Allan on Technology

Cookieless Session State in ASP.NET without nasty URLs

2011-04-03T23:20:00.001+01:00

Some of you have probably heard about the EU proposal that plans to end the internet as we know it on May 25th 2011. If you haven’t heard of it, David Naylor has made a nice little example of it’s consequences here. In essence most sites that use cookies will have to ask visitors to opt-in for every single cookie before using it. I’m very much in favor of online privacy – yet it seems to me that

A simple, little web load tool

2010-08-02T15:56:00.001+01:00

There are many ways of doing performance testing of web applications. In the good ol’ days I remember starting up Microsofts Application Center Test (ACT) and recording some vbscripts that could later be executed. Nowadays ACT is a lot sexier – but now it comes with Visual Studio 2010 but unfortunately only in Ultimate edition. I tried to persuade my wife to spend the $11000 on the ultimate

And a (non-virtual) role change

2010-05-17T15:39:00.001+01:00

May 1st I arrived back in Denmark after spending a year in the US assisting with assembling and training the GREAT team that we have there now as well as working with some truly skilled and passionate partners (you know who you are). I must say it’s been a great learning experience as well as a very exciting time – both for EPiServer but also for me personally. Now, that I’m back in the old

Yo, Halo Reach Beta Peeps

2010-05-05T20:48:00.001+01:00

A long time ago I wrote about shotcodes and for that purpose I even put a shotcode on the web site linking to this web site. It would finally seem like I now get my 15 sec of fame, since Halo Reach supposedly have used a graphic with some similarity to my shotcode in the game (see the computer terminal to the right here). After Zoidberg25 “cracked” this in the Bungie forums I’ve gotten a certain

Awesome nostalgia trip!

2010-02-14T00:14:00.001+01:00

Do you remember the good old Sierra Quest games? Well – I do. I loved those games. Especially police quest I->IV which could run on my dad’s old PC. I’d play them again and again during the late 80’ies / early 90’ies and to this day I hold them responsible for me learning english (although my english teacher in primary school did give it a nice try as well). Of course, Space Quest, Kings Quest

Visual Studio 2008: Application Cannot Start

2009-12-23T06:32:00.001+01:00

I got this annoying error, every time I tried to run my VS2008 SP1 in Administrator mode (which is needed to avoid the “Failed to map the path '/'.” when running an EPiServer site in visual studios web server). Some google searches brought to outdated microsoft material – but luckily also to Alex Riley’s helpful post: https://www.21concepts.com/Blog/EntryId/10/Visual-Studio-2005-2008-

QuickWatch Gadget for EPiServer CMS 6 Gadget Contest

2009-11-01T03:46:00.001+01:00

I just published my contribution to the EPiServer CMS 6 Gadget Contest on EPiServer World. This time I have been playing around with dynamic compilation and running code on the fly in Web Applications. Download the Gadget and check out the source here: http://world.episerver.com/Blogs/Allan-Thran/Dates/2009/11/QuickWatch-Gadget/

HTTP Error 500.19 – Internal Server Error

2009-09-03T02:39:00.001+01:00

A couple of times I have now run into this wonderful error after setting up a new EPiServer CMS site on a newly installed machine. However, I don’t think it’s specific to EPiServer CMS – but can occur in any asp.net application. The error message looks like this: The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid. As with many other

Guest Post: Конвертирование FB2 в PDF для Sony Reader PRS-505

2009-08-02T21:36:00.001+01:00

Я - счастливый обладатель Sony Reader PRS-505! Однако взявшись за чтение книг на русском языке, я обнаружила, что формат, в котором можно скачать большинство книг на русском в интернете FB2, не поддерживается моим Reader. Возникла проблема - как сконвертировать FB2 в один из форматов, поддерживаемых Sony Reader (например, PDF). Найденная в интернете веб страничка http://fb2pdf.com/ ,

New Tool: Convert .FB2 files to PDF

2009-08-02T04:35:00.002+01:00

It all started a couple of months ago when my wife, @othraen, got her Sony eReader. She loves it, and reads a couple of books a week on it. I can definitely see why she likes it – it’s slick, simple, and very pleasant to read on. Great toy, if you like books! Anyway, with the speed she’s reading, not even the 5000000000000000 (or whatever count they reached now) free titles at Google

Trends in Web Content Management

2009-06-21T19:28:00.001+01:00

After a couple of weeks of attending various web content management conferences (GilbaneSF and Web Content in Chicago) and talking to a lot of people more clever than I, I figured that a summarizing blog post might be in order. These are some of the trends I spotted. Social Facebook, Twitter, Flickr have paved the way – now everybody wants user generated content. It seems as if most

