Never tought I will need Award Images module on my site ...

I recently built a PAD generator script on my site in order to easilly promote my software, but I never tought my software will be awarded. The surprise came from Sedo Auctions Watcher, it was awarded 5 stars by redsofts.com (you can find my program listed here). Becouse I built this little tool for few hours and it wasn't doing anything than informing you on ending domain auctions I was pretty surprised. What's even more interesting is that Sedo Auctions Watcher is adware program. It displays banners, but it does this by following some guidelines. It will not change your homepage or install toolbars. Probably because I was trying to play fear I was awarded. What's good is that this award changed the way I think. After 4-5 hours of work

were awarded, what will happen if I spend some more time?

You'll see soon ;)

You can find the rating guidelines here:

http://www.redsofts.com/awards.html

Finally its here ...

Skype passport 1.0 is out, you can find the simple html page on Chameleon Bulgaria Online demo: Here Download page: Here

>

World's first Skype Passport is almost out ;)

This is a little javascript which will allow your users to easilly register on your site, by filling their contacts automatically from skype (offcourse only few fields are populated, but most registrations require only few fields after all). Here is a screenshot of this neat little javascript placed on a page: Note : This works only if your users are using IE (as this thing depends on ActiveX). The tool will be available for free download at my site : ChameleonBulgaria so visit it regularly ;) When I publish it, I will also publish a news on the frontend so you can know. Just a few more hours ;)

.

Very simple tool to watch ending Sedo Auctions

Few months ago I was interested in the domain trading business. It was interesting to me as it generated 14.2 million dollars back in 2006. It is based on speculla I think. Something like FOREX but not quite. I registered two domains and placed them on Sedo Auctions. I was also interested on how other domains are going so I decided to write a small tool. It will stay in your tray and will show you the auctions which are about to end the next 24 hours. The following information is gathered about each auction: - Domain for sale - Price - Currency - Time left before the auction is closed - Google PR for each domain The program is available for download from Chameleon Bulgaria I decided to put a banner on this program so my domains

for sale are visible to the users (well, after all I spent some time on this program and I would really like ot have some incomes after all ;).

Here is a direct link to the program page on Chameleon Bulgaria may be found
here

5 minutes C# to dispose your NotifyIcon object

If you have this problem - try calling .Dispose() method for your NotifyIcon explicitly in the FormClosing event:      private void Form1_FormClosing(object sender, FormClosingEventArgs e)      {         notifyIcon1.Dispose();      } Note : this trick may not work if the Application was terminated abnormally. I will investigate that issue when I have some free time and report back what is the best approach on this.

>

5 minutes to have your web.config keys in order

This time I will not post any C# codes ;). I will only inform you that I am in the middle of the development of two small tools which will (hopefully) make deployers life easier. The first one is used to create simple web.config plans - you will be able to create plans for your sites and use those plans in the future to check if everything is in order.

The second one is what I call "the player" it will receive those plans and play their recorded actions against selected sites. This way you can always check if some of your sites is still configured properly. After the check is completed - you will be able to export the results to CSV file so you can use them as a checklist.


Another post will be posted here when the tools come out and you will be able to find them (free of charge) on my site ChameleonBulgaria.com, so check it too (by the way the site is Under Construction but I will complete it too, unfortunatelly I am the only person to work on it, but this is also subject to change).


I also plan to develop the ability those tools to receive the site / host name and output file name as a parameters so they can be scheduled easilly to run on their own, so all you will need to do is take a look at the files from time to time to make sure everything is still working smooth.

Bulgarian IT Boxing - We (.NET team and fans) lost round 2, waiting for round 3 now ...

Last night the second round of Bulgarian ITBoxing took place. What is ITBoxing? ITBoxing is an event where developers using different platforms gather and present the advantages of their platform. After all the technologies are presented the audience votes about their favourite technology. Last night the following technologies were presented (votes included): Java 73 votes. .NET 45 votes. Ruby on Rails 13 votes. PHP 11 votes. This was the second round so now Java and .NET are on the top (the first round was for .NET ;). I was disappointed to understand that my technology wasn't first this time. Round 3 will be held in about a month or so and the topic will be Enterprise development. Hopefully there will be less Java

developers in the audience this time so we can win again ;). I think we deserve it ;).

