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What Microsoft's Scott Hanselman Does Not Tell You About His Work

Mr.CorrectTruth — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 17:25:59 -07:00

Scott Hanselman of Microsoft won't tell you that his Contoso Crafts demo will break if forced to process a large amount of data. This means that new developers are likely to get suckered into using ASP.net Core thinking it will be easy because of how easy he makes it look in his demo. Then they will copy his methods as close as possible thinking that surely a Microsoft employee would lead them down the right path. Everything will seem fine for awhile until they have a lot of data in their posts table at which point the dataset is too big to work with Scott's get all data method. Don't believe me? Just look at how slow this site is and how often error messages are displayed instead of posts. Other developers are recommending the use of something called a ViewModel which Hanselman never discussed in Contoso Crafts. They say using the ViewModel to compute properties would be preferable to doing it the GetPosts() method of the PostsService class. I thought everything needed to be computed in a service class since that is how it was done in Contoso Crafts and other examples from either Microsoft or other so called ASP.Net experts.
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Artisteer 3 Function Name Change Broke My SEO Code

ThanksALotArtisteer — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:53:23 -08:00

If you use a pre-Artisteer 3 version of Artisteer then don't upgrade to Artisteer 3 unless you don't need to change the functions in your themes to make up of the failure of Artisteer developers to provide basic search engine optimization (SEO) features. Features like meta descriptions and canonical link tags that should be a no brainer to any competent developer, but seem lost to the Artisteer people require improvements to be made by the customer. Those changes can be made in Artisteer themes themselves by adding new functions to and tweaking out of the box functions in functions.php or by changing header.php using just default Wordpress functions. In my case I changed Artisteer functions that all had the prefix "art_" in the function names, but are all "theme_" now and in some cases entire function names have been changed or removed completely. In addition I cannot use custom code I built to strip some types of HTML tags from posts because art_get_post_content() is no longer a function. Now I must re-do all my work because some idiot decided to change all the function names. To make matters worse I could not post a question about this in the Artisteer help forum because I got a XML parsing error whenever submitting my thread. As a result I had to start writing this before losing all my progress due to a power surge and having to write this now all over again. As a result what should have been a simple copy and paste has cost me a half hour of my life due to the forum mishap and power surge alone. Thanks a lot Artisteer.
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RIP Welcome to America Now Speak English Bumper Sticker

IllegalAlien — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 05:40:33 -08:00

Today the Welcome to America Now Speak English Bumper Sticker was found out to be unavailable on Amazon. Instead of posting this in shopping now the best this to do is just to show you the sticker you could have bought and its old product description. Old Description: With its universal design the Welcome to America Now Speak English Bumper Sticker is great for sending a message to all aliens who don't speak English in a way they cannot possibly understand until they learn the language to read the sticker. Nevertheless its patriotic star spangled banner background makes it clear that this is a patriotic bumper sticker.
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RIP Illegal Alien Costume with Jumpsuit and Green Card

IllegalAlien — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 22:16:24 -08:00

It is with great sadness that I regret to inform everyone that the Illegal Alien Costume with jail jumpsuit and Green Card is no longer available on Amazon. When it was still available its product description was as follows: The Illegal Alien Mask with Jail Jumpsuit and Green Card appears at first glance to be an illegal alien Halloween costume. It has an alien mask, an orange prison style jumpsuit, and a Green Card, but there is something wrong with this image. If this is an illegal alien costume how do you explain the Green Card? Think about, have you ever heard of an illegal alien with a Green Card? Having a Green Card by definition makes you a legal resident alien in the United States. Since the alien has a Green Card it is impossible for him to be an illegal alien in America unless he is one of those expired Green Card carrying illegal aliens, but the card is advertised as a key piece of the the costume, so how the hell is this an illegal alien costume? I don't know, but if I had to guess this poor guy followed the steps to legal residency to get his Green Card in the United States before acquiring a mask and an orange jumpsuit. Then sometime later he crossed the border into Canada or took a flight overseas at which point his American Green Card became useless making him an illegal alien. Costume Includes: 1 Space Alien Mask 1 Orange Jumpsuit 1 Green Card
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ASP.Net AJAX Rating Control is a Disappointment

NoLimitList.com — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:38:09 -08:00

The AJAX Rating Control from Microsoft's AJAX Control ToolKit for the ASP.Net framework currently in use on this website has been a bit of a disappointment so far. It performed quite well at first because it made adding a graphic user interface for users to rate posts and binding its CurrentRating property to a SQL Insert Statement quite easy, but after that problems arose that proved inconvenient to fix and could have been hard for a less experienced developer to address. The first problem occurs when trying to display average ratings for which the value is about halfway between two whole numbers (ex: 3.5) because it can only display whole numbers (ex: 3 or 4). This problem could easily be fixed down the road by using a jQuery plugin with images for half stars. The second problem is that the CurrentRating property only supports integer values. As a result any non whole number such as a decimal (ex: 3.5) or a null value will result in a runtime error. The decimal bug rules out using it to display accurate averages visually and the null values rules out using it for anything in which a post can have no ratings unless fixed by the developer. The best way to fix this that we have found so far is to convert the text values for the average rating label control in each row to a string, convert that string to a decimal, round the decimal to the nearest whole number, convert the result to an integer, and set the CurrentRating property to the integer value using the RowDataBound event of the GridView. Sanitized Code Used for Integer Conversion: AjaxControlToolkit.Rating ratingcontrol = (AjaxControlToolkit.Rating)e.Row.FindControl("Rate"); Label rateavglabel = (Label)e.Row.FindControl("RateAVG"); string rateavg = rateavglabel.Text.ToString(); Decimal exactrating = (Decimal)Decimal.Parse(rateavg); Math.Round(exactrating); ratingcontrol.CurrentRating = Convert.ToInt32(exactrating); We would post more code, but for security reasons we don't allow some characters that are necessary to render C# scripts server side in our input forms on this site. At present it is necessary to prevent cross site scripting (XSS) attacks. The use of e.Row.FindControl is being used because it is inside of an "if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)" if statement inside of the GridView RowDataBound event (ex: protected void GridView1_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)). There is a little bit more to our code than that, but its mostly for customizing labels. All of this was done with the CurrentRating set to 0 by default.
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Taser C2 Stun Guns No Longer Not Available

AntiCrimeDog — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 10:21:47 -07:00

Just when I'm ready to move the Taser C2 Stun Gun with Laser Sight ad from one site to this one I find out that it is no longer available on Amazon. In fact I don't see any Taser stun guns on the site at all anymore. Too bad because now I am here ranting when I should be posting an ad in shopping as follows: The Taser C2 Stun Gun with Laser Sight utilizes the latest Electro-Muscular Disruption (EMD) technology from Taser International, the world leader in personal defense electronics. Built to stop the most dangerous, roid rage driven, meth addicted, and psychotic of homicidal lunatics alive in their tracks by taking control of their muscles, rendering them helpless, and leaving them on the ground temporarily incapacitated in a fetal position. The new The new EMD technology gives the C2 a dramatic increase in shocking power over previous models with the same injury reducing safeguards as older less powerful models. Responsible use is encouraged and remember that each cartridge is tagged with a serial number to assure greater accountability. Taser C2 Features: 50,000 Volts of Shock Power 2 Barbed Probes with 2 inches of Clothing Penetration Ability 15 Foot Range of Fire 1 Laser Sight 1 LED Flashlight 1 Lithium Power Magazine Built in Safety Features Lifetime Replacement Guarantee
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