MaxSmash – Yet Another Babysmash application

2009-02-25T11:33:00.001+01:00

My son, Maximilian (age 1½ years old), is (not unlike his father) a big fan of technology and computers. In fact, every time I open my laptop at home, he’ll notice, stop doing whatever it is he is doing and run to me, climb on my lap and start pounding the keyboard. While at the laptop, these are the things he prefers to do: Send messenger/skype messages to whomever I was talking to like this

Cool Tool: XDELTA

2009-02-24T11:38:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, while trying to find a solution to a minor distribution problem I came across xdelta. It seems to be an awesome tool – just the way I like it: simple, fast, transparent and commandline based. It can find the difference between two binary files and store that compressed, and then later apply it as a patch. “Why is that neat?”, I hear you cry. Well – simple – now instead of storing a lot

Fun with card games

2009-01-04T21:31:00.001+01:00

I just published one of my holiday pet projects on Codeplex. It's a very basic framework for building your own card games in .net. With time, I'll also publish some sample projects, and hopefully even expand the project to include some basic AI logic as well. Check it out: http://www.codeplex.com/CardGameLib Even though it's still missing a lot of parts, I've already begun to use it for 2

WikiX - a Wiki for EPiServer CMS

2009-01-04T16:13:00.001+01:00

Just before Christmas I was part of a team that launched WikiX an Open Source Wiki for EPiServer CMS 5 R2. Even though it's still in beta, it is actually really nice with a lot of cool features. WikiX is based on some of the thoughts and ideas presented here: http://allantech.blogspot.com/2008/10/wiki-vs-cms-difference-is-psychological.html. See the announcement: http://labs.episerver.com/en/

Connect4 in Flash

2009-01-04T13:26:00.002+01:00

Inspired by Giorgio Sardo who used my old Connect4 code to demonstrate moving a c# game to Silverlight for Mobile (when will you put that code online, Giorgio?) in a PDC 2008 session, I decided to use the same code as the basis of a project I had to do for a flash course last year. This time, I didn't migrate all of the code, but rather made the flash talk to a back-end c# web service that

PDC 2008 - Here I Come

2008-10-24T21:07:00.003+01:00

Travel time again. Destination Los Angeles. There I'll spend the next week learning everything that Microsoft will try to teach me - and probably then some.See you all at the parties! I'll be the guy in a gray t-shirt, with a laptop and a high-tech phone. If you find me, I'll buy you a beer or something!

Flash Rss Reader

2008-10-22T19:58:00.003+01:00

Another little flash gadget I just made... An RSS reader. Yes, I know it's an original idea - but it seemed like a good, comprehensible, and to some degree useful thing.For fun I made iPhone style navigation - in the sense that you need to drag right or left to move between items.It lists the blog feed from labs.episerver.com.The trickiest thing was to handle all the security around loading a URL

Allan version 1952

2008-10-22T12:35:00.001+01:00

Just stumpled upon Yearbookyourself.com. What a cool feature! You can see how you would look like on a high-school yearbook picture from 1950-2000. In case you're wondering, here's how I would have looked in 1952 (when I was -27 years old).

Oh, the power of DHTML

2008-10-20T18:40:00.001+01:00

I spend Sunday visiting Copenhagen's Zoological museum with my wife and son. Great museum, even my 14 months old son loved it - all the stuffed animals to look at and pet! Nevertheless, I came across some stuffed lemmings there and quickly found myself floating back memory lane to that wonderfully 90-something game that I used to spend so many hours enjoying. I figured someone probably had put

Wiki vs CMS - the difference is psychological

2008-10-18T17:21:00.001+01:00

When I started in EPiServer AB one of my first tasks was to "make a wiki plugin for EPiServer". Naturally, being new in my job, I enthusiastically started working. However, it pretty soon dawned on my that I didn't know what a Wiki really was. Sure, I use wikipedia daily and understand how it works, I know that "Wiki" means "fast" in Hawaiian, but it wasn't really that obvious to see what the

My first attempt at a banner ad - enjoy :-)

2008-09-24T12:08:00.006+01:00

Really annoying Live Messenger bug

2008-09-10T09:17:00.001+01:00

I guess we all know those weeks where everything seems to break down at the same time.....Harddisk recorder stops recording, light bulbs burst, car smells / sound unhealthy, tax authorities make a mistake that costs you a bundle, emails gets lost - and whichever direction you're driving there seems to be a traffic jam. For some obscure reason these weeks always happen at the most inconvenient

Multiple Templates for a PageType

2008-06-10T14:41:00.001+01:00

It looks like a Dev / Partner summit is the perfect birthplace for ideas to grow. Here is yet another idea that grew out of discussions with partners, eMVPs and other Guru's at the summit: It could be cool to have multiple renderings (templates) for a page type. Today several PageType's can share the same template, but it's not possible to specify more than one template to use for a given

Busy Times

2008-06-08T16:28:00.002+01:00

A lot of people has been asking me what I'm up to lately - and complaining that my posts aren't as frequent as they used to...I know it's been way too long since I blogged on this blog. It's not because I have nothing to blog about - in fact every day a new interesting blog-topic springs to mind and I begin writing it...But before I finish it, work or family-life or another idea interferes and

Mixing ASP.NET MVC with an exisiting WebForms web application project

2008-02-21T14:51:00.002+01:00

I had a chance last night to integrate the new cool asp.net MVC with a "normal" web application - it went rather painless. Read the recipe on my work-blog.