NOTE: I wasn't in the .NET team, I was in the audience but tried to help with comments against Java ;).

No matter which technology wins I think those events are very helpful for all develeopers, as after all - our work is to complete our job on time and with less efforts. When you attend such events you can inform yourself about which type of tasks are easier to complete with Java, which with .NET, which with PHP and which with Ruby.

5 minutes C# to build a Zoo with Marker Interfaces.

First of all what is marker interface? A marker interface is an empty interface which defines no fields, but is only there for reference. Let's start with the case study and we will go through the example and explain everything. Case Study : Build a simple Zoo program. You have a Zoo with few animals - those animals are only fishes and birds. As this Zoo is relatively small it has only one employee to feed all the animals with the appropriate food. The fishes eat food which we will refer to as "fishfood" and the birds eat a food which we will refer to as "grains". To accomplish this we may create an interface, which identifies the things that are common for both types of animals in the Zoo. IAnimal.cs using System; using

System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   interface IAnimal
   {
     void Feed(FoodType food);
     bool Hungry
     {
        set;
        get;
     }
   }
}

Ok, we gave the animals the ability to eat, but how will the employee identify what kind of food to feed them with?

Let's first define an enumerator to hold the food types:

Food.cs:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   public enum FoodType
   {
     Grains,
     Fishfood
   }
}

Ok, we have the food types now. In order to split the animals in the Zoo in two separate groups we are going to use the Marker Interface, we will define two interfaces to mark which animal is fish and which is bird.

IBird.cs:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   interface IBird : IAnimal
   {
    
   }
}

Now let's do the same for the fieshes:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   interface IFish : IAnimal
   {
    
   }
}

Now let's have two concrete animals - one for each type:

Heller.cs:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects.Animals
{
   class Heller : IFish
   {
     #region IFish Members
     private bool hungry = false;
     public void Feed(FoodType food)
     {
        if (food != FoodType.Fishfood)
        {
           throw new ArgumentException("Heller is a fish and eats only fishfood.");
        }
        else
        {
           this.hungry = false;
        }
     }

     #endregion

     #region IAnimal Members

     public bool Hungry
     {
        get
        {
           return this.hungry;
        }
        set
        {
           this.hungry = value;
        }
     }

     #endregion
   }
}

Chicken.cs

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects.Animals
{
   class Chicken : IBird
   {

     #region IBird Members
    
     bool hungry = false;

     public void Feed(FoodType food)
     {
        if (food != FoodType.Grains)
        {
           throw new ArgumentException("The chicken only eats grains.");
        }
        else
        {
           this.hungry = false;
        }
     }

     public bool Hungry
     {
        get { return this.hungry; }
        set { this.hungry = value; }
     }

     #endregion
   }
}

Let's have one employee to feed the animals:

ZooEmployee.cs

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   class ZooEmployee
   {
     public delegate void OnAnimalFeeded(string Animal, string FoodType);
     public event OnAnimalFeeded AnimalFeeded;

     public void FeedAnimals(List<IAnimal> animals)
     {
        foreach (IAnimal animal in animals)
        {
           if (animal is IFish)
           {
             animal.Feed(FoodType.Fishfood);
             this.AnimalFeeded(animal.GetType().Name, "fish food");
           }
           if (animal is IBird)
           {
             animal.Feed(FoodType.Grains);
             this.AnimalFeeded(animal.GetType().Name, "grains");
           }
        }
     }
   }
}

NOTE: I added the OnAnimalFeeded delegate and the AnimalFeeded event, so the Zoo employee can report to us when it has feeded an animal.

Let's define the Zoo class:

Zoo.cs

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   class Zoo
   {
     List<IAnimal> animals = new List<IAnimal>();
     List<ZooEmployee> employees = new List<ZooEmployee>();

     public Zoo()
     {
        animals.Add(new Animals.Chicken());
        animals.Add(new Animals.Heller());

        ZooEmployee employee = new ZooEmployee();
        this.employees.Add(employee);
     }

     public List<IAnimal> Animals
     {
        get { return this.animals; }
     }
     public List<ZooEmployee> Employees
     {
        get { return this.employees; }
     }
   }
}

Now, in the main form of the program we will instantiate the Zoo class, and call its employee to feed all the animals.

