB) and hard drives (bought another hard drive for backup).
2. Thought Virtualization will serve me better in terms of security, availability, usage etc. So, I used VMWare Server to setup virtualized servers. Built a virtualized server in my main server machine (server 2003 r2), and another virtualized server in my personal computer (windows 7), thus got 3 servers (windows 2003 r2). Setup my server machine as the domain controller (just for reference, I’ll name it as “A”), the virtual machine in it as the web/ftp/file/shoutcast/sql servers (name - “B”), and the virtual machine in my PC as the backup server (or testing machine), clone of B (name - “C”). Just before major software updates or changes in the network settings or any other changes that was supposed to affect the web traffic in B, I rerouted my network traffic to C.
3. Synchronization Strategy – Synchronized servers B and C using SyncToy (for folders) and Backup/Restore feature in SQL Server (for database). I will explain this in detail in my next blog.
4. Backup Strategy – Scheduled nightly backup of windows folders, SQL server and few other settings, and monthly backup of virtual machines (manually copied virtual machine files) to a hard drive dedicated for backups.
5. At least at the time of writing this blog, I didn’t have anything to do with ASP.NET Sessions, so rerouting the web traffic was not a big deal – just opening and closing ports in my router took care of it. However, as I didn’t have a proper way to reroute my radio traffic, I just played some pre-recorded announcements saying “Server is going to be restarted, it will be back in X minutes” or “Server is unavailable due to maintenance, it will be back in few minutes (or hours)”
6. Domain Management – I added and modified @ and CNAME records, changed name servers etc.

Database Administrator/Developer
Godaddy’s ASP.NET Hosting was good (not great though), but their Database Hosting was ridiculous. They had an ASP.NET based interface, just to execute db scripts… running DDL scripts was not a problem; however, executing DML or importing data was not easy. So, decided to host my SQL Server Database in a different place, and only when I found that Godaddy blocked remote SQL Server access. All these limitations and the price factor pushed me to setup my own database server. My responsibilities as a database administrator or developer:
1. I’ve never liked writing dynamic or inline queries in the frontend, so always followed stored procedure approach. Performed most of the database operations using stored procedures. Once I started using LINQtoSQL and Entity Framework, the usage of stored procedures got reduced, I used them only for complex operations.
2. Created database, user accounts, roles etc., mapped user accounts or roles to data objects appropriately.
3. Built backup (full and differential) and restore strategy, and scheduled sql server jobs to perform these operations appropriately.
4. Created and used SSIS for routine GeoIP to Location data imports from MaxMind.

Tester
I used my server “C” as a backup or a testing server. I always applied patches or installed/upgraded softwares here, and only after thorough testing, I performed the same operations in my server “B” (my main server).

Web Developer
Working as a Web Developer, I created many Web 2.0 websites at my work, and at one point I found Web Development to be interesting than Windows Development. At that point, I felt I should convert my HTML site to Web 2.0 using all the latest web technologies. With all the experiences that I gained on web development from my job, I developed my website, and based on the experiences that I gained from developing my website, I did many things at my office – my work and my website served each other well.
I developed the first .NET version of my site using VS 2005/.NET 2.0 Framework with SQL Server 2005. Later on, upgraded to .NET Framework 3.5/VS 2008, used LINQtoSQL and other new features in VS 2008. My current version (as of Aug 15 2010), uses .NET 4.0 and SQL Server 2008.

If you need any help on building your own server, feel free to contact me.

Link to my site – http://www.gokulnath.com

Thirukural

Gokulnath — Sat, 15 May 2010 02:06:55 GMT

Thirukural, written by Thiruvalluvar, in the form of couplets that convey noble thoughts. It is considered to be a book of ethics for the ordinary man, the administrator, the king and the ascetic. It is universal in perspective, and hence called "Ulaga Podhu Marai" meaning the Common Knowledge for the world. It is as timely today as when it was written more than 2000 years ago. Click here to know more about this book.

It has been translated to 80 languages (including many Indian languages). However, as far as I know only few people from India, other than from Tamil Nadu (a southern state in India) have known about or read this book. It is one of the reasons, why I decided to add it to my site ... just an attempt to spread this book further, hope you will do the same.

Acknowledgements:
I took most of the content from - Tamil.pdf (254.88 KB), English.pdf (351.65 KB) and TamilMeaning.pdf (972.86 KB). Thanks a lot to all those who have worked on these projects. A special thanks to B.Viswanathan, the creator of the software Azhagi, using which I generated reverse-transliterations. Thanks to Google for its Transliteration API. Last but not least, thanks to all others who have worked/are working/will be working on spreading this book.

Difficulties:
1. Spent a lot of time in collecting and importing the content to my database than designing the pages; used all sort of scraping techniques (programmatic) to fetch the content from the pdfs listed above. So, I cannot assure you that all the kurals, meanings (Tamil & English) and the Transliterations are 100% correct. In case if anything is wrong with any of the content, please report to me by following the report link.
2. Searched many places in Chennai for Thirukural CD with files separated by kurals, didn’t get one! However, I got 3 CDs for each section and files separated by adhigarams (chapters).
3. Had a tough time adding adhigaram mp3s in un-downloadable format. Shoutcast’s streaming content was easier compared to httphandlers, flash playlist etc. However, Shoutcast generated playlist in .pls format, and it didn’t work in Windows Media Player. So, wrote separate code to generate windows media playlist file (.wpl). If you have any problems in listening, download the playlist files and then try to open it in any of the players installed in your system.

Vazhga Tamil!!

Here is the link - http://www.gokulnath.com/thirukurals

Audio or Sound Card problems in Windows 2003 Server (especially when remoting)

Gokulnath — Thu, 06 May 2010 22:53:56 GMT

If audio is not working in your server, check whether Windows Audio service is started…

How to do:
1. On Windows Run (windows key + R key), type services.msc
2. Look for Windows Audio service and check whether it is started, if not, start it

If this doesn't resolve your problem, try updating your audio drivers.

If audio is not working only when remoting, try the following:

1. On Windows Run (windows key + R key), type gpedit.msc
2. Go to Local Computer Policy/Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/Terminal Services/ClientServer redirection
3. Enable Allow audio redirection

and then do this too:
1. On Windows Run (windows key + R key), type tscc.msc
2. Open the Connections folder in the left sidebar
3. Right-click RDP-Tcp, select Properties
4. Click Client Settings tab
5. UNCHECK the "Audio mapping" checkbox under the section "Disable the following:"
7. Click OK, and close tscc
8. You may see a warning which says this change will not take effect for any currently-connected RDP sessions. Click out of that
9. Logoff
10. Login

If you are remoting from a Windows XP machine, try to remote into the console by typing "mstsc /console" on run window.
If you are remoting from a Windows 7 or a Vista machine, try to remote into the console by typing "mstsc /admin" on run window.

Take Ownership and Grant Permissions in Windows 7

Gokulnath — Wed, 05 May 2010 04:15:42 GMT

After upgrading my PC from Windows XP to Windows 7, an external hard drive which was working fine on XP lost write permissions.

Found a solution:

1. Right click on the drive icon for the external drive.
2. Select Properties
3. Click Security Tab
4. Click Advanced Button
5. Click Owner Tab
6. Click Edit Button
7. Choose your account or administrators group, whichever you want to give permissions
8. Check 'Replace owner on subcontainers and objects'
9. Click OK

If this doesn’t resolve your problem, choose the user from “Group or user names” list, click “Edit”, and give appropriate permissions.

Hope this works for you!

Accessing TFS 2010 using Team Explorer 2008 Client

Gokulnath — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:21:03 GMT

If you are getting “None of the products that are addressed by this software update are installed on this computer. Click cancel to exit setup” (the popup below) while trying to install Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 (this allows to use the Team Foundation Server 2010 server with Team Explorer 2008 SP1 client) , first install VS 2008 SP1 (not 3.5 SP1) and then try installing the compatibility update.

Copying Large Files into VMWare Virtual Machine

Gokulnath — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:34:47 GMT

Recently, when I tried to copy a large file (around 1 GB) to Virtual Machine (VM) from the host machine, it froze either of the machines. However, when I tried to copy a large file from the VM to the host machine, everything was normal.

Found a solution for this problem:
Try allocating your Virtual Hard Disk's space upfront. Unfortunately, I didn't find a way to modify my existing virtual hard disk, so I added a new virtual drive and pre-allocated its space, and it resolved the file transfer problem.

Setting up FTP Server in Win 2003 Server

Gokulnath — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 14:13:09 GMT

If you are setting up a FTP Server in a Domain, this article should help you. I have just taken info from various sites and had consolidated into one.

