tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83092676148906324182011-11-27T16:38:30.891-08:00Here are my rantings about any code/tool/application that I come across, topics that I spent considerable amount of time learning, things that I have stumbled upon and found them to be interesting, and things that stomped me etc.Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.comBlogger271100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-74288196185011961812011-10-18T12:02:00.000-07:002011-10-18T12:17:00.192-07:00

I got to think about code in my previous blog post about calculating the age of a given date in months and thought about a little more elegant way to do it, here is my modified version: //Calculate the approximate age in months for a given date function getAgeInMonths(fromDateStr) { var frDate = new Date(fromDateStr); var toDate = new Date(); if (frDate > toDate) { throw "Given date is in

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-11133025338575999392011-10-17T19:08:00.001-07:002011-10-17T19:44:41.785-07:00

Have you ever tried to calculate the age of a given date in months using Javascript? Well, a co-worker looking for a way to do that. It does not have to use the date (day of the month), but just a rough calculation of age in months. Here is what I have come up with: //Calculate the approximate age in months for a given date function getAgeInMonths(fromDateStr) { var frDate = new Date(

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-58209220611259026762011-09-19T14:50:00.000-07:002011-09-19T14:58:26.491-07:00

The other day one of my co-workers was asking if there is a quick way to insert a SQL query to find duplicates in a given column in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) similar to how you can insert SQL scripts, i.e. “Select Top 1000 Rows”, “Edit top 200 Rows” etc., when you right-click on a table name.You could sort of do this using Template Explorer feature in SSMS, but it is not very

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-955852699347206352011-09-15T22:09:00.000-07:002011-09-15T22:09:48.261-07:00

We have our JIRA instance running on a server, for example, JIRA_SERVER01. Users can get to that server by using URL http://JIRA_SERVER01/.  We also created a CNAME to that server called JIRA so users can use a friendly name such as http://JIRA/ or fully qualified name, for example, http://JIRA.OurCompany.com/.All of these URLs work fine, however, we want all of those URLs to automatically

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-67041329777663896222011-09-10T23:13:00.001-07:002011-09-14T16:05:58.806-07:00

I sometimes find myself having to write the following code where I need to use multiple Using statements and end up nesting them.using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader("FileToProcess.txt";)) { using (StreamWriter results = new StreamWriter("Results.txt")) { using (StreamWriter errors = new StreamWriter("Errors.txt")) { // Read/Write from/to the files as

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-843269961463395802011-09-09T16:57:00.001-07:002011-09-13T21:04:08.435-07:00

In JIRA, when you are looking at an issue, it often shows all the comments expanded. This would be OK if there are only a couple of comments and they are compact, but often comments are added to JIRA via emails and each email contains the whole thread and thus it makes very hard to read/browse through the comments as they all seem to run together with same text repeated in successive comments.

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-12146316760129120042011-09-08T14:27:00.001-07:002011-09-13T21:03:35.646-07:00

If you ever download stuff off of web, you should use some sort of checksum tool.  I believe in most Unix/Linux flavors of Operating Systems, come with a checksum tool, but no such luck in Windows. Have you every wished every edition of Windows came with checksum tool?  Well, almost.  As far as know, most of the Windows versions do not come with this tool, however, Microsoft does provide one.  In

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-50272196580210586592011-03-21T01:21:00.000-07:002011-04-26T22:11:31.047-07:00

I can’t believe it has been more than 18months since I have written a blog. Today, I was trying to call a stored procedure in SQL Server 2008 and keep getting Incorrect syntax error.For example, let’s say, I have a following stored procedure on the asp.net membership provider that returns active users since a given date: CREATE PROCEDURE _GetActiveUserSinceDate @SinceDate DATETIMEASBEGIN

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-78532012092532310332009-08-11T16:58:00.001-07:002009-08-11T17:15:55.305-07:00

Get ready for brain overload, 24 hours of nonstop SQL Server training by experts all around the world! And best of all it is FREE and you don't have to go anywhere to get this training. Here is the link to this training http://24hours.sqlpass.org.Anyway the reason for my post is not to propagate about this event, though it is not a bad idea, but to share a little javascript. When I went to