On the form I added one button and one RichTextbox. When I click the button the following code will get executed:

        Objects.Zoo zoo = new MarkerInterface.Objects.Zoo();
        zoo.Employees[0].AnimalFeeded += new MarkerInterface.Objects.ZooEmployee.OnAnimalFeeded(Form1_AnimalFeeded);
        zoo.Employees[0].FeedAnimals(zoo.Animals);

What are we doing here - we are simply creating a Zoo, we are using it's first employee (as we said it will always be exactly one emplyee) AnimalFeeded event to report when what animal is feeded and with what food and we are then asking the employee to feed the animals.

The marker interfaces here are used in the ZooEmployee.FeedAnimals() method to help the employee decide which type of food to give to each animal.

As the Chicken inherits from the IBird the employee will feed it with grains. As the Heller inherits from IFish it will be feeded with fish food.

Here is the Form1_AnimalFeeded which is fired each time the employee feeds animals. It will be used to display in the RichTextBox what is our employee doing at the moment:

     void Form1_AnimalFeeded(string Animal, string FoodType)
     {
        this.rtbAnimalsFeeded.AppendText(Animal + " was feeded with " + FoodType + "\n");
     }

Here is how it looks like after it was runed:



Hope you understood it ;).

businesscatalyser - a game?

Well, after I was too bored today I decided to do something interesting. So I made my own game. I decided to buy a domain and park it on the sedo auction, I also listed it for sale. So here are the rules: 1. Park the domain and try to get as much clicks as possible (no spam or other black techniques). 2. List it also for sale but don't try to sell it for less then 1K EU (just to be more interesting) 3. You may use only home made software and public sites services in order to promote the site. Here is the site : BusinessCatalyser.com (don't laugh about the name, I wanted to have some very competitive keyword in the domain(business) so the game can be even harder and more interesting. You may say this is a madness or losing time, but

as I was wondering how to promote this thing I made a little software which you may use in order to promote your sites. It is a small program which takes the words and searches for a sites with similar content, checks the PR of the sites found and reports you where it will be good to write a post.


Here are the basic stats of BusinessCatalyser.com :

SmartPageRank.com says this site costs 0 USD
Sedo.com says it is for sale and has no content, no PR, no links
It currently has 0.00 EU from the parking affair.


If you are interested in this game I will be happy to exchange information with you, just write a comment ...

Thanks for the attention ;)

sealed class usage

We recently started an internal academy in our company to improve our software development skills. The first meeting was about OOP fundamentals, it was really interesting (thanks Vesko for your efforts!). This question appeared as interesting for me - when should we use the sealed class. Some collegues guessed it should be used in the most concrete classes, as they will not be used as a base classses, but I don't think so. After all - why should you say : "Hey, don't use this thing as a base class" explicitly after you know it will not be used anyway. I did soem research on the net about the sealed class usage, it appeared it's common use is for classes with static methods. The example I've found was about Brush and Pen .NET

objects. They are sealed as they have only static fields like : .Blue and so on.

So when you are doing software you may keep in mind that you have that sealed thing to help you limit the inheritance of your classes.

Is Microsoft the source of all evil or what?

It is very strange, I was searching for a migration tools, just to see how this market is going. I accidently found this thing here: What's so strange? Some people choose weird domains to run business under. The strange thing happened after I clicked on the link to see what's behind: Finally I decided to type the url address in my browser to see actual site behind thesource.ofallevil.com and see where it redirected me:

>

5 minutes C# code to load CSV file into a DataSet

Step 1 : add button for browsing files, a textbox to hold the file name and paste the followin code in the browse button click handler (this code will basically popup a OpenFileDialog, set up to only open files with .csv extension):

             OpenFileDialog ofd = new OpenFileDialog ();
            ofd.Filter = "CSV Files|*.csv" ;
             if (ofd.ShowDialog() == DialogResult .OK)
            {
                this .textBox2.Text = ofd.FileName;
                GetData();
            }

Then we need to get the file from the textbox2 and load it into data set:

       private void GetData()
       {
             FileInfo fi = new FileInfo (textBox2.Text);
             OleDbConnection con = new OleDbConnection ( @"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" + fi.Directory.FullName + ";Extended Properties='text;HDR=Yes;FMT=Delimited'" );
            con.Open();

             DataSet dsThings = new DataSet ();
             OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand ( "SELECT * FROM " + fi.Name, con);
             OleDbDataAdapter adapt = new OleDbDataAdapter (cmd);
            adapt.Fill(dsThings);
             this .dataGridView1.DataSource = dsThings.Tables[0];
                    }

As you can see we use OleDB provider to load the CSV file into the dataset.