Nightly Fun with 301

2008-02-14T11:26:00.001+01:00

WARNING: GEEKY STUFF. Do you ever have difficulty falling asleep at night, because your brain begins to code the moment your tired body hits the bed? Well, I do every once in a while. And then I know that I can either toss and turn all night or sneak downstairs and code for a while - just to get it out of my system. Last night was one of those nights. This time, though, I decided to make

WebResource.axd gives 404

2008-01-23T16:36:00.001+01:00

My colleague, Michael Knudsen, has been struggling with a customer & partner for several hours now with an annoying problem on an EPiServer 4.62 site just moved to a production server. Finally, after browsing through half the web and getting valuable feedback from most supporters / developers known to man, a simple solution was discovered. To save other people the agony he's gone through he

Skype and Port 80

2008-01-04T13:52:00.000+01:00

This is probably old news to a lot of people, but I just ran into an error message in IIS7 on my Vista saying that "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process" whenever I tried to start my default website.Ah well, I thought...Better shut down various other applications although I was wondering what file it could possibly be that there was a sharing conflict on.

XSLT in EPiServer CMS 5

2007-11-23T14:59:00.001+01:00

Personally I'm not a big fan of neither XSLT nor XML. In fact, my feelings around XML is expressed in this quote I heard recently: "XML is like children. They start out cute and small, then they grow..." (I don't remember who said it - if it was YOU, mail me and tell me to credit you for those words of wisdom). In my opinion XSLT's are mainly just good for job-security for XSLT developers - they

Parallel Computing Made Easy

2007-11-16T22:50:00.001+01:00

At the Developer Conference, Øredev, earlier this week I had a chance to see a session about Microsoft's upcoming ParallelFX - the .NET toolkit for working utilizing multiprocessor machines - and it really looks promising! The basic idea is that it should be a lot easier to utilize multi-processors from code than it is today. Sure, we have System.Threading and it's QueueUserWorkItem, Threads and

My new favourite Global Search Engine

2007-11-15T21:00:00.000+01:00

Whenever people hear about "search engines" they immediatly think Google. A few of the early bloomers might even remember Altavista or Lycos - but they still prefer Google. Sure, they might have seen a challenger or two in their time (Live Search being one) but usually they've tried it a couple of times and then went back to their safe heaven - Google.I use Google too, for my global searching

A Simple Page Import Web Service

2007-11-09T14:54:00.001+01:00

In EPiServer CMS 5 there's a couple of very useful Web Services that gives you pretty thorough access to do just about anything you please - at least with regards to adding / searching / modifying pages. However the Web Services can be pretty complex and at times a green newbie like myself needs a quick & dirty way of importing files from another system into EPiServer without doing too much

How to extend the general Page functionality in EPiServer CMS 5

2007-10-22T14:50:00.001+01:00

Still being a newbie in the EPiServer company I learn a lot of new things every day - both about the product and the company. I've decided to share some of my discoveries here - perhaps they help other EPiServer newbies out there :-) Today I came across quite a useful, but not-so-well-documented feature in EPiServer CMS 5: The ability to extend the general functionality of your Pages. So, if

Off to Stockholm

2007-10-08T19:10:00.000+01:00

After a terrific first week at EPiServer Denmark, I'm off for a 3-day introduction tour to the swedish HQ.In the first week I accomplished most of what I set out to do: I got my laptop up and running, with a decent dev. environment, almost learned my way around Vista (still don't know if I like it) and got started on a couple of really interesting projects.I've also started an episerver-based

First Day on the new Job

2007-10-01T19:05:00.000+01:00

Today was my first day at the new job at EPiServer, and I must say that the future is looking bright!A lot of new cool hardware had arrived for me (in fact, I'm posting this from my new Lenovo T61p laptop) and - yes, I've taked the step to Vista (finally).So, naturally I spend a lot of day unpacking hardware, installing and learning my way around Vista (only made it crash twice).I also had a

EPiServer Code: Send a warning email when a page is about to expire

2007-09-24T15:36:00.001+01:00

As you might imagine I find it difficult to keep my hands of the brand new v.5. So naturally I've been searching out excuses to try out coding some small samples against the API.Here's a feature that I've heard requested from several intranet customers already - An automatic email that informs the owner of a page that it's about to expire."What a great idea" I thought first time I heard it - One

New Job!

