What is this? It’s a Basic Stamp Microcontroller board that is manufactured by Parallax, Inc.  Some of you may not know; but I originally got started with Programming as a Electronics Engineering student in college. Electronics was my first love.  However, when I graduated the market demands were for programmers and not electronic engineers so I decided to go where the demands were. This was over  6 years ago and I pretty much forgot everything, so I figured I would re-teach myself the basics of electronics and learn how to program microcontrollers in the process. I did have some experience programming the Motorola 68000 which were found in the early Apple computers. But, I wanted something that was a little easier to set up and have a better programming environment. The 68000 chip had to be programmed using Assembly Language and a EEPROM programmer. But of course, I didn’t want to go back to using Assembly Language after writing C# for all these years. To program the Basic Stamp all you need is a PC and a serial port. I do have to learn a new language called PBASIC, which looks as feel a lot like the original BASIC language. To start of with, I would advise anyone to purchase the Basic Stamp Activity Kit as it includes everything (except the 9V battery) you need to get started with.  The documentation is very easy to read and they have a great forum you can use to post any questions that you may have.

In my next post, I would like to have at least 1 project completed and I will take some pictures of the circuit board layout and post the code for you to see how easy it is. Obviously, the more complex circuit you have, the more code you have to write. So, I will start off with something simple.  Hopefully, this post has inspired you to start a new adventure in any area of your life. This is one adventure that I hope I can keep up with until something else comes along :-).  Until next time…

Happy Coding!

ASPX

<asp:TextBox id="txtPassword" runat="server" TextMode="Password" />

Code-Behind

txtPassword.Text = "mypassword";

But, when the page loaded, there was no value contained in the password text box. So, what’s the issue? Apparently, this is a restriction that the ASP.NET developers thought that should be in place due to security reasons. However, a workaround for this is to add the value to the attributes collection of the web server control:

txtPassword.Attributes.Add("value", "mypassword");

Doing this would cause the Value attribute of the <input type="password"> HTML control to be populated. So, here is what will be sent to the browser for rendering:

<input type="password" id="txtPassword" name="txtPassword" value="mypassword" />

It should be noted that even though the value of the password will be masked in the browser, the value will show up in clear text if you view the page source. So, if this is not the behavior you would like to have, then this is not the solution for you. Hopefully, this was of some help to you.

Until next time…

Happy Coding!

1. Configure your client machine using the Remote Debugger Configuration Wizard.
2. Copy the Remote Debugger server components to the remote machine

That’s it.  Ok. I didn’t give you much here, so here is some more detail.

To run the Remote Debugger Configuration Wizard go to:

Start -> Program -> Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 -> Visual Studio Tools -> Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger Configuration Wizard

The wizard will begin and you will be brought to this screen:

This screen is basically asking if you want to run the remote debugger as a Windows Service. For me, I didn’t check the box to run as a service and it’s probably not even necessary. There is nothing much else to do but to click Next until the wizard completes. At the end it will tell you that all the necessary ports (most likely TCP) were opened and ready to connect to remote machines.

To run the server components on the remote machine, you need to copy the contents of this folder to the remote machine.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger\x86

Once copied to the remote machine you will just have to run the msvsmon.exe program. The main window would look like this when it’s ready to accept incoming connections:

Play close attention to the server name listed in the entry. This is the name you will need to enter into the Qualifier field in the Debug -> Attach to Process screen inside Visual Studio when you want to begin the debugging process.

Remember to set your breakpoint first and attach to the process you want on the remote machine. The process you will want to debug should be listed in the Available Processes list.

One thing to watch out for is that in my setup, my username and password on my client machine and my remote machine were kept in sync. This way I don’t run into any unexpected access/permissions issues when connecting to the remote machine. I would also note that I was an Administrator on both machines so this would rule out any permission issues.

Let me know if you found this helpful. I do appreciate how the Visual Studio tools team simplified this process to it is as easy as following the 2 steps I listed above.

Until next time…

Happy coding!

