I’m not entirely sure what Dundas have achieved by basically creating themselves a new competitor by allowing Microsoft to give the product away for nothing. Unless they are expecting users to want to ‘upgrade’ to the Flash-based Dundas charting tools which are not provided as part of this control.

Happy charting!

• HOW-TO: Increase the size of an existing VMWare Hard Disk (VMDK)

The open source disk partitioning software recommended in the article also seems to work a treat once the space has been increased.

• Proper multi-processing, allowing JavaScript (for example) within tabs to execute separately from other tabs and processes within the browser
• Intelligent memory management
• Runs on the open source WebKit engine already used in Google’s Android mobile handset operating system
• Automated compatibility testing across millions of existing web pages
• Shortcuts to common browser functions, such as custom search
• Decent popup management
• Web applications given their own chrome to feel more like desktop apps
• Intuitive security model providing proper process sand-boxing
• Always-active phishing signature updates

All in all this sounds like a pretty promising package but I’ll remain dubious until the beta is released later today and we can have a play ourselves. One does wonder how Google Chrome may affect the great work of the Mozilla project but they seem pretty satisfied by the new Firefox competitor.

But the general public don’t really care about Acid2 and the like. What they want are USPs such as Visual Search, which actually looks quite smart.

For example, if you had a typed DataSet and stored some XML that conformed to its Schema on disk, you could use CacheDependency to store the data in the Cache until such time as the physical file is modified.

public static MyDataSet GetDataSet(string path)
{
  if (HttpContext.Current.Cache["MyDataSet" + path] == null)
  {
    MyDataSet ds = new MyDataSet();
    try
    {
      ds.ReadXml(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(path));
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
      throw new MyException(string.Format("Unable to load file '{0}' as a MyDataSet", path), ex);
    }
    CacheDependency dependency = new CacheDependency(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(path));
    HttpContext.Current.Cache.Insert("MyDataSet" + path, ds, dependency);
  }
  return HttpContext.Current.Cache["MyDataSet" + path] as MyDataSet;
}

In the example above, when the file located at path is modified, the Cache will be cleared due to the dependency. When GetDataSet() is next called, the latest version of the file will be loaded into the Cache instead.

What if you’ve just got a basic HTML anchor that you want to run some JavaScript event off, such as onclick, but don’t want the browser to go to the ‘top’ of the page when actioned? The following will shift to the top of the page when clicked:

<a href="#" onclick="alert('Clicked');">Click me</a>

but the following will not, as expected:

<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="alert('Clicked');">Click me</a>

Simple when you know how!

This is where I’ll be posting various useful findings that I would like to share with the world during my time as a web developer.

“Why have you waited 12 years?” I hear you ask. I cannot answer that. No excuses.