Installation - Click here to view the entire article

Click Start, point to Control Panel, and then click Add or Remove Programs.
Click Add/Remove Windows Components.
In the Components list, click Application Server, click Internet Information Services (IIS) (but do not select or clear the check box), and then click Details.
Click to select the following check boxes (if they are not already selected):
Common Files
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Service
Internet Information Services Manager
Click to select the check boxes next to any other IIS-related service or subcomponent that you want to install, and then click OK.
Click Next.
When you are prompted, insert the Windows Server 2003 CD-ROM into the computer's CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive or provide a path to the location of the files, and then clickOK.
Click Finish.

Configuration

Start Internet Information Services Manager or open the IIS snap-in.
Expand Server_name, where Server_name is the name of the server.
Expand FTP Sites
Right-click Default FTP Site, and then click Properties.
Click the Security Accounts tab.
Click to select the Allow Anonymous Connections check box (if it is not already selected), and then click to select the Allow only anonymous connections check box.
When you click to select the Allow only anonymous connections check box, you configure the FTP Service to allow only anonymous connections. Users cannot log on by using user names and passwords.
Click the Home Directory tab.
Click to select the Read and Log visits check boxes (if they are not already selected), and then click to clear the Write check box (if it is not already cleared).
Click OK.

To Isolate the Users - Click here to view the entire article
To create a new FTP site that isolates users
1. In IIS Manager, expand the local computer, right-click the FTP Sites folder, point to New, and click FTP Site.
2. Provide the required information in the FTP Site Description and IP Address and Port Settings dialog boxes, and click Next.
3. In the FTP User Isolation dialog box, click Isolate users, and click Next.
4. In the Path box, type or browse to the directory that contains, or will contain, the site content, and then click Next.
5. Select the check boxes for the FTP site access permissions you want to assign to your users, and then click Next.
6. Click Finish.

To create FTP root-point and user folders
If users of different domains log on with their explicit domain\username credentials, create a subdirectory for each domain (by using the name of the domain) under the FTP site root directory you specified when you creating the FTP site.
For Example -
Domain Name: Account
FTP root directory -> D:\MyFTP\
LocalUser locate at D:\MyFTP\Account

For individual domain user, you need to create folder in this format - Domain\username
Domain User: Nancy locate at D:\MyFTP\Account\Nancy

How To Configure PassivePortRange In IIS - Click here to view the entire article. Folders will be listed only if passiveportrange is configured.
a) To Enable Direct Metabase Edit
1. Open the IIS Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
2. Right-click on the Local Computer node.
3. Select Properties.
4. Make sure the Enable Direct Metabase Edit checkbox is checked.

b) Configure PassivePortRange via ADSUTIL script
1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
2. Type cd Inetpub\AdminScripts and then press ENTER.
3. Type the following command from a command prompt.
adsutil.vbs set /MSFTPSVC/PassivePortRange "5500-5700"
4. Restart the FTP service (Start->Run->services.msc, find FTP Publishing Service and Restart it).

Note: this is what I executed in my machine - cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set /MSFTPSVC/PassivePortRange "5500-5700"

You'll see the following output, when you configure via ADSUTIL script:
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved.

PassivePortRange : (STRING) "5500-5700"

Open Ports in Windows Firewall
Default FTP port is 21, add this TCP port in Windows Firewall Exception list.

To Open/Delete multiple ports
open ports
for /L %i in (5000,1,5200) do netsh firewall add portopening TCP %i "FTP %i"

delete opened ports
FOR /L %I IN (5000,1,5200) DO netsh firewall delete portopening TCP %I

FTP Client
FreeCommander is a windows file manager which comes with FTP Client, I have been using this for quite some time...I'm satisfied!

Visual Source Safe - Checkin files checked out by other users from VSS Explorer

Gokulnath — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:03:58 GMT

Presumption: You know the other users' passwords.

1. Open VSS Explorer
2. Choose File > Open SourceSafe Database
3. Change the Username (the user who has checked out the files)
4. Once you change the Username, "Open" button will be enabled
5. Click Open and enter the user's credentials
6. Now you should be able checkin the files

Sometimes I do my development stuff in my laptop and sometimes in my desktop, and I share code using VSS...this approach had helped me many times as I know both the systems' credentials. I don't have any idea how to do this without knowing the other users' credentials.

Importing flat file using SQL Server Integration Services (SQL 2005)

Gokulnath — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:41:32 GMT

Here I'm going to use MaxMind's GeoIP flat file

To create a new Integration Services package:

1.     Choose Start > All Programs > Microsoft SQL Server 2005 > SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio.
2.     On the File menu, choose New > Project to create a new Integration Services project.
3.     In the New Project dialog box, select Integration Services Project.
4.     In the Name box, change the default name to Importing Flat Text File.
5.     Click OK.

An empty package called Package.dtsx will be created and added to your project, you can rename this package as you want.

To add connections to the flat file and the database

1. Right-click anywhere in the Connection Managers area (bottom most window) and then click New Flat File Connection (for other type of connections like Excel, FTP etc., choose New Connection), it will open Flat File Conneciton Manager Editor.
2. On the Flat File Connection Manager Editor screen, enter connection manager name.
3. Click Browse.
4. In the Open dialog box, browse to the flat text file you intend to extract data from.
5. Set the fields according to your flat file. To preview the columns in the text file, click Columns tab. To rename the columns, click Advanced, and in the property pane change the "Name" property for each column.

6. To add connection to the database, right-click in the Connection Managers area and then click New OLE DB Connection.
7. On the Configure OLE DB Connection Manager screen, click New.
8. Choose your server (servers in your network will be listed) or enter IP.
9. Choose authentication type and the database.
10. Test the connection.

Your connection managers window will look something like this:

To add a Data Flow task:
1. Click the Control Flow tab.
2. Add a Data Flow Task from the toolbox (under Control Flow Items section) to the design surface of the control flow tab. Rename it as you want.

To add a Data Flow Source:
1. Click on the Data flow tab.
2. Add a Flat File Source from the toolbox (under Data Flow Sources section) to the design surface of the data flow tab. Rename it as you want.
3. Double-click the Flat File source to open the Flat File Source Editor box.
4. In the Flat file connection manager dropdown, select the created flat file connection.
5. You can rename the output columns if you want.

To add a OLE DB destination:
1. Add a OLE DB Destination from the toolbox (under DataFlow Destinations).
2. Drag the green arrow from the Flat file source to the OLE DB Destination.

Your data flow design surface will look something like this:

3. Double click OLE DB Destination to open OLE DB Destination Editor.
4. Select the created OLE DB connnection for OLE DB connection manager (it will be automatically selected).
5. Click New to create a new table or choose already created table.
6. Here, I have already created a table, so I'm just going to map the input columns with the table's columns.

My table structure:

Mapping:

To run this package:

1. Click on the Debug menu and click Start Debugging.
2. After the package has completed running, on the Debug menu click Stop Debugging.

Additional work:

If you see above, all the columns in my flat file are enclosed within double quotes, to strip them or to format the data.

To format the format columns in the flat file before importing:
1. Add a Derived Column from the toolbox (under Data Flow Transformations).
2. Connect Flat file source's output to Derived Column and Derived Column's output to OLE DB Destination.

3. Double click the Derived Column to open Derived Column Transformation Editor.
4. Expand Columns tree and drag the column to be formatted to Derived Column Name, and add you expression. Here, I'm removing double quotes.

To truncate data in the existing table before importing:

1. Click Control Flow tab.
2. Add Execute SQL Task from the toolbox (under Control Flow Items) to the design surface of control flow tab.
3. Double click it to open Execute SQL Task Editor, click the SQLStatement section ellipsis and add your SQL statement i.e., "Delete From TableName"

4. You can add it before or after the data flow task.
5. Add the connections appropriately.

Start running and the colors will change automatically:

There might be better ways to accomplish this, if so, please let me know.

Thanks

Loan Calculator

Gokulnath — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:02:42 GMT

I have seen people always getting confused with the loan calculation method, especially auto loan (including me, when I bought my first car), just to help you all ... I have created this calculator. Try this and find out how it differs from the other calculators on the internet.

What my calculator is capable of?
1. Calculates monthly payment or apr or term or loan amount based on your input. (any calculator online does this ... not a big deal)
2. Gives you the total amount that a person will pay if he takes a loan i.e., principal (loan amount) + total interest amount.
3. Gives you the amortization table i.e., monthly splits. The amount that goes towards your principal and interest from your monthly payment.
4. Allows you to edit your monthly payment and gives you the amount that you will gain with the change. Many pay their monthly payments exactly, without knowing that even few dollars (or rupees or whatever) increase will change their total interest.
5. Tells you whether refinance will be profitable or not, by changing interest rate or loan term. Gives you the amount that you will save/lose by refinancing.

Formula used for this calculator:
Monthly Payment = (P * R) / (1 - (1 + R)^(-n)) where

P = Loan amount
n = loan term i.e., number of months
R = Annual Percentage Rate/ (12 * 100)
12:number of months/year
100: As rates are in percentage

Feel free to send your comments.

