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

 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.

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.

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.

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