Netbooks, Good or Bad?

by Patrick 2. May 2009 17:40

image Well, I broke down and bought an ASUS 1000HE for work and I have to say, I love it.  I have a normal laptop, Lenovo W500 which I do all my programming and web work on.  So why did I need this netbook?

Well, for one, I love the size, it is only 1024x600 native LCD, but it is perfect for watching video tutorials or testing or reading PDFs.

The other main reason was that the 1000HE brags about 9.5 hours of battery.  I figured if I could get half this, I’d be happy.  I can say that under normal usage, you can easily get 6-8 hours.  I haven’t loaded any movies on it yet to find out how it performs under movie watching conditions.

I did do two upgrades to it, I added a 2 gig ram stick I had from another laptop, but found out I should have spent the 22 bucks to get a faster stick to overclock with.  I ordered one and should be here later this week.

Second upgrade I did was to throw a 200gig 7200rpm hdd into it.  I didn’t spend enough time with the 160gig 5400rpm it came with, so can’t tell you if its faster.

Lastly, I decided this will be my test laptop, so I threw Windows 7 RC1 on it and got most of the drivers worked out.  Everything works, I really like the size and weight of it, and you can’t beat the battery life.  It could never be my primary computer, but for the “around the house” or second laptop, it is amazing, especially if you travel.

Windows Live Writer Testing

by Patrick 25. February 2009 17:24

After installing BlogEngine.Net and really loving it. I decided to give Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer a try.

This post has been written completely in WLW.

Scan_PS

I was able to add this picture and even add the title and sepia tone to it.

Table

Values

One Two
Three Four

It can do all kinds of things like insert a table (see above) and even code snippets like:

if (this == that)
{
response.redirect("/somepage.aspx");
}

and insert maps

Map picture

of the Metrodome in Minneapolis, MN

Windows 7 Beta Notes

by Patrick 18. January 2009 09:01

Well, first attempt was on my Thinkpad w500 and that failed hard.  But it appears it was probably because of the switchable graphics card.

I installed the beta on my mac mini, which is the media center computer, and it works well.  Faster, but boot camp support for drivers is limited at best.  Hopefully Apple will come out with drivers soon.  One issue on the mini, after watching a movie in Media Center, media center crashes.

Since I didn’t get the w500 working with Windows 7, I did switch over to using that as my main computer, so that left the Thinkpad t61p to play around with.  Installed Windows 7 on the t61p was a snap.  Of course I had a bit of a challenge forgetting my dvd rom drive at the office in the docking station.  Thanks to my obsolete HD-DVD Xbox 360 drive, I was able to install Windows 7.

Install went well, most of the lenovo drivers installed fine, although I’d like to see more supported drivers, but that will happen at launch. 

I highly recommend anyone wanting to play around with the next desktop OS from Microsoft try Windows 7.  It is a much better experience than Vista, faster, easier to use and once released, the drivers and support will be much better ( I hope ).

Anyway, this post came from the new Windows Live Writer which is a great tool to post entries to many types of blogs.

Install Wordpress 2.6.3 on IIS 7 and Windows 2008

by Patrick 13. November 2008 01:11

I tried installing Wordpress 2.6.3 on my dev Windows 2008 server running IIS 7 and .Net 3.5sp1 and could not get it working.

I went back to 2.6.0 of wordpress which installed just fine and then did the upgrade to 2.6.3 which worked. No idea why it didn't install, but something clearly changed between 2.6.0 and 2.6.3 to break IIS 7 installs.

Oh well, now to figure out how to get comments and other functions in Wordpress to work under IIS7, got permalinks working, but think it broke the comments feature. I love the new URL Rewrite Pack for IIS7 as well as the Media Streaming Bandwidth throttle option for IIS 7.

Can't believe I am saying this, but the last couple of months working with IIS 7 has converted me from Apache. Still wish IIS 7 could do wildcard binding without dedicating an IP and retain the web.config file across publishes from Visual Studio 2008, but oh well. I also wish that the ASP.NET Visual Studio Web Server could understand the URL Rewrite statements in the web.config file and route the links appropriately instead of having to publish to my local IIS 7 install in Vista. Also wish that IIS 7 could be installed on XP.

Oh well, at least I got Wordpress running and MySQL on it, so that means I can start testing the various Wordpress sites I have moving from Apache to IIS 7. Next up is cleaning up my Wordpress export to BlogML for Blogengine.net import. Oh well, lots to do, little time to do it.

WPF Dynamically Added Controls and Getting Values

by Patrick 4. November 2008 11:11

Today's challenge was fun.

I had added a bunch of textboxes and labels to a Grid with 2 StackPanel in my code behind.


StackPanel sp1 = new StackPanel();
StackPanel sp2 = new StackPanel();
Grid g = new Grid();
                ColumnDefinition colDef1 = new ColumnDefinition {Width = new GridLength(50)};
                ColumnDefinition colDef2 = new ColumnDefinition();
                g.ColumnDefinitions.Add(colDef1);
                g.ColumnDefinitions.Add(colDef2);
gb.Content = g;
                Grid.SetColumn(sp1,0);
                g.Children.Add(sp1);
                Grid.SetColumn(sp2, 1);
                g.Children.Add(sp2);

for (int i = 1, i < = 4, i++)
{
                Label lbl = new Label {Content = "Name", Margin = new Thickness(0)};
                Grid.SetColumn(lbl, 0);
                sp1.Children.Add(lbl);
                TextBox fieldname = new TextBox {Text = "", Name = "fieldname" + i, Margin = new Thickness(0,5,0,0)};
                Grid.SetColumn(fieldname, 1);
                sp2.Children.Add(fieldname);
}

So I then wanted to get the results of what someone types into these TextBoxs.

But wait, I can't just access them like this:


string t = fieldname1.Text;

Why? Only Microsoft knows, but apparently, dynamically added controls can't be accessed this way since they don't exist in the XAML code.

So, how does one access them then? Well, that's where this cool LogicalTreeHelper function to find the control by name we use the FindLogicalNode option of the LogicalTreeHelper function

So to loop through the number of fields you added you can do the following:


List test = new List;
for (int i = 1; i < = 4; i++)
{
test.Add((LogicalTreeHelper.FindLogicalNode(Fields1, "fieldname" + i) as TextBox).Text);
}

So there you have it, a simple way to access dynamically added controls using LogicalTreeHelper and FindLogicalNode just remember to name your controls you add.

Tags: ,

Coding | C# | WPF

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