Regular space and html space (ascii 32 and 160 respectively)

Gokulnath — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:44:20 GMT

Can anybody find the difference between the first and the second ‘testing abc’ in this file test.txt (.02 KB). Open the file and search for ‘testing’ (there should be 2 matches), ‘abc’ (2 matches) and then ‘testing abc’ (1 match). It is because the ‘space’ between the two words varies, one is a regular space and the other is a html space (not nbsp), their ascii values are 32 and 160 respectively. I figured this after converting the spaces to ascii values! (spent almost an hour)

Take an asp.net application offline easily

Gokulnath — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:36:59 GMT

We can take an ASP.NET 2.0 application offline temporarily by uploading a file called app_offline.htm to the root directory. It will shut-down the application, unload the application domain from the server, and stop processing any new incoming requests for that application.

To know more about this - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/10/06/426755.aspx

Working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/04/09/442332.aspx

I came to know this only today when I was listening to Hansel minutes, this will definitely help me in taking my website down easily.

ASP.NET menu control - hiding root node and arrow image

Gokulnath — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:28:18 GMT

This is for my future reference.

If you are using sitemap as the data source for the menu control, then you can set the property ShowStartingNode = "false" of sitemapdatasource. Inorder to hide the arrow image, set the properties DynamicEnableDefaultPopOutImage = "False" and StaticEnableDefaultPopoutImage = "False" of the menu control.

Setting up ShoutCast Server (online radio) and fetching its statistics from .NET application

Gokulnath — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:08:22 GMT

Setting up shoutcast server is just like installing any other software. Installation and configurations should not take you enough time, whereas opening your firewall/router ports might take some time, it depends on your networking knowledge. If you are aware of setting up a router or any other network device, this should not take you enough time.

Here you go:

1. Download Winamp. Install it.
2. Download DSP plug-in. Install it.
3. Download appropriate DNAS Shoutcast Server for your server and OS. Install GUI version.
4. Run DNAS server. This will open your GUI.

5. Start Winamp and open Preferences (CTRL-P) and click on the DSP/effects subcategory under the Plug-ins tree.
6. Select Nullsoft SHOUTCast Source DSP v x.x. This will open a pop-up like this

7. Play some song in winamp, this will change the dB on Input Meters (Main Tab).
8. Go to the 'Encoder' tab. Change the Encoder Type to MP3 Encoder, if you are playing mp3 song. This will automatically choose Encoder Settings to 24 Kbps, 22.050kHz, Mono. You can change this based on your needs.
9. Go to the 'Output' tab. Click the Connect button, this will start streaming the song current being played i.e., the status will change from 'Not Connected' and it will look like the window below. Click Yellowpages to add information about your radio.

10. If the status has changed, you can jump to step . If the status has not changed, check whether the shoutcast server has been added to your Windows Firewall exceptions list. Open your control panel, double-click windows firewall and go to Exceptions tab. Check whether 'sc_serv' is in the exception list, if not, click add program and add your shoutcast server exe (programfiles\shoutcast).

11. To check whether the shoutcast server is streaming properly, open windows media player. Go to File menu and click Open Url (ALT + F, U), and type http://localhost:8000. You should be able to listen to the song being played in winamp.
12. Open ports 8000 and 8001 in your windows firewall (see step 10 to know about opening firewall ports), and then open the same ports in your router (look for port forwarding in your router config page). This will allow you to stream your radio on the internet.
13. You can change the Shoutcast server's settings based on your needs (open DNAS GUI and click Edit Config). This site explains clearly about the settings - http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/shoutcast-config.xml#doc_chap1

Fetching Shoutcast statistics from .NET application

WebClient webClient = new WebClient();
String xmlDoc;
DataSet shoutCastStatistics = new DataSet();

webClient.Headers.Add("user-agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)");
xmlDoc= webClient.DownloadString("http://yourradiourlORwanip:8000/admin.cgi?pass=PASSWORD&mode=viewxml");
shoutCastStatistics.ReadXml(new StringReader(xmlDoc), XmlReadMode.Auto);

Dataset shoutCastStatistics should have 5 tables: shoutcastserver, webdata, listeners, listener, songhistory and song. You can use them based on your needs.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

CSS Friendly Adapters

Gokulnath — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:39:14 GMT

If we want to get control over finally rendered output of ASP.NET controls like Menu, TreeView, DataList etc, we can use CSS Control Adapter. This adapter emits CSS friendly html output and can significantly help when using CSS on the website. To know more about this adapter, follow this link - http://www.codeplex.com/cssfriendly . To see the difference between the html generated with and without using this adapter, follow this link - http://www.asp.net/CSSAdapters/Menu.aspx

Choose Items in Visual Studio Toolbox crashes Visual Studio

Gokulnath — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:04:38 GMT

I was trying to add AJAX Control Toolkit to my Toolbox, for some reason Visual Studio was crashing. I found a solution for it, see this works out for you – start Visual Studio in safe mode (go to Visual Studio’s command prompt and execute ‘devenv /safemode’) and then try to add items to your toolbox, I was able to do it! There might be a better solution for this, please let me know if there is one.

Deals Alert Service

Gokulnath — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:01:34 GMT

Initially, I developed this deals alert service for my personal use and later on thought it might be useful for others too, so I extended it accordingly and added it here. This service basically grabs RSS feeds from deals sites (listed on the deals alert page of my site) and checks for the keyword(s) that are added, and if it finds a match, sends email at the time mentioned on the page. This service performs properly only if the keyword(s) are specific, because it is just using some ‘exact’ and ‘like’ string searches. I might be improvising this by using dictionary or thesaurus in the future. You can enter multiple keywords (separated by spaces) related to a single product, and only if all the words are present on the deal title, alert email will be sent. As I’m just using simple search here, the deal may not be related to the product you are looking. For eg., say suppose you add an alert for ‘card reader’ and if there is any deal for a laptop with ‘card reader’, my service is going to grab this deal too, because this service is not as intelligent as you are :). So, in this case it is better to add price limit too.

I have added this service without any commercial intention, so do not worry about your emailids, I won’t trade them to advertisers, and moreover you can unsubscribe from this service or modify the added keywords at any time by clicking ‘Unsubscribe’ link on the email that will be sent to you after adding an alert.

After writing this service I understood how difficult it is come up with search algorithms, hats off to Google and other search engines. Implementing ‘exact’ keyword search was easy whereas ‘like’ search was very difficult. For eg., I added ‘backpack’ as keyword, the service was bringing all the deals having ‘pack’ on the title, like ‘cd pack’, ‘dvd pack’ etc. I told about this service to couple of my friends, and one of my friends added ‘mens watches’ as keyword, and found out that most of the deals had “men’s” on the title. I recoded to accommodate this scenario, but still it is going to bring deals related to women's watch even if you add men's watch. One last example, keyword ‘all in one printer’, there was a deal with title ‘Calls to any phone in India’, if you see here ‘all’ is in ‘calls’, ‘in’ is in ‘India’ and ‘one’ is in ‘phone’. I can keep listing out examples on this service's ability/disability. As a developer, I have done my testing part (developer's test cases are always subset of testers' test cases) to an extent, it is yours now...you are my testers!

If you have any idea or thoughts to improvise this service, please send your comments. Here is the link.

To prevent your system from idling

Gokulnath — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:52:51 GMT

This program prevents your system from getting locked even if it is left idle for time greater than your screen saver time. It basically presses ‘down’ arrow key every minute.

Create a Windows Forms Application and add a timer to the form.

public Form1()

{

InitializeComponent();

StartAction();

}

private void StartAction()

{

// the timer is started and the form is minimized

// set the timer interval as per your needs. I have set it to be 60000 milliseconds = 1 min

timer_keypress.Enabled = true;

this.WindowState = FormWindowState.Minimized;

this.ShowInTaskbar = false;

}

To add the application to your system tray when minimized, add a notify icon from your toolbox to the forms and set properties appropriately. I chose an icon and changed the text property. By default this form will be in minimized state, as I have added code to do so in my StartAction function.

Add context menu from your toolbox to show menu when the system tray icon is right clicked. Right click contextMenuStrip and choose Edit items to add your menu items. Double click on the menu item to add a handler. I’ve added ‘Exit’ menu. Set your notify icon’s contextmenustrip property.

private void exitToolStripMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

StopAction();

}

private void StopAction()

{

// the timer is stopped and the form is closed

timer_keypress.Enabled = false;

this.Close();

}

// this event will be triggered every minute

private void timer_keypress_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

SendKeys.SendWait("{DOWN}");

}

There are many ways to do this, I found this one to be easy.