Name: Keira Cheyenne Davis
Born:  1/18/2008 @ 10:42am
Size:   4lbs. 10oz. 18 in.

Wow! Isn’t she beautiful!

I’ve seen some VS macros that currently do this in VS 2005 and I think Visual Studio IDE enhancement tools like Resharper, has this feature already baked into their product. However, in VS 2008, we get this for free, at least if you are using C#. Until next time…

Happy Coding!

UPDATE: 1/11/2008

For those who would like to see my implementation here it is:

   1:  using System;

   2:   

   3:  using System.Web;

   4:   

   5:  [Serializable]

   6:   

   7:  public sealed class SessionManager {

   8:   

   9:     private const string SESSION_MANAGER = “SESSION_MANAGER”;

  10:   

  11:     private Product _product = null;

  12:   

  13:     private SessionManager( ) {

  14:   

  15:     }

  16:   

  17:     public static SessionManager Current {

  18:   

  19:         get {

  20:   

  21:             HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current;

  22:   

  23:             SessionManager manager =

  24:   

  25:                 context.Session[ SESSION_MANAGER ] as SessionManager;

  26:   

  27:             if ( manager == null ) {

  28:   

  29:                 manager = new SessionManager( );

  30:   

  31:                 context.Session[ SESSION_MANAGER ] = manager;

  32:   

  33:             }

  34:   

  35:             return manager;

  36:   

  37:         }

  38:   

  39:     }

  40:   

  41:     public Product ActiveProduct {

  42:   

  43:         get {

  44:   

  45:             return this._product;

  46:   

  47:         }

  48:   

  49:         set {

  50:   

  51:             this._product = value;

  52:   

  53:         }

  54:   

  55:     }

  56:   

  57:  }

  58:   

  59:  //And to access this property

  60:  SessionManager.Current.ActiveProduct = new Product();

If you would like to see what others have implemented, see the article below:

Strongly-Typed Session in ASP.NET - Chris Stewart’s ASP.NET Blog

Until next time…

Happy Coding!

Until next time…

Happy Coding!

Table Name : Contacts

Please don’t pay attention to the names. I’m sure you did so already. Anyway, let’s pretend that we had a scenario that we want to loop over the rows in this table and send an email out to these individuals.  We can do this without using a database cursor. Here is some code to ponder on:

   1:  declare @email varchar(20)

   2:  declare @id int

   3:  declare @rowNum int

   4:  declare @maxrows int

   5:   

   6:  select top 1 @id = ID, @email = EmailAddress from Contacts

   7:  select @maxRows = count(*) from Contacts

   8:   

   9:  set @rowNum = 0

  10:   

  11:  – this will until the last row is reached

  12:  WHILE @rowNum < @maxRows

  13:   BEGIN

  14:      set @rowNum = @rowNum + 1

  15:      – this is where you can now do something like sending an email

  16:      – for now, we will just print the email to the output screen

  17:      print (‘Sending email to: ‘ + @email)

  18:   

  19:      – now we grab the next row making sure the ID of the next row

  20:      – is greater than previous row

  21:      select top 1 @id = ID, @email = EmailAddress from Contacts where ID > @id

  22:   END

I have tried to include additional comments in this code snippet so that it doesn’t require much explanation. However, you can see the original article if you need additional details.. Until next time…

Happy Coding!

   1:  using System;

   2:  using System.IO;

   3:  using System.Text;

   4:   

   5:  namespace SimpleFileWriter {

   6:      class Program {

   7:          static void Main( string[ ] args ) {

   8:              using (StreamWriter writer = File.CreateText( @"c:\temp\test.txt" ))

   9:                  writer.WriteLine( "Hello World!" );

  10:   

  11:          }

  12:      }

  13:  }

I have posted the entire program just for your reference; but only lines 8 and 9 are needed to write data to the file system.  You can find more information on the other members of the File class here. I’m sure this may not be new to some of you; but the intent of this post was to emphasize how a well-designed API goes a long way. Until next time…

Happy Coding!