2007-09-24T14:33:00.000+01:00

Just a quick personal update: I've decided to join the great team at EPiServer, starting october 1st as a Technical Architect. I'll still be based in Copenhagen, Denmark - but my primary work-area will still be within development (which for the most part is in Stockholm) so I guess I'll once again get to try working virtually with people all over the world.I'm looking very much forward to joining

An oldie but a goldie

2007-09-13T08:23:00.000+01:00

Just came across this old story that pretty much explains why so many software companies have trouble surviving after moving from pioneers to "real software company".It's quite a laugh.

Google Earth Rules!

2007-09-06T15:44:00.000+01:00

A couple of days ago I read that Google Earth had introduced a new awesome feature and I hurried to download the latest version.No, I'm not talking about the wannabe astronomical function where you can browse the sky as well as the earth - thats cute, but no were near as cool as their new "secret" Flight Simulator.What a great idea to build in a flight-sim in Google earth! It's awesome to cruise

PRSS = Post Release Stress Syndrome

2007-08-31T15:12:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I last blogged, and a lot have happened in the time.Mostly I've been busy with the post-release of Maximilian 1.0 (= my son). It's amazing how tricky it is to code and blog, with such a cute kid to distract you and a lot of diapers to change...Now, however, we're slowing finding a routine in our daily lifes and I'll try to start blogging again - but bear with me if I don't

My own MiniMax implementation

2007-07-25T13:12:00.000+01:00

As you might have noticed these last couple of days has been kind of slow tech-blog wise.This is of course due to the birth of our wonderful boy, Maximilian, who was born monday morning.I expect it'll be a couple of weeks before I again have time to write tech-blog entries :-)Check my personal blog for personal updates.

NXT: My first 'bot

2007-07-17T19:59:00.000+01:00

As I mentioned earlier I recently got a cool Lego MindStorms NXT to play with.Now, with the help of Jesper, we managed to build the basic humanoid robot - and it's awesome!I've coded it to do a few things:Whenever the light is on, Mr. Bot will say "Goodmorning" and start walking.When the light is turned off he'll say "Goodnight" and stop walkingWhen he's 12 cm from an obstacle he'll say "Please"

WCF: Sharing Types between Server and Client

2007-07-17T10:59:00.000+01:00

A discussion I've run into time and time again through the last few months when I've been working with WCF is whether to use the generated proxy classes client-side or think of something else (like inherting the proxy-classes, creating your own proxies, or somehow try to make the proxy classes identical to the source classes).I guess the discussions arise as a result of people not being sure if

Automatic Language Detection

2007-07-13T13:21:00.000+01:00

A classical task when dealing with textual information is to automatically identify which language a text is written in (no, geeks - it's not a question of VB or C# - I mean human languages!).Here's my attempt at a very simple, yet useful approach: character-bigram statistics.I've basically made some extensive statistics on several languages on the frequency of all bigrams, and using that it's

Majestic

2007-07-11T14:05:00.000+01:00

A major problem for most global search engines is the simple fact that the net grows so rapidly that no matter how many serverfarms they build, pages are being created or updated faster than the search engines can detect and index them.I recently came across Majestic that has a really interesting approach to this problem: Distributed crawlers. They've made a simple crawler-client that can help

Code Challenge: Michael the Math Maniac

2007-07-10T15:43:00.000+01:00

Time for another summer code-challenge. Hopefully this one is a bit easier than the last one :-)Mr. Michael was a lucky man, cause today, 20070710 (ISO standard) was his birthday!But Michael wasn't your average lucky birthday boy. He was a Math Maniac. And on this special day, he was wondering: How many of the numbers between 0 and 1.000.000.000 contains the ciphers "20070710" (in that order)

Code Challenge Results: No luck for the Hash-Party

2007-07-06T14:32:00.001+01:00

So far there hasn't been a lot of entries to the latest Code Challenge so I suppose I might have overestimated the abilities of you, my honorable readers.In fact, the only entry I received was from Peter Thygesen and he admits to actually just having adopted an algorithm by Paul Hsieh.However just for the fun I compared it to the build-in string hashing algorithm (.GetHashCode()).The comparison I

EPiServer 5 CMS - First impressions

2007-07-06T14:31:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I wanted to check out how the new EPiServer 5 looked, so I downloaded a free trial version of the RC2.It comes in two flavors. There's the traditional installer that installs the Manager which allows you to setup new EPiServer websites with a default look & feel, but on top of that there's also a new Visual Studio integration available that I instantly knew I just had to try

Zattoo is awesome!

2007-07-06T13:14:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I came across Zattoo which is a really cool p2p live-tv service. A bit the same concept as Joost, but with zattoo it's not on demand. Instead you get high-quality streaming of live channels..And quite a lot already! It's easy to get started and it work surprisingly well.I'll definetly remember that I have it installed next time my wife wants to watch "America's next top model" when I

Code Challenge: Fun with Hash

2007-07-02T14:14:00.000+01:00

No, this is not what you expected, crackhead. This post doesn't include getting high on anything stronger than your coding skills. It's time for another code challenge!The challengeSometimes it can be very handy to make a small fingerprint of a piece of textual information so you can easily compare it to other pieces of text and check if they are identical without doing a full textual

Happy birthday to me!

