Andrey Sanches has a very nice post here about how to use List.Find().

Notice that the search value is 1, which is a fixed value. That is not allways what you want. Consider for example you want to know if the person exists who’s id the user typed in a textbox…

I’ve often said to achieve enything you have to invest. Either money or time.

Now, I don’t have tonnes of money to spend. Most of us µISV’s don’t.

So, what do I have? Time. But not a lot of it. I as an µISV want to bring my software ideas to market. WIll they sell? I don’t know. Who can? If I would be sure, I’d get some funding somewhere and build it.

What is my strategy then?

All my ideas for software, I want to make. I want to make them fast. Every piece of software should be good in terms of quality (or else it comes back to haunt you…).

But for that, I need tools to create software. I used ASP.NET Ajax control toolkit until now but I constantly ran into rendering and postback problems (among other). This was taking up so much of my time I wasn’t really getting to putting the software on the market.

Now a new customer of mine asked me to build him a peice of software to manage incoming and outgoing communication in his company.

I decided this too would make a great piece of software to add to my products list, so I set out on building it.

Recently I did a lot of research on other toolkit out there that could easily integrate with ASP.NET. I did not find anything that was remotly interesting. Last week I had another go at finding a toolkit. I happened to stumble upon Gaia Ajax Widgets.

MARVELOUS!!!

I’m using it now to build a user control (maybe turn it into a server control) to be a generic lookup form. I learned the UI style from my Nav days and it is truly wonderfull.

I will keep you posted on my progress.

Sure has been a while since my last post… So what have I been doing?

I’ve been doing a lot of consulting work for a Dutch company calles Qurius.

The end customer was BIS Industrial Services. They do insulation, scaffolding and a host of other services.

What I did for them was create a portal for their remote employees for registering time spent on projects. They register time for about 3000 employees. This is done by about 35 administrative employees.

The technology used was ASP.NET 2.0 on IIS6. The backend was Microsoft Dynamics Nav.

Where am I going?

I’m doing a small µISV project which has allready been sold for a company in Roeselare. They want a small program that allows them to register communication between the company and external contacts. They have been doing this for years an see real added value in this business process.

Until now, they have been registering their communications in an excell spreadsheet. This of course has some drawbacks in a multiuser environment. Another major drawback is that their contact details are in their Microsoft Dynamics Nav System.

Yes, that Nav again. I did design the app to allow for a pluggable dataaccess though, so it can easily be coupled to other software. The app is in C# ASP.NET and I’m probably not going to use the ajax control toolkit but rather Gaia Ajax Widgets.

I will probably post about my experiences with those in the next few days.

Holy tamole!!!

I take a lot of my words from my earlier post and comments back! I got it running!

So what did I do wrong the first time?

This time I installed an Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop, the previous time I had installed the server version. (in retrospect I think it will work on a server edition too).

I followed Timani’s first post to the letter. Everything was fine and dandy and the xsp2 webserver was happily serving on port 8080. Only one small issue: his post says:

For the ASP.NET 2.0 environment
$ cd /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/
$ xsp2
$ sudo cp /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index.aspx /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index2.aspx

But this should be

For the ASP.NET 2.0 environment
$ cd /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/
$ sudo cp /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index.aspx /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/index2.aspx
$ xsp2

Notice the cp statement comes before running the webserver.

Now came the time to get apache serving the aps.net apps

I headed over to Timani’s second post and again followed it rigidly.

Everything went fine until I got to sudo a2enmod mod_mono. This said the module was already enabled. Step 2 was also not needed. The module was loaded already.

After everything was done I pointed my browser to: http://localhost/AspOnApache/

Nothing nada zip I was very dissapointed, again… A nice 503 greeted me, again… I thought this cannot be, what is the matter here.

So then, I looked very carefully at the configuration file /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. I noticed that from copy/pasting from Timani’s post some quotes (“) where replaced by a dot (.). Don’t ask, I dont know why.

After retouching the conf, I reloaded apache again and reloaded http://localhost/AspOnApache/ in my browser. WELL WELL!!! It shouted a parser error at me! At least apache wasn’t hicking up anymore.

In the aspx file, the same foul play as with the conf happened, so I gave the aspx some love and reloaded http://localhost/AspOnApache/ once more.

IT WORKS!!!

Last notes: thanks to Timani and Viraptor for gently kicking me in the rear end! Persistance does pay off!

What next? I’ll see if I can serve some small asp.net 2.0 app i created some time ago. I’ll post the results.

UPDATE: *** I’ve struggled some more these last few days,  trying to get two apps of mine to run on the box. To no avail, I’m giving it up for now, due to too much work ***

I was talking to a friend of mine who said that he was running an ASP.NET 2.0 app on a Linux machine. That would be too good to be true wouldn’t it? Well he indeed showed me and thus I had to believe him. He was running the app on a Redhat linux box with Apache2 and Mono.

I was intrigued and toyed with it myself for several days but could not get it to work. Since then, I allways wanted to try again. If he could do it, I certainly can! I hate to admit failiure…

So, I’m going to have a shot at it again, this time following this post: Timani’s Blog » Blog Archive » Installing mono, apache, mod_mono and deploying applications in Ubuntu

I will let you know what I find out!

Have any of you guys done it before?

I’ve been playng for a while with ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. and I like it. Having studied Rails, I was missing some things I missed from Script.aculo.us so I tought that it was impossible no one would have used Script.aculo.us with ASP.NET. My collective memory (google) led me to this article: CoreWeb :: Script.aculo.us, Prototype and Asp.Net Best Friends Forever

I will check it out tonight and see what I can learn from that.