Here is the file - KeyPress.exe (889 KB)

Get Windows account name on your ASP.NET page

Gokulnath — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:04:37 GMT

With <authentication mode="Windows"/> in your application and Anonymous access enabled in IIS, you will see the following results:

System.Environment.UserName: Computer Name

Page.User.Identity.Name: Blank

System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name: Computer Name

With <authentication mode="Windows"/> in your application, and ‘Anonymous access’ disabled and only ‘Integrated Windows Authentication’ in IIS, you will see the following results:

System.Environment.UserName: ASPNET (user account used to run ASP.NET service)

Page.User.Identity.Name: Domain\ Windows Account Name

System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name: Computer Name\ASPNET

With <authentication mode="Windows"/> and <identity impersonate ="true"/> in your application, and ‘Anonymous access’ disabled and only ‘Integrated Windows Authentication’ in IIS, you will see the following results:

System.Environment.UserName: Windows Account Name

Page.User.Identity.Name: Domain\ Windows Account Name

System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name: Domain\ Windows Account Name

With <authentication mode="Forms"/>:

Request.ServerVariables["LOGON_USER"]: Domain\ Windows Account Name

Developer Tools and Utilities

Gokulnath — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:57:42 GMT

Some tools and utilities that will surely save your precious time:
1. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2009UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx
2. http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2008/11/23/developer-tools-and-utilities.aspx (Above site pretty much has most of the tools in this site)
3. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545046.aspx (microsoft powertoys)
4. Compare files - http://www.prestosoft.com/edp_examdiff.asp
5. File manager - http://www.freecommander.com/

Postback problem on a modal popup or Session transfer to a popup or a page opened from another popup

Gokulnath — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:07:04 GMT

Solutions for postback problem:
1. Add "<base target = “_self” />" inside <head> tag of the popup.
2. You can use window.open instead of window.showModalDialog.

Solutions for session transfer problem:

1. You can use window.open instead of window.showModalDialog.

2. You can use AJAX modal popup.

This seems to be a IE bug (working fine in firefox and chrome), I have this problem if I open the .NET application after opening an instance of IE (say google.com) whereas if I open the former before the latter, things are fine.

Please let me know if anybody has any good solution for this.

Session expiration Notification & Redirection using AJAX Modal Popup

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:55:52 GMT

This article describes how to notify users about session expiration and allow them to renew the session.

Controls that need to be added:
1. A Panel with an OK button.

2. A label with session expiration notification message.

3. An AJAX ModalPopupExtender.

4. A dummy button and set ModalPopupExtender’s TargetControlId as this button.

This is how it looks:

<cc1:ModalPopupExtender ID="modext_promptmessage" runat="server" BehaviorID="popup_promptmessage"

PopupControlID="pnl_popup" TargetControlID="btn_dummy">

</cc1:ModalPopupExtender>

<asp:Panel ID="pnl_popup" runat="server" Style="display: none">

<th>

Prompt Message

</th>

</tr>

<tr>

<td>

<label>Your session is going to expire in 2 minutes. Please click OK to renew it."></label>

<asp:Button ID="btn_ok" runat="server" OnClientClick="ResetSession()" Text="OK" />

</td>

</tr>

</table>

</asp:Panel>

My code behind class looks like this:

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load

' checks whether session expired

If Current.Session.Keys.Count = 0 Then

Response.Redirect("sessionexpired.aspx", True)

Exit Sub

End If

' Javascript function PromptSessionExpiration() will be called 2 minutes before session expiration (120000 milliseconds)

Dim strExpireSessionScript As String = String.Format("setTimeout('PromptSessionExpiration()', {0}); ", (Me.Session.Timeout * 60000) - 120000)

Me.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptBlock(Me.GetType(), "expirescript", strExpireSessionScript, True)

End Sub

''' This click event will renew the session, need not add any code inside it

Protected Sub btn_ok_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btn_ok.Click

End Sub

My javascript:

function PromptSessionExpiration() {

// the function below will be triggered at the 125^th second

setTimeout('CheckSessionStatus()', 125000);

// show popup

$find('popup_promptmessage').show();

}

// handles closing popup

function ResetSession() {

$find('popup_promptmessage').hide();

}

// this function will be called if user doesn’t respond to the prompt message

// which will redirect to sessionexpired page

function CheckSessionStatus() {

window.location = “sessionexpired.aspx”;

}

</script>

Thanks.

Why Lehman Brothers collapsed?

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 03:01:40 GMT

I came across this article on The Hindu magazine, this article clearly tells why Lehman Brothers collapsed? ...and the reason for the eventual economic crisis, a video is also added under resources/videos tab 'The Crisis of Credit Visualized'.

The bursting of the speculative bubble in the U.S. housing market has destroyed billions of dollars in investor wealth across the world, crippled the banking system, expunged close to a million jobs…and India has not been spared either. With banks failing by the day, definitely, these are uncertain times for the financial services industry. While many people who have lost their jobs are faced with permanent shrinkage of their lifestyle, others in the industry are going through the trauma of not knowing if and when their turn would come. Who is to blame?

Flashback to year 2003:

Rohit (name changed to protect identity), a good friend of mine and someone who was officially considered to be a genius with an IQ of 150+, graduated from one of the leading IIMs. Rohit managed to make it into the New York Headquarters of the most sought after firm that had arrived on campus for the first time — Lehman Brothers — a top U.S. Investment Bank (then). On joining, he was assigned to Lehman’s mortgage securities desk that dealt with Collateralised Debt obligations (or CDOs).

Following is an extracted transcript of a chat session I had with Rohit back in 2004:

Me: So man, you must feel like you are on top of the world.

Rohit: Yes dude, the job here is amazing, I get to interact with people around the world, investment managers who want to invest millions of dollars

Me: Great…so tell me something interesting. What’s your job all about?

Rohit: You know there is a great demand for American home loans, which we buy from the U.S. banks. We then convert these into what is called as CDOs (Collateralised Debt Obligations). In plain English, this refers to buying home loans that banks had already issued to customers, cutting them into smaller pieces, packaging the pieces based on return (interest rate), value, tenure (duration of the loans) and selling them to investors across the world after giving it a fancy name, such as “High Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leverage Fund”.

Me: Wow! I would’ve never guessed that boring home loans could transform into something that sounds so cool!

Rohit: Hahaha…actually we create multiple funds categorised based on the nature of the CDO packages they contain and investors can buy shares in any of these funds (almost like mutual funds…but called Structured Investment Vehicles or SIVs)

Me: Dude, you make your job sound like a meat shop…chopping and packaging. So, in effect when an investor purchases the CDOs (or the fund containing the CDOs), he is expected to receive a share of the monthly EMI paid by the actual guys who have taken the underlying home loans?

Rohit: Exactly, the banks from whom we purchased these home loans send us a monthly cheque, which we in turn distribute to the investors in our funds

Me: Why do the banks sell these home loans to you guys?

Rohit: Because we allow them to keep a significant portion of the interest rate charged on the home loans and we pay them upfront cash, which they can use to issue more home loans. Otherwise home loans go on for 20-30 years and it would take a long time for the bank to recover its money.

Me: And, why does Lehman buy these loans?

Rohit: Because we get a fat commission when we convert the loans into CDOs and sell it to investors.

Me: Who are these investors?

Rohit: They include everyone from pension funds in Japan to Life Insurance companies in Finland .

Me: But tell me, why are these funds so interested in purchasing American home loans?

Rohit: Well, these guys are typically interested in U.S. Govt. bonds (considered to be the safest in the world). But unfortunately, Mr. Alan Greenspan (head of Federal Reserve Bank, similar to RBI in India ) has reduced the interest rate to nearly 1 per cent to perk up the economy after the dotcom crash 9/11attacks. This has left many funds looking for alternative investments that can give them higher returns. Home loans are ideal because they offer 4-6 per cent interest rate.

Me: Wait, aren’t home loans more risky than U.S Bonds?

Rohit: We have made home loans less risky now. In fact they have become as safe as U.S Govt. bonds.

Me: What are you saying, man? What if the people who have taken these underlying home loans default? Then the investors would stop getting the EMIs, and their returns would take a hit. Wouldn’t it?

Rohit: Boss, may be some will default, but not definitely more than 2-3 per cent. Moreover, we have convinced AIG (a leading insurance company) to insure our CDOs. This means that even if there were big defaults,the insurance company would compensate the investors.

Me: that’s amazing. What are these insurances called?

Rohit: Credit Default Swaps.

Me: Definitely you guys are the most creative when it comes to naming.

Rohit: Thanks.

Me: And why has this AIG guy insured millions of home loans?

Rohit: See man, the logic is simple. Home prices in the U.S always go up. In fact over the last three years alone they have doubled. So even if someone defaults paying the EMI, the home can be seized and sold for a much higher price. So there is no risk. Insurance companies are actually competing to insure this, because they can earn risk-free premiums.

Me: No wonder investment managers from all over the world want to put money in your CDOs.