2007-07-01T19:13:00.000+01:00

Today is my birthday. I love birthdays..lots of cake and many presents. The last couple of years (okay...ever since I lost my childhood innocense) the presents have gotten more and more "boring" (= practical and nice but not really play-toys).Being the eternal kid that I am, I was naturally extremly pleased this year when my wonderful wife (!!!) gave me Mindstorms NXT.I can't wait to start

Code Challenge: "John the courier"

2007-06-28T21:00:00.000+01:00

Yet another brillian idea popped into my mind today: Why not celebrate the rainy summer with a nice indoor competition - a Code Challenge! Through the next couple of weeks I intend to publish a couple of challenges like the one below.Think fast, solve the problem and post it as a comment!The various challenges will have different winning criterias. These could be: "First valid solution posted", "

Making cross-thread calls / events

2007-06-21T16:10:00.000+01:00

Many developers first introduction to multithreaded programming is the classic challenge of using one or more "background-worker" threads to do some work thats expected to take longer than the average user wants to wait for his windows application to become responsive again.Making a worker-method and starting up a thread to run it - or asking the ThreadPool to assign the method to a thread from

EPiGirl leads the way

2007-06-21T14:55:00.000+01:00

I just came across Rachel Goldthorpes newly started Blog on EPiServer development.She definetly seems to be off to a good start with her post on getting started with EPiServer 5 CMS - it looks very helpful and I'll definetly keep it in mind when I get the chance to try out the new RC.Welcome to the blogging sphere EPiGirl and keep up the good work!

Warning: TortoiseSVN Rename

2007-06-20T08:39:00.000+01:00

Now, here's a little lesson I just learned the hard (!) way... When you are using the "Rename" functionality on a folder in TortoiseSVN it doesn't do what you might expect, that is - rename the folder. No, in fact it deletes the f0lder and creates a new one with the contents thats commited to the Subversion repository. And it doesn't just do a "move-to-recycle-bin" kind of deletion, no it makes

Generic Type Conversion in C#

2007-06-15T21:55:00.000+01:00

I have now several times found myself in the peculiar situation of having two classes, that mostly have the same properties and fields, but doesn't implement the same interface or inherit from the same ancestor, which makes it rather tedious to convert between them.The problem is typically seen when dynamically loading 3rd party libraries and trying to get them to interact with other 3rd party

Blog War: EPiServer vs Sitecore vs Reddot

2007-06-15T19:32:00.000+01:00

Some months ago I came across Blogpulse.com (by Nielsen Buzzmetrics) which is a cool service that monitors how popular certain topics arein the Blog-sphere. Just for fun I ran this comparison between 3 of the major european CMS vendors: Sitecore, EPiServer and Reddot.It would seem that all of the vendors have huge variations in their blog-popularity.I also couldn't resist trying out

Awesome Public/Free SVN Repository

2007-06-13T16:06:00.000+01:00

Several months ago my friend and colleague Jesper (aka Graffen) got the idea to make a free public SVN hosting service.I know, I know - several of those exist already, but this is awesome because it's so simplistic, easy to use - and without any rules about having to do OpenSource, etc. bothering you.You just go to the website, create users and repositories and you are ready to go.I've already

Spring cleaning

2007-06-13T16:00:00.000+01:00

Although spring has passed and summer is here, I thought it might be a good idea to begin doing some spring cleaning in my draft posts.Typically I get a gazillion ideas for posts I want to make and I instantly begin writing them, but pretty quickly I get another new idea that I'd rather post, resulting in a lot of half-finished draft-posts.Through the next couple of days I'm going to do some

Surfing Linkedin

2007-06-13T15:51:00.000+01:00

I just had a brief surf through my linkedin contacts and I saw that my good friend Mats Hellström from EPiServer has joined the blogging sphere way back in march.Welcome, Mats - I hope to see more postings soon!Check out Mats' blog here.

ShotCode - Let's reinvent barcodes!

2007-06-08T20:43:00.000+01:00

About a year and a half ago I was amazed at some of the new java applications for cameraphones I saw at the NeXT conference, among others were a reinvention of barcodes where the idea was that if a special 2d barcode was put on a poster, everybody with a cameraphone could scan it and get someinformation contained in the barcode, typically an ID number which an online service could translate to a

The Meaning of Life

2007-06-03T17:50:00.000+01:00

If I were a religious man I might believe that there's one truth in this world, known only to God (and perhaps Knuth also figured it out, but I digress).If there really was such a one single truth, it should be possible (although perhaps not economical) to let a computer figure out what it is.Someone once said that if you fill a room with monkey's and typewriters and give it enough time (and

Is Google high on LSI?

