Category: נתנאל לב

Want a better IE performance? Kill it’s addons!

The other day I visited a friend of mine that bought a new netbook.

After installing windows XP SP3 and IE8 his browser performance dropped, websites were loaded slowly and it took the IE ages to load.
At first, he thought it was a malware of some kind so he installed an antivirus and scanned the computer but the scan showed nothing.
After a little more research he said to me “I think I know who is the virus – the IE itself…” and guess what, he was right.
IE8 comes with a lot of add-ons that suppose to make your social life easier. I for one would never understand what is the use of those addons and don’t know anyone that use them…
Apparently those add-ons slow down the performance of the browser and as a result, it takes ages to make it launch or load websites.
As I see it if you want a better browsing experience you have two options:
1. Disable those add-ons.
2. Use another browser.
Personally, I’m a big fan of Google Chrome and use it as my default browser but because I’m a web developer who develops using .Net and Visual Studio technologies I can’t just get rid of the IE.
The only choice I had left is to disable those add-ons and that exactly what I did.
Here is how you do it:
1. Go to Tools -> Manage add-ons

2. On the left side of the window that was opened choose “all add-ons”

3. Disable irrelevant add-ons by choosing them and press the disable button at the right bottom side of the window.

Now I don’t need to be afraid that my PC will freeze every time I click on a link in an email message.
Hope this helps you too!
Netanel

Developing an IPhone app with C#

Yes, it’s possible.

A couple of days ago my friend Erez Eden sent me an email with a link to the Mono project website.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, mono is a “cross-platform, open source .NET development framework” sponsored by Novell and the open source community – that means that you can develop applications to OS’s other then Windows using .Net technology.
I’m familiar with this project for some time now but what I didn’t know is that there is an IPhone OS version of the framework! that means that you can develop IPhone app using C# – How cool is that?
The subproject is called MonoTouch and you can find it here.
Currently, it’s not open to the public but hopefully, it will be in this September.
The downside is that because the IPhone OS doesn’t support JIT engines the code you write will be compiled to static native code for the OS.
That generally means no reflection and some more limitations for the development.
As a developer in the mobile industry that is a big fan of the .Net technology and especially C# I was very excited to hear about this framework but after I realised I’ll still have to develop the application on a mac in order to test it I started thinking why to bother and start to develop an application that rely on a third party framework, maybe it’s better to suck it up and learn the Objective-C syntax and that’s it (objective-c is the language that being used do develop applications to the IPhone and Mac) ….
I still don’t know if I’ll go with the mono or objective-c path but I’ll sure give the MonoTouch a try once I’ll get my hands on it!
What do you think?

Getting values of CheckBoxList items from javascript

On my last post I wrote on getting CheckBox values from the client side.

On the same project, I needed the same functionality for the CheckBoxList control.
Because CheckBoxList holds ListItem I couldn’t access the InputAtributes property of the CheckBox.
After some googling I found this post by Evan Freeman that explains how to create a new custom control that renders the server side values into the HTML code.
In this way, you gain server side and client side functionality at the same time.

This is the code for the new ChcekBoxList control:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Security.Permissions;

namespace System.Web.UI.WebControls{
[AspNetHostingPermission(SecurityAction.InheritanceDemand,
Level = AspNetHostingPermissionLevel.Minimal),
AspNetHostingPermission(SecurityAction.LinkDemand,
Level = AspNetHostingPermissionLevel.Minimal),
ToolboxData("")]
public class CheckBoxListWithClientValues : CheckBoxList
{
private CheckBox _controlToRepeat;
private bool _cachedIsEnabled;
private bool _cachedRegisterEnabled;

public CheckBoxListWithClientValues()
{
    this._controlToRepeat = new CheckBox();
    this._controlToRepeat.EnableViewState = false;
    this._controlToRepeat.ID = "0";
    this.Controls.Add(this._controlToRepeat);
}         

protected override void RenderItem(ListItemType itemType,
    int repeatIndex,
    RepeatInfo repeatInfo,
    System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer)
{   
    if (repeatIndex == 0)
    {     
        this._cachedIsEnabled = base.IsEnabled;
        this._cachedRegisterEnabled = ((this.Page != null) && base.IsEnabled);
    }               

    ListItem item = this.Items[repeatIndex];
    this._controlToRepeat.Attributes.Clear();

    if (item.Attributes.Count > 0) //has attributes  
    {       
        foreach (string str in item.Attributes.Keys)
        {          
            this._controlToRepeat.Attributes[str] = item.Attributes[str];
        } 
    }
    this._controlToRepeat.ID = repeatIndex.ToString(NumberFormatInfo.InvariantInfo);
    this._controlToRepeat.Text = item.Text;  
    this._controlToRepeat.Checked = item.Selected;
    this._controlToRepeat.EnableViewState = true;
    this._controlToRepeat.Enabled = this._cachedIsEnabled && item.Enabled;
    this._controlToRepeat.InputAttributes.Add("value", item.Value); //add the value attribute to be rendered
    this._controlToRepeat.RenderControl(writer);
}
}
}

And thanks for Evan for posting this code.

Happy coding.
Netanel.