Massoud Mazar

After realizing that asp.net menu is generating a huge HTML and causes the application pages to be large and slow, I decided to use CSS friendly control adapters. It reduced the page size by 50 KB, but I had some challenges to get it to show the way I wanted it. Here I want to share some of the things I learned along the way:More...

SQL Server Reporting Services ReportViewer control has a toolbar that is not displayed correctly in Google Chrome browser. You will see something like this:

 The correct display looks like this:

A workaround I'm using is to use JavaScript to find DIV and TABLE elements in the above toolbar and change their "display" style to "inline-block".

Following code can be added to the bottom of the page to accomplish this:More...

TreeView server control in asp.net can use AJAX behind the scenes to populate child nodes when user clicks on the expand icon next to each node. If the loading process is fast, it works perfectly. But when child nodes are generated by a slow process (like a slow database query) then user experience is unacceptable. User would click on the expand and nothing would happen for a long time, leaving user wondering if the click really did anything.

In such scenarios, an animated icon that lets user know data is being loaded would help a lot. More...

This past week I tried to use Google GeoMap visualizations API to display some values on a map. The JavaScript part was easy, but I could not find good sample code for providing JSON data asynchronously from .net, so I thought I should build a sample here to save others some time. More...

I was experimenting different themes with my BlogEngine blog and noticed not all of them show the correct color coding of my source code examples. There is a simple fix for that which is to copy the section of style.css file related to "Syntax Highlighter" from a working theme to the style.css of the theme you like. That should do the trick.

Suppose you want to start your SysTray application at installation time and remove it when your application is uninstalled. Here is one way to do this:

Add an Installer Class to your project, and overwrite the Install and Uninstall methods. For Example, assuming your SysTray program is named "My SysTray": More...

If you have setup more than one email account in your Outlook (Work and Home) you may have realized a need for some type of pop-up dialog which will ask you which account you want to use when creating a new email. Outlook lets you define a default account, but obviously that's not good enough. I decided to write a small and simple add-in which will ask me to select the sending account every time I compose a new email. (Even if Outlook already has such a tool, I couldn't find it! and I wanted to gain some Office programming knowledge anyways.)

I used Visual Studio 2008 and created a new Office project of type Outlook Add-in. This will give you the basics you need. Just fill the methods with your code and you are done. More...

iTextSharp is a rich code library to create PDF and RTF output. Recently I decided to use it for a client and realized there are not much good code examples available on the internet. Even some of the code samples from its online tutorial wont run.

By doing a lot of try and error and with some help from other posts, I could get the desired output. It took me too much time to gather all this information and thought it may come handy to others. So I put together a sample web application which creates a PDF document and renders it to the client browser. Here is the code behind for the page: More...

I thought this may save someone a little time:

WHen using BlogEngine.net as your blogging tool, you can format your code using one of the extensions which comes with the tool.

some of the things to remember: More...

While working on a Windows Service project in .net (Visual Studio 2008), a minor problem related to defining custom event logs kept bugging me.

As you already know, to debug your Windows Service you should use InstallUtil tool to install the service in your Windows. For InstallUtil to be able to install your Service, you add an Installer to your project which contains a ServiceProcessInstaller and a ServiceInstaller. So far everything is cool. You set the properties on these components and BAM! you can now easily install your Service. If you look closely at the IinstallUtil messages on your screen you will see that it creates an EventLog source with the same name you specify for the Service Name property of the ServiceInstaller component and assigns that source to a standard Windows event log called Application. More...