*A global financial cobweb started getting built around the American dream of purchasing a home and it rested on the assumption that “home prices will keep rising”. As demand for the CDOs started growing across the global investment community, the investment bankers (like Lehman) who were meant to sell these instruments also started investing a significant portion of their own capital in these. I guess after selling the story to the whole world, they themselves got sold on the seemingly foolproof concept. Gradually the markets for CDOs and Credit Default Swaps started expanding with traders and investors buying and selling these as if they were shares of a company, happily forgetting the underlying people behind these products who took the home loans in the first place and on whose capacity to repay the loans, the safety of these products depended.

As Wall Street firms like Lehman were churning more and more home loans into CDOs and selling them or investing their own money, there was a pressure on the banks to issue more loans so that they can be sold to the Wall Street firms in return for a commission. Slowly banks started lowering the credit quality (qualification criteria) for availing a home loan and aggressively used agents to source new loans. This slippery slope went to such an extent that in 2005, almost anyone in the U.S could buy a home worth $100,000 (45 lakhs INR) or more without income proof, without other assets, without credit history, sometimes even without a proper job. These loans were called NINA — “no income no assets”.

The U.S. housing market went into a classic speculative bubble. Home loans were easy to get, so more and more people were buying houses. The increased demand for houses caused the price to increase. The rising prices created even more demand, as people started to look at homes as investments — investments that never went down in value.

When I touched base with my friend Rohit in late 2005, he was on cloud nine. During the previous one year, he managed to buy a home in Long Island (a posh area near New York City ) worth almost a million dollars, and got himself a Mercedes. All this was interesting to hear, but what shocked me was that although he was earning close to $20,000 a month (that is what CEOs in India make) he was not able to save anything because his lifestyle expenses where growing faster than his salary.

Unheeded signals

In late 2006, Mortgage lenders noticed something that they’d almost never seen before. People would choose a house, sign all the mortgage papers, and then default on their very first payment. Although no one could really hear it, that was probably the moment when one of the biggest speculative bubbles in American history popped. Another factor that lead to the burst of the housing bubble was the rise in interest rates from 2004-2006. Many people had taken variable rate home loans that started getting reset to higher rates, which in turn meant higher EMIs that borrowers had not planned for.

The problem was that once property values starting going down, it set off a reverse chain reaction, the opposite of what had been happening in the bubble. As more people defaulted, more houses came on the market. With no buyers, prices went even further down.

In early 2007, as prices began their plunge, alarm bells started going off across mortgage-backed securities desks all over Wall Street. The people on Wall Street, like Rohit, started getting calls from investors about not getting their interest payments that were due. Wall Street firms stopped buying home loans from the local banks. This had a devastating effect on particularly the small banks and finance companies, which had borrowed money from larger banks to issue more home loans thinking they could sell these loans to Wall Street firms like Lehman and make money.

Everyone got into a mad scramble to seize and sell the homes in order to get back at least some of the money. But there were just not enough buyers. The guys who had insured these loans thinking they had near zero risk (e.g. AIG) could not fulfil the unexpectedly huge number of claims. The best part was that since these insurance policies (credit default swaps) could themselves be traded, multiple people had bought and sold them, and it became so tough to even trace who was supposed to compensate for the loss.

The global financial cobweb built around mortgages is on the brink of collapse. Firms, large and small, some young some as old as a 100 years have crumbled as a result of suing each other over the dwindling asset values. Lehman’s India operations, that employed over a thousand staff, is up for sale and many of the employees have been asked to leave. The Indian stock market has crashed almost 50 per cent from its high (and so have markets around the world) as the Wall Street giants sold their investments in the country in an effort to salvage whatever is good in order to make up for the mortgage related loss. Hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies all over the world have lost billions in investor’s money. Many Indian B-School graduates with PPOs (pre-placement offers) in the financial sector ( India and abroad) have either received an annulment or indefinite postponement of joining dates. IT firms that built and maintained software for the U.S. mortgage industry or the related Investment Banks, have shut down their business units, laid-off people or transferred them to other verticals.

Fragile system

For all the hoopla over the sharp and sophisticated people on Wall Street, the current financial crisis has exposed the fragility of the system. Wall Street is blaming the entire episode on people who could not repay their home loans. But the reality seems to point towards the stupidity of people who lent all this money, financial institutions that built fancy derivative packages and in effect facilitated billions in trading and investments in these fragile low quality loans.

The U.S. Govt is planning to grant 700 billion dollars to the Wall Street firms to compensate the financial speculators for the money that they have lost. Isn’t this like rewarding greed and stupidity? The head of a leading Investment Bank has stated, “This is necessary to sustain financial ingenuity. We don’t want to spend this money on ourselves. We just want this money to go into the market so that we can carry on trading complex securities, borrowing and lending money.” (Yeah…right, so that one can act as if nothing had happened without analysing too much into it). The real question is: Who is going to compensate the common investors across the world who have lost their wealth in the resultant market meltdown? (either directly or through pension funds).

After being unreachable for a month now, finally I heard back from my pal, Rohit, saying he is back in India to take a break from the roller coaster ride that he had lived through. After Lehman’s collapse he has lost his job and probably the house that he had bought by taking a hefty loan. I really don’t know whether to feel happy for him, for getting an opportunity to learn a lesson or two from the experience or to feel sad for him for losing his job. May be I’ll get a better sense of things once I meet him next week.

Populating HTML tables using PageMethods/AJAX

Gokulnath — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:24:25 GMT

This article shows you how to use ASP.NET AJAX PageMethods to perform Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) operations with an HTML table. Here HTML table acts as a light-weight DataGrid.

Inorder to make PageMethods work, following things need to be done:

ScriptManager should be added to your ASPX page.
EnablePageMethods property of the ScriptManager should be set to true.
System.Web.Services namespace should be added as reference on your codebehind class.
Page Methods on your code-behind should be decorated with [WebMethod] attribute.

First let us start with Read.

As mentioned above, add a ScriptManager and set its 'EnablePageMethods' property to true. Add an HTML button and an onclick handler to it, and then add an HTML table with thead, tbody and tfoot. Since the HTML table will be referenced from javascript, add id to the table and its body. Here, only HTML tags/controls are used because, server side controls cannot be referenced in PageMethods.

Your ASPX page should look something like this.

<body>

<asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server" EnablePageMethods ="true" ></asp:ScriptManager>

<%--This click event handles loading data from the database--%>

<div>

<tr>

Column1

</td>

Column2

</td>

Edit

</td>

</tr>

</thead>

</tbody>

<tfoot>

<tr>

</td>

</td>

<%--This click event handles adding data to the database--%>

</td>

</tr>

</tfoot>

</table>

</div>

</form>

</body>

Now add your JavaScript function to load data from the database using PageMethods. PageMethod call should always have a success handler (this will be executed if the page method is executed successfully) and an exception handler (this will be executed if an exception is thrown). Say suppose we added 'GetData()' as the page method on the code behind, our javascript will be PageMethods.GetData(SuccessHandler, ExceptionHandler). Just for understanding, I have named the success and exception handler appropriately, you can name them as you wish. In case, the page methods takes parameters, you can add like PageMethods.GetData(param1, param2, SuccessHandler, ExceptionHandler).

Page methods should be decorated with [WebMethod] attribute and should be declared as static. Its signature shoul look something like this:

[WebMethod]

public static string GetData()

Page method to return data to javascript.

public partial class AJAXGrid : System.Web.UI.Page

{

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

}

[WebMethod]

public static IEnumerable<MyEntity> GetData()

{

try

{

Data fetch part should go here

// used List, as collections are serializable. See below for MyEntity class

List<MyEntity> MyEntities = new List<MyEntity>();

MyEntities.Add("1", "abc");

MyEntities.Add("2", "xyz");

MyEntities.Add("3", "pqr");

MyEntities.Add("4", "mno");

return MyEntities;

}

catch(Exception ex)

{

throw ex;

}

}
}

MyEntity class

public class MyEntity

{

private string _Column1;

public string Column1

{

get { return _Column1; }

set { _Column1 = value; }

}

private string _Column2;

public string Column2

{

get { return _Column2; }

set { _Column2 = value; }

}

public MyEntity(string sCol1, string sCol2)

{

_Column1 = sCol1;

_Column2 = sCol2;

}

Javascript function that calls page method and populates the HTML table

//Loading Data

// Handles btn_load click event

function LoadData() {

// If data was fetched successfully, SuccessHandler will be called; else, ExceptionHandler

PageMethods.GetData(SuccessHandler, ExceptionHandler);

// Incase parameters need to be passed to PageMethods, you can do like this PageMethods.GetData(param1, param2, SuccessHandler, ExceptionHandler)

}

// After fetching the data successfully

function SuccessHandler(result) {

var tbody = $get("tbody_grid");

// clear the table

for (var j = tbody.rows.length; j > 0; j--) {

tbody.deleteRow(j - 1);

