atlas

as an exercise in mucking around with atlas i've started coding a search engine aggregator. the new controls does make it very easy to call webservices from javascript asynchronously, which in turn makes it easier to make the ui more responsive. i did have to get my hands dirty with javascript which i am shite at. but i managed to get a test page behaving how i'd like.

the www.asp.net site does have some useful atlas tutorials and quite a responsive forum for questions. as to the responsiveness of the site, well its very slow i do find it funny that a site to help those using new microsoft tech, built using microsoft tech can be so slow.

next step for my app is to actually return some proper results from search engines/web services.
i'll start off by parsing and displaying standard google results, which is a good excuse to finally teach myself regex. i've downloaded regexbuddy and the regulator (which seems better) to help me.

reading through a c# book at home it looks like the most performant way to use regex is to compile the regex to a separate assembly that can then be re-used within the application. that means though that writing the regex code will probably have to be a 2 step process. when coding/debugging the app use regex as normal then when testing move compile the regex out to a separate assembly, then change the calling code to execute the compiled regex.

bit of a palava, but i need to write the most performant code possible for this app, so its the price i have to pay.

astoring asp.net profiles unblobbied

http://www.asp.net/sandbox/samp_profiles.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1

and another

http://atlas.asp.net/docs/default.aspx

another atlas url

http://atlas.asp.net/docs/atlas/doc/services/consuming.aspx#simple

atlas

just downloaded the april ctp of atlas and have started having a muck around.
There is definitely some interesting stuff to be playing with, especially in terms of making a web app mroe responsive to a user.

i've started working on a new idea, which poses an issue of how to deal with calling several long running functions, an interesting use of atlas would be to allow functions return their data separately rather than having to postback the entire page and then wait for all the functions to return before returning the page.

http://atlas.asp.net/docs/atlas/doc/services/exposing.aspx

yahoo maps

Well. i've nearly finished writing the basic functionality that will allow me to switch between using the google or yahoo maps api. this would have given me real flexibilty in terms of outages to either service, or api changes. however whilst testing the yahoo code i've come to the realisation that actually, yahoo maps doesn't cover the uk. oh bugger.

its not all bad though. rejigging the code to aloow for both apis has forced me to refactor some stuff
which i probably would have left. and it now means i can concentrate on sorting the google functionality safe in the knoweldge that if/when yahoo decide to open up maps to the uk i'll be able to take advantage of it.

When implementing the yahoo maps api i decided to go down the ajax route and wrote a getoverlay page that returned a valid georss document. There is no reason why i can't code the google ajax code to simply read the same file (code reuse, oh yes). so that is the next step really.

once that is done, i'll need to think about images for the icons. and i'll also need to rewrite the overlay code so that i can pass the price range parameters in the ajax call. This also means i need to create a ddl of house prices, then work out the javascript code (really easy probably but i'm shite at javascript) that can get the selected value from the ddl and the place name from the textbox.

whats new

made some progress on adding properties to the database

read a article about the new beta of yaho maps. got me thinking that maybe i should try and build the "mapmove" (don't like the name but its shorter than, "google maps rightmove competitor idea") site so that it will work with either yahoo or googles api. I guess this is the sort decision that needs to be made when you use thrid party web services. its all very well developing an app to use a service, but you are then completely dependent upon the unguarranteed service working.

Writing the site so that i can switch between the two (maybe just a flag in the web.config) would be really useful, espeically i either api changes radically or stops.

I'll have to read this stuff:
http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/

longitude and latitude fun

when i first set wrote the screenscrape i chucked up a database for it to write to with the lat and lng being saved as varchar s. obviously this is shite so i started looking at the corrcet data type to store them as.

Eventually after much pain and fannying around with floats (bad idea leave them alone) i have a latitude and longitude field in my database with the following data type

Decimal(9) with a scale of 6 and a precision of 18 (the default).

maps maps maps

making slow but steady progress on the mapmove (as i've badly named it) idea. noconsultant now being completely sidelined.

i've been working on the basic adding a property functionality. to be used by agents. they enter property details (price, postcode, etc) that gets saved to a table, and then kicks off the screenscraper to get the lng and lat values for the postcode whcih are then added to the proprty table.

Also been reading up on using ajax with the maps api. originally i was thinking i'd have to dynamically generate loads of javascript to create the overlays for the properties on the map. but instead i'll asyncronously call a .aspx from the javascript which will return an xml document containing the properties and their coordinates.

google maps etc

i've been continuing poc on the idea to use google maps to plot houses for sale. not an original idea it turns out as theres a ssimilar thing done in the us with craigslist.

obstacles so far have been post office being nazi's and owning the copyright to postcodes. but i've written a really simple screenscraper that scrapes google maps to get the latitude and longitude values. postcodes are important not for the user but for estate agents to be able to add a property.
i expect users to just search by place names.

so far i've got this:
1) screenscraper
2) list of uk towns and cities and their lat and long values
3) thought about how the ui would work
4) created a basic generic da class

another idea

i've been trying to buy a house recently and have spent a lot of time using rightmove.co.uk as well as lots of other shite property websites. i was thinking the other day how i put in my search criteria and get a list of houses, 99% of which aren't even in an area i would consider buying in.
Would'nt it be nice to be able to view a map which showed the houses for sale (or rent for that matter) in your price range. so you could simply zoom into your preferred area and not have to look at a huge list of houses in shitty areas that just happen to be in your price range.

