PEAR as I’m sure you’re aware stands for “PHP Extension and Application Repository” and is one of the leading frameworks for reusable components. Installing BlueHost can be easily be accomplished using the Fantastico located inside your Cpanel access. The configuration of PEAR can be quite a challenge though! The PEAR installation as I’m sure you’ve…
Today, while changing a report in SQL Server Reporting Services I noticed that my report when exported to excel was showing the dreaded “Number stored as text.” When a value was 0, I was replacing with a blank string. By changing it to return Nothing. I was able to get rid of the dreaded Number…
Elminating the unused variable warning for a declaration in the catch block is very easy because you don’t need to assign to a variable. See the below code for an example. try { doSomething(); }catch (Exception) { logError(); } Note: you should always log an exception if it isn’t expected. For example, for any IO…
A while ago, Facebook created the Facebook Like Button that works by using an iframe of FBML. The Like button allows you to easily get some free social media coverage with consumers. Many websites and blogs are making use of the Facebook Like button and any other ways possible of sharing on social media networks…
The easiest way of telling what version of Magento you are running is by viewing file app/Mage.php and looking for a function called getVersionInfo(). The function should look something like the following and be fairly self explanatory to most developers. public static function getVersionInfo() { return array( ‘major’ => ‘1’, ‘minor’ => ‘5’, ‘revision’ =>…
What is Magento? Magento is an open source eCommerce platform with two versions: Magento Community Editon, and Magento Enterprise Edition. Magento is developed by Magento Inc and is built upon PHP, and the Zend Framework. The Magento Community Edition uses the Open Software License (OSL) v3.0 which is sufficient for most online stores. Why use…
Magento is an insanely flexible system that has a lot of potential, but of course with this flexibility comes a lot of learning.
Adding a JavaScript file and a CSS file to a specific CMS page isn’t very difficult. We should always consider adding the JavaScript file or CSS file to the theme if we’re going to use it on more than one specific page.…
I really like magento, and a lot of the built in features although it can be difficult sometimes to figure out how to use things. Displaying the newsletter in a CMS Page / Block is pretty easy. Just simply paste the following code into the design block, and away you go! {{block type=”newsletter/subscribe” template=”newsletter/subscribe.phtml”}} Hope…
Stopping a System.Threading.Timer isn’t very well covered in the MSDN documentation. We need to use the Change Method which accepts two integers. Please note that it is possible that a few callbacks can be potentially queued and called after you have stopped the timer. This is because the callback of the System.Threading.Timer uses worker threads.…
jQuery Mobile is an absolutely amazing javascript framework that can easily assist developing mobile friendly websites. jQuery Mobile is easily summarized by its authors to: “Delivering top-of-the-line JavaScript in a unified User Interface that works across the most-used smartphone web browsers and tablet form factors.” After adding jQuery Mobile to my first application, I discovered…
If you’re using Subversion at some point you will get the infamous “SVN Working Copy xxx locked and cleanup failed” error. Why you get this error is not exactly known by me, but I believe it to be partly because of subversion’s case sensitivity and Window’s case ignoring. The simplest solution is to search for…
Windows Services,especially managed .NET ones , can be extremely difficult to deploy if not done correct initially. Errors, of course, can also be very difficult to diagnose if theres a problem immediately after the server starts. Occasionally, as a developer you need to uninstall the service whether it be through sc delete, or installutil /u…
Coders at Work written by Peter Seibel is a fantastic book of interviews of fifteen very famous programmers. Audience of the book is clearly programmers with experience programming as the book can at times get fairly rich with technical details about compilers, IDE’s, etc.…
Occasionally, as a software developer you want to restrict a user to only allow them to run one instance of an application on their machine. The reasons why vary dramatically, but often it is because it could make large system changes, maybe their is some business reason, or perhaps it just doesn’t make sense. Restricting…
I’m not sure how many times I have been someone ask for help on the MSDN forums, email me, or come over and ask me in the case of coworkers. The steps to have an application minimized to tray are very simple. Create .NET Windows Application. Create .NET application. Add Tray Notifcation Icon to Windows…
As anyone that works with Microsoft products (especially older ones) knows, it can be extremely difficult to get one of their products to work well across different browsers. In SSRS 2005’s Report Manager the reports appear to look scrunched because the size hasn’t been properly set on an iframe. Unfortunately, we have to fix part…
Professional PHP Design Patterns written by Aaron Saray, coming in at around 250 pages is a very short and concise book. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t cover all of common design patterns but does do an adequate job of covering about 17 different patterns. Each of the 17 patterns covered include fairly easy to understand examples,…
Getting the path of the running application is really simple, and is pretty important if you allow the user to install the application anywhere (which you really should do!) I’ve just included the way to do it for windows forms, but it isn’t that hard to adopt to other situations. using System.IO; using System.Windows.Forms; //………
Editing the footer links in magento is actually pretty easy. By default, there should be a static block called footer_links. The static block starts off with at least these two links: About Us, Customer Service. Editing is as simple as signing into the admin, and Clicking CMS->Static Blocks->footer_links and making your changes. Good luck!
It’s no secret that I have been contact almost daily by Technical Recruiters , often the job advertisements that the technical recruiters have been sending me include a requirement for Microsoft SourceSafe experience. I often wonder a company would choose SourceSafe to manage their code as it doesn’t really do a good job: the only…