}

// populate the table

for (var i = 0; i < result.length; i++) {

//two columns fetched from database are sent as parameters

AddRow(result[i].Column1, result[i].Column2);

}

return true;

}

// Edit and Delete buttons are added to the rows

function AddRow(col1, col2) {

var tbody = $get("tbody_grid");

var row = document.createElement("tr")

var td1 = document.createElement("td")

td1.innerText = col1;

var td2 = document.createElement("td");

td2.innerText = col2;

var td3 = document.createElement("td");

// add buttons

var btnEdit = document.createElement('input');

btnEdit.setAttribute('type', 'button');

btnEdit.setAttribute('name', 'Edit');

btnEdit.setAttribute('value', 'Edit');

// first parentNode represents <td> and the second represents <tr>

btnEdit.onclick = function() { Edit(this.parentNode.parentNode); };

var btnDelete = document.createElement('input');

btnDelete.setAttribute('type', 'button');

btnDelete.setAttribute('name', 'Delete');

btnDelete.setAttribute('value', 'Delete');

btnDelete.onclick = function() { DeleteRow(this.parentNode.parentNode); };

td3.appendChild(btnEdit);

td3.appendChild(btnDelete);

row.appendChild(td1);

row.appendChild(td2);

row.appendChild(td3);

tbody.appendChild(row);

}

// Handles exception

function ExceptionHandler(result) {

}

After populating the HTML table

Javascript functions to handle Edit, Update, Delete and Insert:

Editing Data

// this function handles edit button click

function Edit(row) {

var col1 = row.childNodes[0].innerText;

var col2 = row.childNodes[1].innerText;

// populates values in textboxes and displays Update and Cancel buttons

var editableRow = document.createElement("tr")

var td1 = document.createElement("td")

var txtBox1 = document.createElement('input');

txtBox1.setAttribute('type', 'text');

txtBox1.setAttribute('name', 'col1');

txtBox1.setAttribute('value', col1);

txtBox1.setAttribute('width', 30);

td1.appendChild(txtBox1);

var td2 = document.createElement("td");

var txtBox2 = document.createElement('input');

txtBox2.setAttribute('width', 300);

txtBox2.setAttribute('type', 'text');

txtBox2.setAttribute('name', 'col1');

txtBox2.setAttribute('value', col2);

td2.appendChild(txtBox2);

var td3 = document.createElement("td");

var btnUpdate = document.createElement('input');

btnUpdate.setAttribute('type', 'button');

btnUpdate.setAttribute('name', 'Update');

btnUpdate.setAttribute('value', 'Update');

btnUpdate.onclick = function() { Update(this.parentNode.parentNode); };

var btnCancel = document.createElement('input');

btnCancel.setAttribute('type', 'button');

btnCancel.setAttribute('name', 'Cancel');

btnCancel.setAttribute('value', 'Cancel');

btnCancel.onclick = function() { Cancel(this.parentNode.parentNode); };

td3.appendChild(btnUpdate);

td3.appendChild(btnCancel);

editableRow.appendChild(td1);

editableRow.appendChild(td2);

editableRow.appendChild(td3);

row.parentNode.replaceChild(editableRow, row);

}

After edit button click

Updating Data

// this function handles update button click

function Update(row) {

// fetches values entered in the textboxes

// first childNode represent <td> inside <tr> and second childNode represents textbox

var col1 = row.childNodes[0].childNodes[0].value;

var col2 = row.childNodes[1].childNodes[0].value;

// values sent to server

PageMethods.UpdateData(col1, col2, UpdateSuccess(row), ExceptionHandler);

}

// After updating the values successfully

function UpdateSuccess(row) {

var col1 = row.childNodes[0].childNodes[0].value;

var col2 = row.childNodes[1].childNodes[0].value;

var editableRow = document.createElement("tr")

var td1 = document.createElement("td")

td1.innerText = col1;

var td2 = document.createElement("td");

td2.innerText = col2;

var td3 = document.createElement("td");

var btnEdit = document.createElement('input');

btnEdit.setAttribute('type', 'button');

btnEdit.setAttribute('name', 'Edit');

btnEdit.setAttribute('value', 'Edit');

btnEdit.onclick = function() { Edit(this.parentNode.parentNode); };

var btnDelete = document.createElement('input');

btnDelete.setAttribute('type', 'button');

btnDelete.setAttribute('name', 'Delete');

btnDelete.setAttribute('value', 'Delete');

btnDelete.onclick = function() { DeleteRow(this.parentNode.parentNode); };

td3.appendChild(btnEdit);

td3.appendChild(btnDelete);

editableRow.appendChild(td1);

editableRow.appendChild(td2);

editableRow.appendChild(td3);

row.parentNode.replaceChild(editableRow, row);

}

// this function handles cancel button click

function Cancel(row) {

// values are again populated in labels instead of textboxes

var col1 = row.childNodes[0].childNodes[0].value;

var col2 = row.childNodes[1].childNodes[0].value;

var editableRow = document.createElement("tr")

var td1 = document.createElement("td")

td1.innerText = col1;

var td2 = document.createElement("td");

td2.innerText = col2;

var td3 = document.createElement("td");

var btnEdit = document.createElement('input');

btnEdit.setAttribute('type', 'button');

btnEdit.setAttribute('name', 'Edit');

btnEdit.setAttribute('value', 'Edit');

btnEdit.onclick = function() { Edit(this.parentNode.parentNode); };

var btnDelete = document.createElement('input');

btnDelete.setAttribute('type', 'button');

btnDelete.setAttribute('name', 'Delete');

btnDelete.setAttribute('value', 'Delete');

btnDelete.onclick = function() { DeleteRow(this.parentNode.parentNode); };

td3.appendChild(btnEdit);

td3.appendChild(btnDelete);

editableRow.appendChild(td1);

editableRow.appendChild(td2);

editableRow.appendChild(td3);

row.parentNode.replaceChild(editableRow, row);

}

// this function handles 'add' button click

function Add() {

var col1 = $get("txt_addcol1").value;

var col2 = $get("txt_addcol2").value;

// data sent to the database

PageMethods.InsertData(col1, col2, AddSuccess(col1, col2), ExceptionHandler);

}

// After adding the data successfully

function AddSuccess(col1, col2) {

// add the values to the table

AddRow(col1, col2);

// clear the textboxes in the footer

$get("txt_addcol1").value = "";

$get("txt_addcol2").value = "";

}

Deleting Data

// this function handles delete button click

function DeleteRow(row) {

var col1 = row.childNodes[0].innerText;

// delete from the database

PageMethods.DeleteData(col1, DeleteSuccess(row), ExceptionHandler);

}

function DeleteSuccess(row) {

// delete the row from the table

var tbody = $get("tbody_grid");

tbody.removeChild(row);

}

</script>

Page methods to handle Edit, Update, Delete and Insert:

[WebMethod]

public static void UpdateData(string sCol1, string sCol2)

{

try

{

Data update part should go here

}

catch(Exception ex)

{

throw ex;

}

[WebMethod]

public static void InsertData(string sCol1, string sCol2)

{

try

{

Data insert part should go here

}

catch(Exception ex)

{

throw ex;

}

[WebMethod]

public static void DeleteData(string sCol1)

{

try

{

Data delete part should go here

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

throw ex;

}

We can add paging and sorting too.

This code has been tested in IE7+, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Some of the limitations in using ASP.NET AJAX PageMethods:

1. We can't access asp.net server controls (like TextBox control) in the WebMethod directly as we normally access in the server side methods.

2. We can't access any variable declared in the code behind.

Advantage: PageMethods is a simple lightweight way to submit/fetch data to the server using ASP.NET AJAX. This doesn't submit whole page data to the server and also as opposed to the ASP.NET AJAX call back this doesn't even fire the Page_Load and other Page events of the code behind page.

Free ASP.NET CAPTCHA control

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:45:44 GMT

As I started getting too many spams because of bots, I implemented Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) in all the interactive pages of my site.

Took the control from here http://www.codeproject.com/KB/custom-controls/CaptchaControl.aspx, and customized according to my needs. The code was easy to understand and customize.

OpenSource Database & .NET documentation softwares

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:44:48 GMT

I got a chance to work on the below documentation softwares recently, were pretty good. There might be some other softwares better than these, if so, let me know.

SQLSpec – For database documentation, it supports various databases like MS SQL Server, Oracle, Access, DB2, Sybase etc. It is very easy to use, however, customizations like excluding objects and xml commenting took me sometime. It creates MSDN help file style documents. Download link - http://www.elsasoft.org/
SandCastle – Free software, for .NET project documentation. Supports .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5. It is also very easy to use and creates MSDN help file style documents. Download it from here http://www.codeplex.com/Sandcastle and install it, and then install SandCastle Help File Builder from here http://www.codeplex.com/SHFB

Adding custom configurations in Web.config or App.config

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:43:34 GMT

You can add your own configuration sections in Web.config or App.config file. There might be some good way to do it, if so, please let me know.

