Some of you may have been wondering why there hasn't been any updates at all since the November of last year. The main reason for this is because I have been busy with my pet project at http://tradelr.com.  It's quite surprising how time flies when you're having fun. Before I knew it, half a year has passed. Also, the other nagging question is "Why have the comments been disabled?" Answer: S... [More]

On the lighter side of things, here are some of my favourites from xkcd.com.   ---- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- -- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Sadly to say, I have only now come across this wonderful book, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction. But as they say, better now than never. The above book is highly recommended to those who are interested in improving the way that they write code and to reduce the headaches associated with code maintenance. The key points mentioned by this book are Software construct... [More]

Previously, I have implemented an iGoogle-like interface for a seperate project as proof of concept. This project allows a site to allow gadgets to be added and removed in a nice AJAX way add and remove tabs in a nice AJAX way allow users to rename tabs allow users to specify the number of columns (1,2 or 3) change the colour of the background, gadget title, gadget text The above pro... [More]

While developing the new UI for Raya, I noticed that gadgets were not displaying if they rendered in a hidden tab. The first thing I checked was jquery UI's Tab documentation (jquery UI 1.7.2). Lo and behold there was a short paragraph describing this issue and a solution was also given... phew.  The paragraph is duplicated here to save you time... Any component that requires some dimension... [More]

Since I will be going to Singapore for a short trip soon and my laptop is currently out of action. I will need to have a list of things on my portable hardisk to ensure I can still work efficiently on another PC. It would be nice to be able to boot directly from USB hardisk but there is a chance that my friend's PC's BIOS will not support booting from USB. So the following are the tools that I sho... [More]

Update: As Stefan pointed out, you will not need to do the following if you have VS2005 or above. As usual, if it ain't broke, don't touch it. If you're using TortoiseSVN for version control and are thinking of integrating it with Visual Studio either through VisualSVN or AnkhSVN, you will need to change its working directories from .svn to _svn. This can be achieved from the TortoiseSVN settings... [More]

When I first replaced the default search feature on the site with Google Custom Search, it didn't work. Then I realised that you cannot have nested form tags. It seems that the outer form tag will be processed, which will usually be one belonging to ASP .NET. To fix this issue, you will need to modify the code snippet for the custom search box to remove the form tag. Below is the code s... [More]

Note: With ASP .NET MVC, jQuery is the more convenient method you could use to make Ajax calls. Ajax.NET is the first Ajax library for the .NET framework. Up until the day ASP .NET 3.5 was released, there was nothing quite like it. In ASP .NET 2.0, the UpdatePanel was introduced as a way to enable partial rendering on ASP .NET pages. UpdatePanels are quick to implement. However, the downsid... [More]

Since about a month ago, I had been unable to view local MSDN documentation due to a problem with Microsoft Document Explorer. It would give a warning about being unable to display the page, unspecified error. This problem started appearing after an SDK update or maybe it was an SQL Server update. Anyway, no amount of uninstalling and reinstalling the various related applications could fix this p... [More]