2007-05-29T20:44:00.000+01:00

Ah, the headline caught your attention :-) Well, don't worry. LSI is not a new fancy designer-drug and although the G company has a history of flying high, I doubt they are on anything stronger than Coke Zero.But yesterday I just came across this excellent post by fellow blogspot blogger, John Colascione.In the post he brings some interesting examples on how Google has implemented LSI (Latent

WCF: Duplex is awesome!

2007-05-29T15:43:00.000+01:00

One of my first assignments in the new job has been to lookup into a couple of the fun new features in .NET 3.0, like WCF and WWF.So far, I've found Communication Foundation really interesting, albeit a bit annoying to work with.It's main force is it's flexibility. Where you would usually have to decide on either building a Web Service, your own custom coded TCP Server or use remoting, you can

New Job!

2007-05-20T11:42:00.000+01:00

After about a month filled with interesting job interviews and exiting offers, I finally decided where I'm going to work!As of tomorrow I'm working as a Software Architect at Infopaq International.I find Infopaq to be a really interesting company, mainly because of their ideas and infrastructure. They monitor a lot (!) of media, write news resumees and distribute the relevant news to their

Playing around with Embedded Objects in IE

2007-05-16T10:58:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I felt like playing around a bit with embedded objects in IE - you know, showing Windows Forms in a browser. An old .NET trick that I've used a couple of times.For some reason it has never quite become the market standard it was supposed to (probably because it's ugly, inefficient and very browser specific) - but it would have been nice with a good alternative to java applets!I made a

Solving Sudokus as CSP with Forward Checking

2007-05-16T10:38:00.000+01:00

When you think about it, a Sudoku is a perfect example of a Constraint Satisfaction Problem, and so it made good sense that the final programming assignment in the IAIP course I'm taking was to solve a Sudoku as a CSP, using forward checking.The basic idea is to define the problem as a set of variables (in this case 9*9=81 variables), where each has a finite domain of potential values (by default

Solving NQueens using Reduced Ordered Binary Decisision Diagrams

2007-05-12T19:31:00.000+01:00

Here's one of the things I've been too busy to post:At my AI course we've completed our last 2 assignments. The one that I'll post here is the N-Queens problem solver, that helps solving the n-queens problem using BDD's.BDD's is a really clever technique that can help solve some satisfiability problems quite fast.The N-Queens problem is a classic problem, described lots of places. The derives

The joy of being unemployed!

2007-05-12T07:31:00.000+01:00

Ahh..posting again... I know, it's been a while, but now I hope to be back again. Now I've been through the first month of unemployed life, and I must admit that it has been nothing like I had imagined. It's been crazy! No time for sitting in front of the local supermarket drinking 6-packs of beers all day (as I had been told unemployed people are supposed to do), no time for playing around with

Awesome IKVM; Interact with JAVA from .NET

2007-04-26T07:30:00.000+01:00

Yet again I've java in my studies at ITU. The current assignment Peter, Thomas and I are working on is to implement an assistant that helps a user solve the classic N-Queens problem using Reduced ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (RoBDDs or simply BDDs).There's many(!) ways to solve that problem, but using BDDs does seem like a very intriguing approach. The only problem: it requires a BDD engine.

DPLL in C# - Satisfying problems in CNF

2007-04-16T21:53:00.000+01:00

Time for another AI post! These last couple of weeks I've been working with two fellow C# guru's, Peter Thygesen and Thomas Gravgaard on an assignment in our AI class, on implementing a couple of specific parts of the DPLL algorithm, such as the methods for choosing split symbols, finding unit clauses and identifying pure symbols."What's DPLL good for?" I hear you cry...Well, it's simple really -

Just overwhelmed

2007-04-13T19:11:00.000+01:00

Since Monday I've been practically flooded with interesting job offers. It's quite a wonderful situation to be in - to be able to pick and choose like this (and potentially to have 5 months with full pay to make a selection in). I've even considered using these next months to work on my own, blogging and building a second-life empire - or perhaps make my own little code-piece shop online?It's

Looking for New Adventures

2007-04-10T16:17:00.000+01:00

It's been a wonderful easter, where I didn't get any of the programming projects done, that I had hoped I'd get done.But no worries... My employement situation had an interesting shift today which means that I now will have a lot of free time to blog, program my personal pet projects and write a good CV.This also means that in a while I might be tempted by interesting job-offers. Here's a short

Back from Budapest

2007-04-03T16:44:00.000+01:00

After spending a nice relaxing week in Budapest, seeing the sights and enjoying the spa's, I'm back in full force. One working day left, and then a loooong eastern which will be an excellent time to blog and code a bit more than what has been usual for the last couple of weeks.I hope to get somewhere with the Poker Bot tournament, work on the DPLL group-assignment I'm in and perhaps also play

Why, oh WHY?!?!?!