Step 1

Add the follwing inside <configSections> tag:

</configSections>

Step 2

Add your custom section before or after <appSettings> but after <configSections>

</customSection>

Your app.config will be like this

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

</configSections>

</customSection>

</appSettings>

<system.web>

</system.web>

</configuration>

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Step 3

How to access it?

NameValueCollection colCustomSection = (NameValueCollection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("customSection");

string key, value;

for (int count = 0; count < colCustomSection.Count; count++)

{

// we can get the keys

key = colCustomSection.GetKey(count);

// we can get the values

value = colCustomSection.Get(count);

}

To add multiple sections

Add this inside <configSections>

</sectionGroup>

</configSections>

Add this around your custom section:

</customSection1>

</customSection2>

</customSectionGroup>

To access it, just change the path:

NameValueCollection colCustomSection = (NameValueCollection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("customSectionGroup/customSection1");

customSectionGroup/customSection1 or customSectionGroup/customSection2

Some Cool Features in Picasa 3.0

Wed, 27 May 2009 17:42:08 GMT

Feature 1 - Face recognition: Though this feature was released on 9/02/2008, I noticed it only recently. Worth trying it!

How to use it?

Log into Picasa Web Album, go to Settings (top right corner) page, you will be able to find a section ‘Name Tags’, and right below it there should be a button ‘Turn name tags ON’, click it. After few seconds Picasa will start auto face recognition, you should be able to see the progress on the right side of your picasa home page.
Once it is done, you can click a photo (your photo or any of your friend’s photos) from any of your albums, picasa will show a rectangle around the face of the person in the photo, you can add a name tag.
Now, go to ‘People’ tab and add more name tags. See below video for more info.

Feature 2 – Email Upload: You can upload photos to your album by forwarding emails addressed to your picasa emailid. You will be able to add a picasa emailid on Settings page, under ‘Upload Photos by Email’ section.

Feature 3 – Meta tag info: I think this was there since picasa was introduced, but I came to know this only recently from one of my friends. I added few web albums and sent the links to my friend; he was able to tell the camera that was used to take the photographs, apertures, focal length etc. Picasa reads the meta tag info of the photo and displays on the right hand side of the photo under ‘Photo Information’, click link more info.

CSS Font-Size: em vs. px vs. pt vs. percent

Tue, 12 May 2009 17:40:36 GMT

I'll usually set my font-sizes in units of 'pt', but this gave me weird results when I increased my monitor's DPI from 96 to 120 (as all the fonts were too small in my HD wide-screen monitor, I increased it). I was doing some research on this and I came across this article, this article clearly explains the right unit to use while developing websites. Though this article says percent (%) is the best, I have used 'px', as it gave me consistent results in IE, Mozilla and Chrome.

Click here to see the article.

You can use the below chart for conversion:

Points	Pixels	Ems	Percent
6pt	8px	0.5em	50%
7pt	9px	0.55em	55%
7.5pt	10px	0.625em	62.5%
8pt	11px	0.7em	70%
9pt	12px	0.75em	75%
10pt	13px	0.8em	80%
10.5pt	14px	0.875em	87.5%
11pt	15px	0.95em	95%
12pt	16px	1em	100%
13pt	17px	1.05em	105%
13.5pt	18px	1.125em	112.5%
14pt	19px	1.2em	120%
14.5pt	20px	1.25em	125%
15pt	21px	1.3em	130%
16pt	22px	1.4em	140%
17pt	23px	1.45em	145%
18pt	24px	1.5em	150%
20pt	26px	1.6em	160%
22pt	29px	1.8em	180%
24pt	32px	2em	200%
26pt	35px	2.2em	220%
27pt	36px	2.25em	225%
28pt	37px	2.3em	230%
29pt	38px	2.35em	235%
30pt	40px	2.45em	245%
32pt	42px	2.55em	255%
34pt	45px	2.75em	275%
36pt	48px	3em	300%

The 90/10 Principle. It will change your life (at least the way you react to situations)

Tue, 05 May 2009 17:38:40 GMT

One of my friends forwarded this article to me sometime in 2007, as it was too lengthy, I didn’t read at that time, and few months back I got a chance to read this; only then I realized I should have read this in 2007 itself, because this article had changed my life in many ways since I read this … hope it will change yours too!

Author: Stephen Covey

Discover the 90/10 Principle. It will change your life (at least the way you react to situations).

What is this principle? 10% of life is made up of what happens to you. 90% of life is decided by how you react.

What does this mean? We really have no control over 10% of what happens to us. We cannot stop the car from breaking down. The plane will be late arriving, which throws our whole schedule off. A driver may cut us off in traffic.

We have no control over this 10%. The other 90% is different. You determine the other 90%. How? ……….By your reaction. You cannot control a red light. but you can control your reaction. Don't let people fool you; YOU can control how you react.

Let's use an example.

You are eating breakfast with your family. Your daughter knocks over a cup of coffee onto your business shirt. You have no control over what just happened. What happens next will be determined by how you react. You curse. You harshly scold your daughter for knocking the cup over. She breaks down in tears. After scolding her, you turn to your spouse and criticize her for placing the cup too close to the edge of the table. A short verbal battle follows. You storm upstairs and change your shirt. Back downstairs, you find your daughter has been too busy crying to finish breakfast and get ready for school. She misses the bus. Your spouse must leave immediately for work. You rush to the car and drive your daughter to school. Because you are late, you drive 40 miles an hour in a 30 mph speed limit. After a 15-minute delay and throwing $60 traffic fine away, you arrive at school. Your daughter runs into the building without saying goodbye. After arriving at the office 20 minutes late, you find you forgot your briefcase. Your day has started terrible. As it continues, it seems to get worse and worse. You look forward to coming home. When you arrive home, you find small wedge in your relationship with your spouse and daughter. Why? …. Because of how you reacted in the morning.

Why did you have a bad day?

A) Did the coffee cause it?

B) Did your daughter cause it?

C) Did the policeman cause it?

D) Did you cause it?

The answer is “D".

You had no control over what happened with the coffee. How you reacted in those 5 seconds is what caused your bad day.

Here is what could have and should have happened. Coffee splashes over you. Your daughter is about to cry. You gently say, "Its ok honey, you just need to be more careful next time". Grabbing a towel you rush upstairs. After grabbing a new shirt and your briefcase, you come back down in time to look through the window and see your child getting on the bus. She turns and waves. You arrive 5 minutes early and cheerfully greet the staff. Your boss comments on how good the day you are having. Notice the difference? Two different scenarios. Both started the same. Both ended different. Why? Because of how you REACTED. You really do not have any control over 10% of what happens. The other 90% was determined by your reaction.

Here are some ways to apply the 90/10 principle. If someone says something negative about you, don't be a sponge. Let the attack roll off like water on glass. You don't have to let the negative comment affect you! React properly and it will not ruin your day. A wrong reaction could result in losing a friend, being fired, getting stressed out etc. How do you react if someone cuts you off in traffic? Do you lose your temper? Pound on the steering wheel? A friend of mine had the steering wheel fall off) Do you curse? Does your blood pressure skyrocket? Do you try and bump them? WHO CARES if you arrive ten seconds later at work? Why let the cars ruin your drive? Remember the 90/10 principle, and do not worry about it. You are told you lost your job. Why lose sleep and get irritated? It will work out. Use your worrying energy and time into finding another job. The plane is late; it is going to mangle your schedule for the day. Why take outpour frustration on the flight attendant? She has no control over what is going on. Use your time to study, get to know the other passenger. Why get stressed out? It will just make things worse.

Now you know the 90-10 principle. Apply it and you will be amazed at the results. You will lose nothing if you try it. The 90-10 principle is incredible. Very few know and apply this principle. The result? Millions of people are suffering from undeserved stress, trials, problems and heartache. We all must understand and apply the 90/10 principle.

It CAN change your life!!!

Enjoy….

Oracle - How to use a parameter in a Select query with ‘IN’ condition

Fri, 01 May 2009 17:33:29 GMT

This works in Oracle, hope there is something similar to this in Sql Server too! There might be some other good way to do this, if so, please let me know.

SELECT * FROM TABLE1 WHERE COLUMN1 IN (‘ABC’,’XYZ’,’PQR’)

Say suppose the strings ‘ABC’,’XYZ’ and ’PQR’ need to be grouped as a single string in the frontend and to be passed as a parameter. How can we do it? We cannot write like this –

SELECT * FROM TABLE1 WHERE COLUMN1 IN (IN_PARAMTER)

There are many ways to do it:

We can write an inline query.
We can split the strings and group it as a table type.
We can write dynamic sql.

There is one more way to do it and found it to be easy, so thought of sharing.

