Metal Thought

It may be so 2008, but, I do love my Firefox with my choice selection of add-ons. That's why I was dismayed to find out that Firefox 3.6 has caused quite a few of them to be disabled due to incompatibility. Today, I got tired of waiting for the new releases, so I decided to enable incompatible add-ons - I recalled doing it when I switched to version 3 by using the old extensions.checkCompatibility. This post used to be a big help. It seems however, that the semi-official way of doing this in Firefox 3.6 is by installing the " add-on compatibility reporter ". If you would like to allow incompatible add-ons in Firefox 3.6 without installing this additional plugin, you now need to add the version name to the preference name, like so; extensions.checkCompatibility.{version} . Check out the Mozzila documentation here . So, to summarize if you want to bypass Firefox's compatibility checking and allow your favorite add-ons to run. Type about:config into Firefox’s ad

The Problem AutoComplete controls have become a main feature in many interactive website and web applications. In fact it is very common to explain the advantages of AJAX using the “Google Suggest” example, as this was one of the first powerful well known implementations implementations. Microsoft has provided a very powerful and easy to use control in the ASP .NET AJAX Control Toolkit – the AutoCompleteExtender . There are two approaches to creating AutoComplete controls. The first one is to transmit all possible data to the client, and implement the algorithm that suggests possible completions, in the browser using JavaScript. The other approach is to send an AJAX request to the server that will retrieve a list of suggested completion words. Such a request is being made every time a new prefix is entered in the AutoComplete text box. The AutoCompleteExtender is implemented using the second approach – this approach works best when the vocabulary that needs to be consider

User Controls are a very quick and effective method to develop reusable controls for your application. They are usually much easier to develop than writing your own custom server controls. I ran into a situation the other day that a user control we’ve made and had been working on for some time, just got a new requirement to be able to contain child server controls. I was a bit surprised to discover this is not a trivial matter. It seems there is a weird limitation on User controls. If you try to put child controls in them or nest a user control inside another, the designer will complain. Furthermore if you thought you could use the PersistChildrenAttribute in order to convince the designer that your control is really intended to support this behavior, then think again – it seems that the designer simply ignores this possibility when it comes to user controls. While searching for a solution, I discovered this post by Bobby DeRosa that suggested a reasonable solution. The problem

Maybe I'm just getting soft and lazy. It seems I've gotten used to just finding the answer to everything I need by googling it and relying on the community to solve it for me. I mean, at least when I’m not dealing with the bleeding edge of technology, I should expect to find a post from somebody who’s already ran into a similar problem – right? Well, I was a bit surprised when I tried to implement a simple email client using the totally mundane System.Net.Mail (really not bleeding edge, is it?), and received the following exception: “ SSL must not be enabled for pickup-directory delivery methods “ Happily I searched the web for this error message only to find two (2!) whole articles about it, none of which was any help at all. So, I figured it’s a good enough reason for my first blog post. After all, the blog itself has been ready and waiting for several months now for me to find the time and motivation to write something. But, I was doing something really trivial - ther