2007-03-22T15:39:00.000+01:00

Currently I'm totally in the state of chock after finding out that C# supports GOTO statements.To some people it's probably old news (that says more about them than me), but I just found out. Let me for the record state that the only way I found out was when looking through some code on codeproject.I'm sure there's those that claim that cases exist where it actually makes sense to use GOTO, but

Another day another tool: XPath

2007-03-21T13:49:00.000+01:00

Here's a small 5-minute tool I made the other day, simply because I needed it and it was faster to make it than finding a good one online that does what I want it to (although I'm sure hundreds of them exist).It's a simple XPath tester, that can test an XPath against a piece of XML, or a URL pointing to XML.It even attempts to do some simple syntax highlighting of the XML.The tool is online at

J# to the Rescue

2007-03-19T22:00:00.000+01:00

I've always wondered what the purpose of J# was. I mean, Java and C# are quite similar, so I'd suppose that if people (for some weird reason) would prefer to code Java (instead of drinking it), they'd do so purely because they wanted to work within the java environment and the java VM. If they eventually decided to overcome their Microsoft fears and turn to the .NET framework, C# would seem like

Connect 4: The code

2007-03-19T16:42:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I handed in my code for the Connect4 game. Since the deadline has now passed I figured I might as well post it here, including the document I wrote to describe it. In case you want to play it again, do it here.Download the code for this article here.Introduction In order to complete the assignment of making an implementation of a computer player for the game "Connect four", I started

MondoSearch Result Authentication

2007-03-16T13:41:00.000+01:00

A very typical request I often hear from customers and partners is the ability to return only the results that the current user is allowed to see. This desire is very natural, but can often present quite a challenge to 3rd party search engines like MondoSearch. The problem is that it varies a lot from each individual setup how authorization works, and hence no general solution can be made. We can

Performance: ArrayList vs List<>

2007-03-15T08:45:00.000+01:00

Quite recently I was trying to optimize/cleanup some .net 2.0 code that had recently been moved from framework 1.1. Naturally various old fashioned Arraylists was scattered over most of the code, and I began the tedious work of tidying up and using generic lists.As I was doing this I began to wonder how big a performance difference there actually is with various list types, and I decided to

MOSS vs EPiServer

2007-03-06T15:38:00.000+01:00

Here's another reason for always making sure your feed-reader is up to speed. Today I had almost missed this great post by Patrick Tisseghem because I had forgotten to update the url to his feed. Luckily I got tipped off (thanks, Jesper!).I already know EPiServer quite well - due to my attachement to the "MondoSearch for EPiServer" project. And just a week ago I spend all day getting an

AI: Connect 4 Game

2007-03-06T08:53:00.000+01:00

I have been kinda slow in posting these last couple of weeks. One of the reasons is of course that I've been busy coding (as always). This time however, it's actually real homework thats been keeping me busy.In the AI course I'm taking at ITU we were assigned the task of making our own version of "Connect 4" - the well known board game where you drop coins into a board from the top and try to get

Loaderlock hell!

2007-02-28T12:16:00.000+01:00

I recently installed VSTS and I'm still trying to learn my way around it.One thing I noticed when using it was that I kept getting a "Loaderlock" MDA (Managed Debugging Assistant) whenever I tried to run a piece of interop'in code in debug mode. This was getting quite annoying, and it didn't seem like there was any problem in the code - rather in Visual Studio.Naturally I started googling the

Off topic: A Murphy's day

2007-02-22T12:24:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I really found out how Murphy must have felt when he formulated his law.The day as such started out fine. I was planning to go to an afternoon meeting in Stockholm, flying there and back on the same day - nothing to it, I've done it often before.The meeting was scheduled for 14:00 so my plane, scheduled to arrive at 12:35 in Arlanda should be fine. But then the problems started...First

Mysteries and Mental Models

2007-02-20T19:35:00.000+01:00

I've for quite some time been wanting to write a post about a phenomenon I've encountered numerous times, and now I finally persuade myself to put my thoughts down in words. Let's for now just refer to the phenomenon as "Black Box of Mystery" (BBM).It's a well known fact in the world of computer-human interaction that a lot of usability problems arise when the mental models in the user interface

C# and keeping your lists sorted

2007-02-19T11:28:00.000+01:00

Every once in a while I feel the need for a having a list in C# thats instantly sorted. And every time I always spend time examining the various lists available in C# and end up being quite annoyed.Perhaps there is such a list in the .NET framework, but I havn't been able to find it yet.Sure, there is the SortedList, but thats a Key/Value-style hashtable where it sorts on the keys. Sometimes