Here it is:

SELECT * FROM TABLE1 WHERE COLUMN1 IN
(
SELECT REGEXP_SUBSTR(In_Parameter ,'[^,]+',1,LEVEL)
FROM    DUAL
CONNECT BY LEVEL <= LENGTH (REGEXP_REPLACE (In_Parameter, '[^,]')) + 1
)

It is enough if we pass the parameter as ‘ABC,XYZ,PQR’ instead of “‘ABC’,’XYZ’,’PQR’”.

More about Oracle Regular Expressions - http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B13789_01/server.101/b10759/functions116.htm

Working with Excel sheet in .NET i.e., Create Read Update Delete

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:10:39 GMT

Select or Insert or Update or Delete rows in Excel using .NET. i.e., CRUD operations in EXCEL using .NET. We can literally use the excel sheet as a database, just the connection string matters. Note: 1. This code cannot be used for password protected excel sheets. 2. Delete does not work. See below for explanations. There might be some other good way to do this, if so, let me know.

Insert a row in an excel sheet

protected void btn_create_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

OleDbConnection objConnection;

OleDbCommand objCommand;

OleDbParameter objParameter;

// Here HDR= YES represents that header is present

// If the excelsheet you are dealing with does not have header, you can mention HDR = NO,

// and while fetching columns you have to mention F1, F2 rather than the column names

objConnection = new OleDbConnection(@"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0; Data Source=D:\Excel\CRUD_EXCEL.xls;

Extended Properties=""Excel 8.0;HDR=YES;""");

objCommand = new OleDbCommand();

objCommand.Connection = objConnection;

objCommand.CommandType = CommandType.Text;

// The sheet name should be followed by $ sign

objCommand.CommandText = "INSERT INTO [SHEETNAME$](COLUMN_INT, COLUMN_VARCHAR) VALUES(@COLUMN_INT, @COLUMN_VARCHAR)";

objParameter = new OleDbParameter("@COLUMN_INT", OleDbType.Integer);

objParameter.Value = 3;

objCommand.Parameters.Add(objParameter);

objParameter = new OleDbParameter("@COLUMN_VARCHAR", OleDbType.VarChar);

objParameter.Value = "testing";

objCommand.Parameters.Add(objParameter);

objConnection.Open();

objCommand.ExecuteNonQuery();

objConnection.Close();

}

Select rows in an Excel sheet

protected void btn_read_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

OleDbConnection objConnection;

OleDbCommand objCommand;

OleDbParameter objParameter;

// Here HDR= YES represents that header is present

// If the excelsheet you are dealing with does not have header, you can mention HDR = NO,

//and while fetching columns you have to mention F1, F2 rather than the column names

objConnection = new OleDbConnection(@"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0; Data Source=D:\Excel\CRUD_EXCEL.xls;

Extended Properties=""Excel 8.0;HDR=YES;""");

objCommand = new OleDbCommand();

objCommand.Connection = objConnection;

objCommand.CommandType = CommandType.Text;

// If the excel sheet you are dealing with does not have header, your query will be SELECT F1, F2 FROM [SHEETNAME$]

objCommand.CommandText = "SELECT COLUMN_INT as COLUMN1, COLUMN_VARCHAR AS COLUMN2 FROM [SHEETNAME$]";

objDataAdapter = new OleDbDataAdapter();

objDataSet = new DataSet();

objDataAdapter.SelectCommand = objCommand;

objConnection.Open();

objDataAdapter.Fill(objDataSet);

objConnection.Close();

}

Update a row in an excel sheet

protected void btn_update_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

OleDbConnection objConnection;

OleDbCommand objCommand;

OleDbParameter objParameter;

// Here HDR= YES represents that header is present

// If the excelsheet you are dealing with does not have header, you can mention HDR = NO,

// and while fetching columns you have to mention F1, F2 rather than the column names

objConnection = new OleDbConnection(@"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0; Data Source=D:\Excel\CRUD_EXCEL.xls;

Extended Properties=""Excel 8.0;HDR=YES;""");

objCommand = new OleDbCommand();

objCommand.Connection = objConnection;

objCommand.CommandType = CommandType.Text;

objCommand.CommandText = "UPDATE [SHEETNAME$] SET COLUMN_VARCHAR = @COLUMN_VARCHAR WHERE COLUMN_INT = @COLUMN_INT";

objParameter = new OleDbParameter("@COLUMN_VARCHAR", OleDbType.VarChar);

objParameter.Value = "PQR";

objCommand.Parameters.Add(objParameter);

objParameter = new OleDbParameter("@COLUMN_INT", OleDbType.Integer);

objParameter.Value = 3;

objCommand.Parameters.Add(objParameter);

objConnection.Open();

objCommand.ExecuteNonQuery();

objConnection.Close();

}

Delete

protected void btn_delete_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

As far as I know ADO does not support Excel row delete

You are more restricted in deleting Excel data than data from a relational data source.

In a relational database, "row" has no meaning or existence apart from "record";

in an Excel worksheet, this is not true. You can delete values in fields (cells). However, you cannot:

1. Delete an entire record at once or you receive the following error message:

Deleting data in a linked table is not supported by this ISAM.

You can only delete a record by blanking out the contents of each individual field.

2. Delete the value in a cell containing an Excel formula or you receive the following error message:

Operation is not allowed in this context.

3. You cannot delete the empty spreadsheet row(s) in which the deleted data was located,

and your recordset will continue to display empty records corresponding to these empty rows.

}

Importing XML data to Oracle database

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:08:18 GMT

Here is a method to import/send XML to Oracle and thus we need not call the database repeatedly for mass insert, update etc. DBMS_XMLSTORE has been used here. There might be some other good way to do this, if so, please let me know.

Here you go:

1. Importing Excel from .NET interface to Oracle. Just to get some xml, I have used an excel sheet here, you can replace it with your xml data.

COL1	COL2	COL3
1	Aaa	abc
2	Bbb	pqr
3	Aaa	Abcdef
4	ddd	pqrst

.NET Code

string strConn = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=D:\\Excel\\excel.xls;Extended Properties=Excel 8.0;";

OleDbDataAdapter daImportExcel = new OleDbDataAdapter("SELECT * FROM [Sheet1$]", strConn);

DataSet dsExcelData = new DataSet();

daImportExcel.Fill(dsExcelData, "TABLE_NAME");

OracleParameter parameter = new OracleParameter();

parameter = new OracleParameter("XML_CLOB", OracleDbType.Clob);

parameter.Direction = ParameterDirection.Input;

parameter.Value = dsExcelData.GetXml();

OracleCommand objCommandImport = new OracleCommand();

objCommandImport.Connection = objConnection;

objCommandImport.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;

objCommandImport.CommandText = "BIMS.XML_PARSER";

objCommandImport.Parameters.Add(parameter);

objCommandImport.ExecuteNonQuery();

Note: I am passing XML as CLOB.

Oracle Procedure

I am inserting the dataset, I mean the XML into table XML_TESTING. Here COL1 is integer and other 2 columns are varchar.

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE XML_PARSER

(

XML_CLOB IN CLOB

)

INSERT_CONTEXT DBMS_XMLSTORE.CTXTYPE;

ROW_COUNT NUMBER;

BEGIN

INSERT_CONTEXT := DBMS_XMLSTORE.NEWCONTEXT('XML_TESTING');

DBMS_XMLSTORE.SETROWTAG(INSERT_CONTEXT, 'TABLE_NAME');

DBMS_XMLSTORE.CLEARUPDATECOLUMNLIST(INSERT_CONTEXT);

DBMS_XMLSTORE.SETUPDATECOLUMN(INSERT_CONTEXT,'COL1');

DBMS_XMLSTORE.SETUPDATECOLUMN(INSERT_CONTEXT,'COL2');

DBMS_XMLSTORE.SETUPDATECOLUMN(INSERT_CONTEXT,'COL3');

ROW_COUNT := DBMS_XMLSTORE.INSERTXML(INSERT_CONTEXT, XML_CLOB);

DBMS_XMLSTORE.CLOSECONTEXT(INSERT_CONTEXT);

END XML_PARSER;

Note:

Names of the columns that are inserted and of the underlying database table should be same. By default, XML documents are expected to identify rows with the <ROW> tag. This is the same default used by DBMS_XMLGEN when generating XML. This may be overridden by calling the setRowTag function. Here ‘TABLE_NAME'’ has been set as rowtag as it is our table name.

Drawback:

.NET is not allowing to use GetXml in huge datasets. If somebody has a solution for it, please let me know.

You can understand better about DBMS_XMLSTORE from this article - http://www.stanford.edu/dept/itss/docs/oracle/10g/appdev.101/b10790/xdb_dbmstore.htm#CACEJGEH

Congratulations, you've installed dasBlog with Web Deploy!

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

After logging in, be sure to visit all the options under Configuration in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 26 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.