Job Done!

I think I made it finally. The osCommerce 2 vShop import was made this afternoon. Just waiting QA test now.

>

.NET C# to parse MySQL queries? Impossible? Pavel can make it ;) (with some ifs and buts offcourse ;)

The most interesting task in my career came the end of the last week. As a Vizibility employee I was asked if I can port osCommerce live site to out vShop solution (http://www.vizibility.co.uk/tmenu/vshop.asp) The interesting thing is that I had no access to osCommerce nor did I ever worked with it. What's even more chalenging - osCommerce database was given to me as SQL queries, something like : drop table if exists table ; create table table ( -- Some things here ... ); insert into table () values ( ); As a normal software developer so there were 3 big chalanges: 1. How to parse this SQL thing (it is MySQL) ? 2. How to figure out

the osCommerce Logic ?
3. How to port all those things as a script so it can be applied to our live servers by the support team?


It's really chalanging don't you think? First I thought it will be a good step to install fresh copy of osCommerce, import the products and try to port them as CSV or something. But then I understood it will take too much time, so I decided to parse the SQL queries on my own and store them in a predefined objects like tables, rows and so on and so on. Then I could easilly transfer them as a text files in the format we needed.

And I almost made it - the parsing methods are done (I was able to parse this thing in a day but some bugs still appear).

Seems the more I work on our shopping solution the more easier I can understand other's shopping solutions.

Great task in a great company!

5 minutes C# code to open Web.Config from Windows Forms application.

In my previous post about IIS, Virtual Directories and Directory Services you saw how can you obtain the sites per IIS instance as well sa all the root virtual directories. Now it is time to show you how can you obtain the Web.Config file for a root directory. At first glance I thought it will be easy, I thought I will simply need declare the following: using System.Web.Configuration; And / or : using System.Configuration; Well it's not quite this way. In order to load web.config file from a windows forms application you need to have some kind of context to be used or, in other words, file mapping. The following method takes two parameters : path to the root directory and DirectoryEntry, representing the root directory

object (you can see my previous post ( Get IIS sites and virtual directories with .NET / C# / Directory Services ) learn how to obtain DirectoryEntry for a web root directory.
And here is the method:

       List < string []> GetWebConfigAppSettings( string Path, DirectoryEntry entry)
       {
             List < string []> items = new List < string []>();
             if (entry.Properties[ "Path" ].Value != null )
            {
                FileInfo fiWebConfig = new FileInfo (entry.Properties[ "Path" ].Value + @"\web.config" );
                if (fiWebConfig.Exists)
                {
                   WebConfigurationFileMap fm = new WebConfigurationFileMap ();
                   System.Collections. Hashtable props = new System.Collections. Hashtable ();
                   foreach (System.DirectoryServices. PropertyValueCollection property in entry.Properties)
                   {
                         string propertyName = property.PropertyName;
                        props.Add(propertyName, property.Value);
                   }
                   VirtualDirectoryMapping mapping = new VirtualDirectoryMapping (fiWebConfig.Directory.FullName, true );
                   fm.VirtualDirectories.Add(entry.Properties[ "AppRoot" ].Value.ToString(), mapping);
                   System.Configuration. Configuration cfg = System.Web.Configuration. WebConfigurationManager .OpenMappedWebConfiguration(fm, entry.Properties[ "AppRoot" ].Value.ToString());
                   foreach ( KeyValueConfigurationElement elmt in cfg.AppSettings.Settings)
                   {
                        items.Add( new string [] { elmt.Key, elmt.Value });
                   }
                }
            }
             return items;
       }



The method above will return a List of all in the web.config file (the appSettings section), you can easilly adjust it to fit your needs.

