By Soul Solutions on
Friday, 29 February 2008
 Boy has this month just flown by! Just a few of the highlights:
My MVP expertise was changed from Live Services to Live Services Platform
Microsoft Australia User Group site was released
We did more travelling this month visting Sydney and Perth do present SQL Spatial and Virtual Earth. The trips were really worthwhile, again, meeting lots of interesting people.
Microsoft Partner Finder was upgraded with some new features.
Today I finished up a contract in town and am starting an exciting project on Monday that I'm sure I'll be writing lots more about soon.
March will be busy with another 2 presentations, Wave Launch in Brisbane and preparing for our trip to Canada / US in April.
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By Soul Solutions on
Thursday, 28 February 2008
I always get caught by this..so time to write myself a note. I've installed Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite and i go to connect to TFS but the menu options are missing..what did i forget to do?
Just need to goto the TFC directory in the root directory on the install disk and install the Team Explorer Client!
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By Soul Solutions on
Thursday, 28 February 2008
We've been working away on the new version of the Microsoft Australia Find a Partner site and it has now been released!
So's what's new since the last version? The key features that the end users i.e. YOU see are:
- Upgraded the map to use Virtual Earth version 6
- You can now filter by specialisation aswell as competency
- List of partners on a pin hover now has infinite scroll rather than a next button
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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 25 February 2008
After what sounds like a very sucessful event 0 GirlGeekDinners Sydney are holding their 2nd event - A Picnic in the Park - to celebrate International Women's Day.
For full details on the event, check out the facebook event here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=21228582696
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By Soul Solutions on
Friday, 22 February 2008
Client wanted to move ViewState off the page to reduce page weight. Hadn't done this for awhile (read ages) so I found this article and the discussion about where to move it to. So I went with cache and allow them to change it or turn it off completely.
It did help the page weight..decreased it by almost a third. I will do some timing tests to see what difference it has made. We're keeping 2 pages of data and monitoring to see if we need more.
So then I moved some of the javascript sitting on the aspx pages into extenal files and reduced it by half! Now to look into moving all the javascript in the code behind into files aswell.
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By Soul Solutions on
Friday, 22 February 2008
Client wanted a text box they could type a date into but also a calendar control if they didn't want to type. So I went with a Textbox, a compareValidator to ensure the entered data was of type Date and the AJAX CalendarExtender the points to the textbox.
Looks something like this:
<asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="calHandoverTextBox"></asp:TextBox>
<asp:CompareValidator ID="calHandoverCompareValidator" runat="server"
ErrorMessage="Not a valid date" ControlToValidate="calHandoverTextBox"
Operator="DataTypeCheck" Type="Date" EnableClientScript="False">*</asp:CompareValidator>
<cc1:CalendarExtender runat="server" ID="calHandoverDate"
TargetControlID="calHandoverTextBox" Format="dd/MM/yyyy" Enabled="True"></cc1:CalendarExtender>
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By Soul Solutions on
Friday, 22 February 2008
A client wanted a cool, predictive dropdownlist. So I decided to give the AJAX AutoCompleteExtender a go. It was really easy to use, didn't have to write a lot of code and works a treat...what else could I ask for?
To use it all i did was:
1. Put the control on the page and point it at a text box.
2. Write a webservice to retrieve matching entries as the user types
Imports System.Web.Services
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_
_
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Public Class SoulSolutionsService
Inherits System.Web.Services.WebService
_
Public Function GetAgencyNameCompletion(ByVal prefixText As String, ByVal count As Integer) As String()
Return AgencyBusinessLogic.GetAgencyNameCompletion(prefixText, count).ToArray()
End Function
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Public Function GetAgencyByName(ByVal agencyName As String) As AgencyDetailsEntity
Return AgencyBusinessLogic.GetAgencyByName(agencyName)
End Function
End Class
3. I wanted to fill out some additional details based on the users selection, so i just added some javascript to handel the selection.
function agencySelectedHandler(source, eventArgs)
{
SoulSolutionsService.GetAgencyByName(eventArgs.get_text(), OnLookupComplete, OnError, source);
}
function OnLookupComplete(result, source)
{
if == source.get_id())
{
CopyToFundingAgency(result);
}
else
{
CopyToDeliveryAgency(result);
}
}
function OnLookupComplete(result, source)
{
if == source.get_id())
{
CopyToFundingAgency(result);
}
else
{
CopyToDeliveryAgency(result);
}
}
function OnError(result)
{
alert("Error: " + result.get_message());
}
function CopyToFundingAgency(result)
{}
function CopyToDeliveryAgency(result)
{}
...
Read More »
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By Soul Solutions on
Friday, 22 February 2008
Here are some tips for anyone looking to get an Ager Airconditioning unit.
Ager will NOT honor the warranty if the owner of the property changes, no matter what the problem with the unit. There's no way to transfer it or get a new one, which is really annoying when the unit is 9 months old and has broken 2wce with what seems to be installation issues (by Ager) and the unit should have a 5 year warranty.
This is a pretty stupid rule, considering they are the ones that supply and install the unit, so they know EXACTLY how old it is. So if you have a flakey unit (as we do) the $ add up pretty quickly to get them out to fix the problems.
We even asked them if they'd just remove it for us seeing it's broken again and they could keep it for spare parts and they refused. So we're just going to pay someone else to do it and then we're getting a brand new unit...different brand, much more reliable, with a warranty!
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By Soul Solutions on
Friday, 22 February 2008
International Women's Day will see the launch of a new Australian girlie IT book : Tech Girls are Chic.
"The book presents 16 gals working in a range of Information Technology (IT) jobs in Australia. It shows the diversity of IT careers in a fun and interesting way through funky photos, an insightful personal profile, and an a quick read fiction story about technology."
For more info about the book check out : www.techgirlsarechic.org
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By Soul Solutions on
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
Our presentation at the Gold Coast .Net User group on SQL 2008 Spatial and Virtual Earth has now been postponed till the 20th March.
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