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-67127773578550893482009-04-16T11:39:00.000-07:002009-04-16T12:27:36.215-07:00

I was looking for an example of how the "Loop Limit" shape can be used in a Flow Diagram and could not find any diagrams either in Microsoft documentation or on their website that show the sample usage of this shape. Most of the pages on the web are also not helpful either. Most web pages are either people asking about how to use this shape or a couple of blogs that basically rehash Visio

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-61527522597211929922009-01-16T14:50:00.000-08:002011-04-26T23:57:03.147-07:00

// The argument could be any of the following: // a) A number itself // b) Number in quotes, i.e. number stored as string // c) Number could be in scientific format // d) An object function isNumber(val) { // we need to explicitly handle null values // because isNaN returns false when it should return true if (null == val) return false; // if it is an empty string or a string with

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-598679184341016172008-11-21T17:25:00.000-08:002008-11-21T17:43:32.821-08:00

I have been working on an ASP.NET page and all of a sudden, I was getting Parse Error on this page as shown below:All I did was modify the code in the page and plus I could build the page in Visual Studio 2008 with out any errors. I could also build the entire web site with out any errors, but I was still getting the error.I compared the file with the previous version and I do not see any

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-90895900578089826532008-11-01T17:21:00.000-07:002008-11-26T11:50:43.248-08:00

I just installed the SharpForge version 0.5.14b on my system that has .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 + Visual Studio SP1. That is, I have AJAX toolkit version 3.5 running and when I browse to the SharpForge web page, I am getting the following error from web.config:I tried changing the version # for System.Web.Extensions to 3.5.0.0 everywhere it is referenced in the web.config but I

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-4402546002310128242008-05-14T23:42:00.000-07:002011-04-27T23:31:31.608-07:00

I was looking for a simple Javascript function to check or validate a date string and most of the examples I have come across are too verbose. So I came up with a simple function that uses Regular Expressions and the built-in Date class.//Checks if a given date string is in // one of the valid formats: // a) M/D/YYYY format // b) M-D-YYYY format // c) M.D.YYYY format // d) M_D_YYYY format

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-1551503439723595222008-05-14T10:38:00.000-07:002008-05-14T10:57:28.943-07:00

In my last post View dynamically generated HTML, I talked about how you can add a button to your Links toolbar in IE and link it to a snippet of Javascript code.Here are a couple of snippets that I use to examine the current document properties and window properties. I have added them as "Show Doc Props" and "Show Win Props" buttons to my IE Links toolbar and they come very handy while debugging

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-25923048554616440542008-05-12T22:27:00.000-07:002008-05-13T08:19:59.715-07:00

Have you ever wanted to see the dynamically generated HTML of a page? If you use AJAX or lot of Javascript, I am sure you have added HTML content to your page on the fly and you wanted to see the active HTML source of that page, since IE only shows the original HTML source.Perhaps you already know about how to do this, but, I often use this little Javascript code snippet to see the active

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-57352581068513235252008-05-09T13:49:00.000-07:002008-05-09T14:25:25.792-07:00

In my previous post titled Convert an integer to an ascii character in Javascript, I said, I could not find any built-in methods in Javascript to convert a char into an integer and vice versa, well, it turns out that I have not looked hard enough. There are two methods on (one static and one instance as expected) String class that would do this conversion and these method are available since

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-54566847088597815182008-05-07T16:15:00.000-07:002008-05-09T14:44:17.949-07:00

See my 2nd post for the revised code using built-in Javascript methods.I was looking for a function to convert an integer into an ascii character in Javascript and could not find one. This is because Javascript does not support explicit character types, and to Javascript character is nothing but a string of length 1. This is what I have come up with. First, you define a string constant

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-78763776549821426032008-04-23T13:25:00.000-07:002008-05-19T18:29:58.876-07:00