As you can see the magic begins in :

> System.Configuration. Configuration cfg = System.Web.Configuration. WebConfigurationManager .OpenMappedWebConfiguration(fm, entry.Properties[ "AppRoot" ].Value.ToString());


method. You simply need to make some preparations befor ask it to open the web.config.

Note : this code again is written in few minutes and does not pretend to be optimized, you can again use it at your own will.

Interesting Apple Ad

Recently I came across this link. It's amazing how creative the Apple marketing team is and how they exploit the Apple vs. MS war. Have fun :)

.

How much does your site costs?

Recently I cam accross this site : http://www.smartpagerank.com. What impressed me was that this site can estimate (who knows how exactly) how much does your site costs. Unfortunatelly my blog was estimated to 0$ but that's subject to change :P. I will also put this code into the left side of my site. You can check it out either.

>

Another 5 minutes with C# to post to Google Blogs (Blogger.com) using Google Blogs SDK (2)

I revised the tool a bit, here is how it looks now: Also I made some refactoring to the code and it looks better now (no more richTextBox1 names ;). I plan to release this tool in order to help developers blog code to their blogger accounts easier. The next secret I am going to reveal is that I started a toolkit to help you create blog related programs with C# / .NET / Google Blogs API. For now I am planning to release the program for free, as a Lite version and I plan to spend some more time to create a better looking version with SEO features in it and distribute it for a small fee (something like 10 EU). The Toolkit will released for free now. Well that's it. I am looking forward when I will have some more time to develop those

controls and programs to help the Blogger community grow ;)

5 minutes with C# - Get your blog in TreeView Control

I played a bit more with the Google Blogs Api and was able to create a custom TreeView control to help you get your blog in Hierarchical View. Here is a screenshot of the TreeView: The control will be soon released to my site and new blog post will be published to let you know

.

Another 5 minutes with C# to post to Google Blogs (Blogger.com) using Google Blogs SDK

// Create service to be used for queries              Service service = new Service ( "blogger" , "blogger-sample" );              AtomEntry createdEntry = new AtomEntry ();              // Create credentials you should add your blog username              // and password here             service.Credentials = new GDataCredentials ( "your_username" , "your_password" );              // As I only have one blog to speed up - I am taking it,              // You can extend here in order to allow the user to              // select from mutliple

blogs if he / she has.
             Uri firstBlogUri = GetFirstBlogUri(service);
            
             // If we have the Uri - it's time to actually post.
             if (firstBlogUri != null )
            {
                // Create FeedQuery and assign Uri.
                FeedQuery query = new FeedQuery ();
                query.Uri = firstBlogUri;

                // Create Atom Feed from that query.
                AtomFeed feed = service.Query(query);

                // Create atom entry for the new post
                AtomEntry newPost = new AtomEntry ();

                // Fill in the post information
                // You need to have a control named richTextBox2 which will
                // contain the post body and a textBox1 control which will
                // contain the post title.

                newPost.Title.Text = this .textBox1.Text;
                newPost.Content = new AtomContent ();
                newPost.Content.Content = richTextBox2.Text;
                newPost.Content.Type = "html" ;
                newPost.Authors.Add( new AtomPerson ());
                newPost.Authors[0].Name = "Pavel Donchev" ;

                // Try to publish and report success / fail:
                try
                {
                   createdEntry = service.Insert(query.Uri, newPost);
                }
                catch ( Exception ex)
                {
                   MessageBox .Show(ex.Message);
                }
                if (createdEntry != null )
                {
                   MessageBox .Show(newPost.Title.Text + " posted successfully!" );
                }
            }

There is also a helper function to retrieve the blog Uri:

       Uri GetFirstBlogUri( Service service)
       {
             FeedQuery query = new FeedQuery ();
             // Retrieving a list of blogs
            query.Uri = new Uri ( "http://www.blogger.com/feeds/default/blogs" );

             AtomFeed feed = null ;
            feed = service.Query(query);
             AtomEntry entry = feed.Entries[0];
             for ( int i = 0; i < entry.Links.Count; i++)
            {
                if (entry.Links[i].Rel.Equals( "http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#post" ))
                {
                   return new Uri (entry.Links[i].HRef.ToString());
                }
            }
             return null ;
       }