Vertical ticker in tooltip

One of the features I was working on recently was to allow a user to be able to hover over a status label and to show a tooltip. So I ended up using the popular jquery.tooltip plugin Fairly straight forward. But as we all know this evolved to become a little more complex...

The issue with the tooltip was the data being displayed in the tooltip was quite lengthy and therefore the tooltip's stretched off the page. So an idea was to show a fixed height tooltip and as the user hovered over the status the tooltip data would start to scroll upwards, and repeat when it reached the end of the list.

After searching around a bit I discovered Tadas Juozapaitis's excellent jquery.ticker plugin. So I then tried fruitlessly to get them to work together. Eventually I then decided to alter the tooltip code, and inject some of the ticker code within it so that I could force the two to work together.

The result was this. Here is the hybrid plugin

The tooltip now scrolls through the list contained within the tooltip and then continues from the beginning again when it reaches the end.

This plugin is really just a hybrid, so thanks to the excellent work done by Jörn Zaefferer (tooltip) and Tadas Juozapaitis (vTicker). Thanks guys!

Blogger-droid

Just installed Blogger-droid off the android market place.

So this is a test. :)

Published with Blogger-droid v1.4.8

AOP (Aspect Orientated Programming) with Sprint.Net

Sprint.Net provides very good documentation regarding Aspect Orientated Programming (Aop). It's really a very nice way of separating logging, transaction and performance monitoring functionality from your code.

I would suggest anyone who's interested to read this article

Removing duplicate files from iTunes library

Found this tool Dupe Eliminator 9.2 which you can get for free if you use trialpay to purchase stuff from argos and many other providers.

Webcontrol being serialized by ASP.NET but not added to Session state

I had an issue where I had a property on a webcontrol that was being added to the session state (StateService). The property object was marked as serializable. But for some reason ASP.NET was trying to add the webcontrol to the session by serializing it and a serialization exception was being thrown.

After quite a bit of investigation I found this very useful article.

In conclusion, on one of my child properties there was an event which was being assigned to an event handler within the page load of the webcontrol. Applying the workaround mentioned in the article solved my problem.

Invalid ViewState... ScriptResource.axd and Performance issues of late

I've been looking recently into performance issues we were experiencing on one of our websites. This meant delving back into IIS application pools, running red-gate memory profiler and generally having a blast ;)

The code base is part legacy code, which has not been extended correctly. The memory profiling highlighted one key factor which I think is vital, and is stressed in multiple performance articles scattered across the web.

Be careful with session state, if it's too big your system is going to suffer

The code base has allot of complex objects which in turn have complex children, these are placed into session state and hang around eating up the w3wp.exe memory. All the session objects are run in-proc which is necessary because the objects have components that cannot be serialized, so extracting the session state to an out of proce provider was not an option.

We ended up increasing the memory on the server, to buy us sometime to reduce the complexity of the session objects and find alternative methods of clearing the session state periodically.

Another issue on the same server was we were seeing allot of Invalid ViewState error messages in the application event log. I read this article which pointed my focus in the right direction.

Basically the DOCTYPE's on my website pages were set to use strict XHTML, and the ScriptResource.axd which contains all client side AJAX javascript was being incorrectly parsed by the browser. Therefore when sent back to the server the viewstate was invalid, and so we got the error.

The solution was to change the browser to use the HTML DOCTYPE. This however messed up the display of the website, which I'm currently looking into now.

_PublishedWebsites missing when using MSBuild

Had some issues with msbuild this morning. The build was successful but when I looked into the drop location, there was no folder _PublishedWebsites only a list of all the bin dll's.

This was the most useful link I found which explains how to change your projects csproj file in order to force msbuild to create and dump website files and folders into the drop locations _PublishedWebsites directory. (Basically so that msbuild knows the project is a web application)

All you need to do is in the csproj file is to include this line:

<Import 
Project="
    $(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\
    Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\
    WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" 
Condition="" />