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Showing posts from 2010

Building multilingual Asp.Net MVC 2 Photo gallery using jQuery, XSLT, and XML

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I built the demo gallery a while time ago. Now I would like to share my implementation design and the source code. I am not going to cover the code implementation in full details here in order to keep the article relatively short. Please refer to the source code (link provided below) for design details. The demo photo gallery solution developed as ASP.NET MVC 2 areas application that contains a single project with default main entry point to the Web application and photos area. The application structure includes Area folder with Photos subfolder that contains the area-specific child folders (for more information on creating an ASP.NET MVC Areas Application using a Single Project refer to MSDN resources). The demo gallery implementation is mainly based on a third-party jQuery plugin. So the photos area has only one area-enabled controller PhotosController with one action method Index. I am not going to cover the basics of development wi

Computer virtualization with VirtualBox: Guest OS copying and extending

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Virtualization is one of the greatest technologies and there are numerous practical aspects of it together with cool factors which provides a huge advantage for businesses. The main benefit is a money-saving aspect related to a minimised hardware cost, systems' replication, disaster recovery, software testing. Since computer virtualization allows a number of operating systems to be used on a single machine that facilitate the beneficial computer resource utilisation. Virtualization allows easy creation of base computing environment, software / network testing, application deployment, etc. Virtualization can help tremendously especially if it is free, lightweight and easy to use. This is where Sun VirtualBox comes to play. VirtualBox is a great desktop virtualization solution which has a number of advantages such as free to use (for personal and evaluation purpose), open source, less resource usage in host, performance benefits, snapshots, save and resume time of virtual

An issue with HttpCookie using HasKeys property and encoded single value string

In this post I would like to share my experiance with HttpCookie object used in some e-commerce application. A web application containts the cookie implementation, which allows customers to persists thier contact details on the client's side using cookies. That code was implemented by third-party web-developers using a well-known HttpCookie class from the "System.Web" assembly. The provided functionality seemed working as expected untill some customers have sent us complains about unability to persist thier contact details for the future shopping needs. The problem was quite hard to identify. In many cases the coookie was persisted without any problem. Eventually, after digging into HttpCookie code implementation, we have found that the HasKeys property was responsible for all these troubles. The HttpCookie object, in our code, is created and stored with single value which is encoded using Base64 scheme as a standard for transmitting data on the Web. Be