I've already started doing some work on this and it may end up taking precedent over noconsultant.com

more useful links for asp.net 2.0 providers

I still haven't got round to sorting the membership stuff. in fact i haven't got round tomuch site wise this week. Here are a few more useful links for when i finally pull my finger out and write some code for this site.

A microsoft bloke's blog. lots of useful links on this

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/02/24/438953.aspx


One of the links of this blog is an article on customer membership providers
http://www.devx.com/asp/Article/29256

this week i've mostly been readin

Just got this book off amazon.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764576100/qid=1143033598/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_3_1/026-6867934-0908452

I'm normally a bit reticent to buy a programming book when a bit of googling will normally get you want you want for free. but this book gives a nice overview of asp.net 2.0 (now if only i could think of a reason to write a mobile web app).

curved boxes

I've been thinking about about the visual design of the site (as a break from the database/app design)

I've been thinking about using rounded corners on the main content boxes on the site, i've found this article that goes thru the basics of achieving this using css.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/css-round-corners-boxes-curves

useful articles

One of the main reasons i set up this blog is to provide myself with a single place to look for links to useful articles i've found whilst researching for noconsultant. Rather than have to keep my work and home bookmarks synchronised by mailing my email account every time i find something useful, so. here is a list of useful articles i've found.

I'll need to write a custom membership provider for my site, here are some useful links:

http://blogs.dotnetgerman.com/alexonasp.net/PermaLink,guid,669e2dc5-a623-4e21-bb16-63bb66cb5be9.aspx
http://imar.spaanjaars.com/QuickDocId.aspx?QUICKDOC=380
http://www.aspnetresources.com/blog/utility_of_provider_model.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/ASPNETProvMod_Prt5.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/ASPNETProvMod_Intro.asp
http://www.dotnetbips.com/articles/displayarticle.aspx?id=494
http://www.devx.com/asp/Article/29256/0/page/3
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/11/Membership/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/00/ASPNET20Overview/default.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/

I'm just in the process of finishing off the database design on a sql server 2000 server. I found this link quite useful for helping me work out what data types to use for my tables:

http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.phpr/2212141

I intend to use a bit of ajax for a few of the pages cos
A) the way i'll use it will really speed up what the user has to do
and
B) Its a good excuse to learn about it.

Below are some links that i found useful when researching ajax and how i could implement it on my site:
http://adamstiles.com/2004/12/hacking_google_/
http://serversideguy.blogspot.com/2004/12/google-suggest-dissected.html
http://www.codeproject.com/Ajax/ajaxnet_lookup_control.asp

testing testing 1 2

when have you done enough testing. at what point can you say "i have tested this completely there isn nothing left i can test" ?

The idea, the story so far

I'm a coder and i'm always coming up with (bad) business ideas that i normally start developing just as learning excercises, before getting bored/disenchanted and moving onto the next one.

A while ago i thought of creating an IT job site with a difference, one that removed the need (if there ever was one) for recruitment consultants. This idea is mainly born out of my dislike of recruitment consultants. In a skills based industry like IT i really can't see how recruitment consultant "add value" (to use wanky business speak) to the process of matching jobseekers to employers. In my experience recruitment consultant are unknowledgable (yeah they want a developer with sequel server c#.net and .net). I've also experienced them lying.

Thinking from an employers perspective i guess a good recruitment consultant should act as (for wont of a better term) shit filter, giving the employer the right candidates for the job. I guess the question is how many good recrutment consultants there are out there?. I know a lto of people who have interviewed completely unsuitable people for jobs that have been provided by recruitment consultants. so my answer to the question would be not many and not enough

dts doh!

I have found why my dts didn't work. in the copy tab of the copy object task there is a check box for use default options. i had kept that checked.
If you untick it and click the "options" button you then get a new form with a "copy database users and database roles" checkbox that is selected by default.

Oh well thats something i've learnt today (along with the existence of a goggomobile http://www.motorbase.com/vehicle/by-id/114/ )

sql server 2000 dts copy object pain

task is simple enough, copy a table (and its contents) from one database server to another.
So i create a dts copy object, uncheck "copy all", uncheck "copy related objects" select the specific table and bobs your uncle, or not. for some reason the dts is trying to copy a user over as well. so i get a "user xxx does not exist in the database" error. ok, thats fine, if i'd even selected that i wanted to copy the user. What a pain in the arse.

Luckily i have an application that updates a replica of this table, and with a quick connection string change i started updating the table (altho this will take 10 times as long as the dts would have).

I'm not saying the dts copy object is shite, obviously i'm dong somethign a bit stupid, but surely if you are allowed to select the specific database objects to copy the dts should only copy those specific database objects?

What is the point of blogging?

well, i intend to use this blog to record my progress thru developing an asp.net 2 based web site.
A by product of this will hopefully be a useful resource for me to look back on my progess (or lack of) and a place to keep all the articles/useful links that i will collect during my research. (maybe this will be useful for others who are doing similar things.) Or simply an opportunity for people to laugh at the stupid programmer making stupid mistakes (and not learning from them).

thats the primary point anyway. the secondary (for now) point will be to allow me to rant about whatever i'd like to rant about (normally idiotic work colleagues)