Cool Service: FeedJumbler

2007-02-16T15:03:00.000+01:00

I love RSS feeds (well and I don't exactly dislike Atom either). But one of the few annoying things about them is that as soon as you have more than 5-10 feeds that you follow daily you'll run into the problem that the feed-viewers will fill up all your available space on your Google start-page (or whatever portal you might be using).Use a real RSS reader you might say..But I tried that - and it

MondoSearch for EPiServer (Part 1)

2007-02-16T12:32:00.000+01:00

Last year, while I was creating the MondoSearch for Sitecore integration I was at the same time technical-contact/project manager for the MondoSearch for EPiServer integration. Besides from keeping me busy for half a year, this provided an excellent opportunity to learn a lot about these two state-of-the-art content management systems, each with their own strengths and difficulties.With the

Improving MOSS Search

2007-02-15T16:10:00.001+01:00

One of my colleagues, Lars Fastrup, has started a really nice blog around all the work our Ontolica team is doing in relation to improve the usability and functionality in MOSS 2007.Recently Lars posted some really nice screenshots of the upcoming version of Ontolica, that'll probably wake the interest with most experienced MOSS users!His announcement of a lightweight version of Ontolica

Hall of Fame: Coleman.com

2007-02-15T15:25:00.000+01:00

Every now and then I come across a search implementation I really, really like.Some places where people think outside of the customers) on their site. In these days where the search market it being heavily commoditized, and more and more websites doesn't care about the quality of their search functionality as long as they have it, it really fills my heart (I know, I'm turning thisbox in order to

The worst thing after computer viruses

2007-02-14T13:03:00.000+01:00

... are real-life virusses, one of which I seem to have caught. The reason for the shortness of posts these last days is that I've been down with the flu since friday."Great, lots of time to code on the Poker challenge" you might be thinking - but alas, no. It's been one of those annoying flu's that makes your head feel like 20 elephants are dancing on top of it to the rythm of your sneezes, and

Structs vs. Classes

2007-02-07T15:45:00.000+01:00

Obviously structs are supposedly a lot quicker than classes. However some time ago I heard rumours that in .NET 1.0 some error in the .net framework would cause them to be slower in some cases. Today for some reason I felt like making a small comparison in .NET 2.0.So, I made a small console program with the following code: public struct

New Functionality: Related Articles

2007-02-06T14:53:00.000+01:00

Here's one of those small things I've been working on over the weekend.If you're using IE, you should now be able to see a new widget-like thing in the bottom of the right-hand widgets. It's "Related Codeproject Articles".The concept I use to get these related articles is somewhat similar to how the "Related Pages" functionality works in the MondoSearch/Sitecore integration - just based on

MondoSearch for Sitecore (Part 4)

2007-02-05T09:58:00.000+01:00

Like all good trilogies, this one comes in more than 3 parts :-)The last little detail in the integration I want to show is the overall architecture. The entire integration between the products are based on 4 key XML WebServices, provided by the MondoSearch products and consumed by the integration within Sitecore.These are:MondoSearch Search WebServiceProbably the most important WebService. This

No more commercials

2007-02-04T14:28:00.000+01:00

The frequent visitor to this blog might notice how the commercials have disappeared all of a sudden. I figured I might as well remove them, given that they only generate around 10-15$ revenue a month - and really takes up a lot of space. Besides, although I'm secretly a fan of Google, I see no reason to increase their revenue even further.However, if the number of visitors picks up dramatically I

Coding...

2007-02-04T14:17:00.000+01:00

These last couple of days I've been busy (as always) coding on several different projects. Probably some of you know the feeling that arise when all of a sudden tons of good ideas emergers in you head at the same time and you can't wait trying them all out to see if they work just as well in the real world as they do in your mind.I've also kept on coding the Poker library, and I think I've gotten

MondoSearch for Sitecore (Part 3)

2007-01-31T14:29:00.000+01:00

As promised, I'm going to share some more screenshots of the integration between MondoSearch and Sitecore. This time I'll focus on the integration of BehaviorTracking.BehaviorTracking Portal. The main entry to the BehaviorTracking information from within Sitecore is in the BehaviorTracking Portal, a portal somewhat similar to the well-known Sitecore Today portal, only this time the portlets

Improving Search with BehaviorTracking

2007-01-31T14:01:00.000+01:00

The topic for this post is Behaviortracking (check out the website, cause I'm not gonna spend time here explaining what it is). This is a post where I'm basically gonna pretend I'm in marketing and fill You, my dear reader, with something that might resemble a sales pitch for a particular product.. "Why?" and "Where's the code?" I hear you ask. Well, first of all I feel quite strongly about this

MondoSearch for Sitecore (part 2)

2007-01-29T20:01:00.000+01:00

As earlier promised, here's some more info on v. 1.1 of the integration between MondoSearch product suite and the Sitecore CMS system, that was released just before christmas. In this second part of my story I will focus on the search itself and the ways it has been integrated.The point of the integration was to integrate not only the search engine but also search analytics, crawler