The other day I was trying to extract bookmarks from my IE's history cache, but could not find any tools in IE to do that. Looked around on Google and found a VB Project, which is fine, but I am looking for something using C#. Then, I found this article on CodeProject titled The tiny wrapper class for URL history interface in C#, which would work, but I want a simple script that I can tweak and

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-75496500636111783392008-04-15T15:11:00.000-07:002008-12-10T13:03:14.632-08:00

Have you ever wanted to move your Virtual PC base and differencing disks to a different locations or to a different system?  Well, I recently have. A friend of mine sent me the following blog post (I highly recommend it if you are thinking about using virtual systems), which talks about how to setup virtual systems using differencing disks:Use VirtualPCs Differencing Disks To Your AdvantageAs

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-20618609548692525052008-04-11T16:32:00.000-07:002008-04-11T17:35:30.136-07:00

Lately, I have been doing most of my work using a Virtual PC and I often find myself having to take a snapshot of the active window (dialog box), especially to create all my blog entries.I know that Alt+Print Screen copies the snapshot of the active window to the clip board, but in Virtual PC environment RightAlt key acts as the Host key, so if you use the RightAlt key it would not work. So make

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-732903043644099152008-04-11T14:53:00.000-07:002008-12-10T13:03:15.355-08:00

I recently ran into a strange issue and spent about a day troubleshooting this so I thought I share my findings here.I had a classic ASP webapp running on a virtual system and I could access it using http://localhost/webapp/ or http://127.0.0.1/webapp URLs. No problem, until I made the following changes:Added the virtual system to our domain to be able to access some appsMoved the virtual system

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-33242003725126252102008-03-28T10:26:00.000-07:002008-12-10T13:03:17.110-08:00

Here is my recent Saga trying to view Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 file saved in Office Open XML format, i.e. pptx.Prelude:I work in the Windows world like many others out there and believe in Microsoft products and technologies to most extent, but recent experience in trying to view a pptx file shaken that belief quite a bit. I only have Office 2003 installed on my system and I received a pptx

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-32595941329065481352007-12-16T22:40:00.000-08:002008-12-10T13:03:17.905-08:00

The other day, I was wondering if you can query against a database that is on a remote server without first having to create a linked server in SQL Server 2005. A co-worker told me that I could use OPENROWSET and then I read the following page on MSDN, which gives a very good overview of what it is and how to use it:OPENROWSET Help Page on MSDNMost of the SQL Experts out there already knows about

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-11332254888784931992007-09-26T23:10:00.000-07:002007-09-26T23:27:11.383-07:00

1) Considered the following usage:string userID = db.ExecuteScalar(dbCommand).ToString(); Better approach might be to use the Convert classstring userID = Convert.ToString(db.ExecuteScalar(dbCommand)); 2) Considered the following usage:if (dr["someColBool"] != null && dr["someColBool"].ToString().Length > 0 && Convert.ToBoolean(dr["someColBool"]) == true) continue;Remove the unnecessary code and

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-83148896648621613662006-12-28T13:03:00.000-08:002006-12-28T13:36:17.551-08:00

Here is a code snippet I ran into the other day:string strMsgType = "";switch (messageType){case MessageTypes.GeneralMessage:strMsgType = "0";break;case MessageTypes.TargetMessage1On1:strMsgType = "1";break;case MessageTypes.GroupMessage:strMsgType = "2";break;case MessageTypes.BroadcastMessage:strMsgType = "3";break;case MessageTypes.CallBackMessage:strMsgType = "4";break;case

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309267614890632418.post-7554281249481310172006-11-20T18:05:00.000-08:002007-01-03T16:49:27.615-08:00

I am reviewing some code and came across the following code:try{if (str.Trim() == "") return DateTime.Now;return (new DateTime(int.Parse(str.Substring(0, 4)), int.Parse(str.Substring(4, 2)), int.Parse(str.Substring(6, 2))));}catch{return DateTime.Now;}Obviously, an exception would be thrown if the string is not in the right format.So, I looked for a clean way to parse the string into a DateTime

Sonny Nallamillihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05843127584842369696noreply@blogger.com0