F9 Group Marketing and Technology Blog

Earlier this year I wrote an article about Twitterizer , an open-source .NET library that can be used to integrate your application with Twitter . Using Twitterizer you can allow your visitors to post tweets, view their timeline, and much more, all without leaving your website. The original article, Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website , showed how to post tweets and view a timeline to a particular Twitter account using Twitterizer 1.0. To post a tweet to a specific account, Twitterizer 1.0 uses basic authentication . Basic authentication is a very simple authentication scheme. For an application to post a tweet to JohnDoe’s Twitter account, it would submit JohnDoe’s username and password (along with the tweet text) to Twitter’s servers. Basic authentication, while easy to implement, is not an ideal authentication scheme as it requires that the integrating application know the username(s) and password(s) of the accounts that it is connected to. Consequently, a user must share her password in order to connect her Twitter account with the application. Such password sharing is not only insecure, but it can also cause difficulties down the line if the user changes her password or decides that she no longer wants to connect her account to certain applications (but wants to remain connected to others)

Over the years I’ve worked on a number of projects that have shared a common requirement – the ability for users to quickly import large amounts of data into a back end SQL Server database. One such project was a web application used by teachers and other staff members. The software was initially purchased for just two schools in the district, but was soon expanded to encompass other schools. Every few months one or two new schools were brought into the fold; every time a new school was added an administrative user would have to create accounts for the new teachers and staff members so that they could sign into the site. Initially, the application offered a web page for the administrator to create new user accounts one at a time, but this interface quickly became tedious and impractical once larger schools with upwards of 100 users were brought online. To allow school administrators to quickly import new users we created a web page from which a user could upload an Excel spreadsheet that contained the one row for every new user; the columns in the spreadsheet mapped to table columns in the database. After uploading this spreadsheet, the application would walk through each row and insert a record into the table. Through this mechanism an administrator could create the 100+ user accounts by first building an Excel spreadsheet (something many of the schools already had on file) and then upload that spreadsheet. This technique may sound familiar – in Importing an Excel Spreadsheet Using Typed DataSets and TableAdapters , author Nannette Thacker walked through building such an interface. While the described approach works well when importing hundreds of records, it starts to seriously slow down when importing thousands or tens of thousands of records

By Quentin Zervaas. This article shows you how to use Zend_Log, the logging component of the Zend Framework. It allows you to record messages from your application however you please. In this article I will show you how to record messages to a log file. Additionally, if you use the Firebug and FirePHP plug-ins for Firefox, Zend_Log can be extremely useful for application development and debugging.

Closing all forms in an application seems like it would be a simple task of using a foreach loop in the Application.OpenForms collection, such as: foreach (Form form in Application.OpenForms) { form.Close(); } But there are two problems. First, the code above will throw an exception because the OpenForms collection changes each time you close a form,

It’s easy to determine if your C# application is 64-bit.  Just check the Size property of IntPtr.  If it’s 8, then your application is 64-bit.  If it’s 4, then your application is 32-bit. Here is a simple C# console program to demonstrate this: (more…) ShareThis

It’s easy to extract an application’s own icon in C#: form.Icon = Icon .ExtractAssociatedIcon( Application .ExecutablePath ); The ExtractAssociatedIcon static method on the Icon class (in System.Drawing) extracts the associated icon from any file.  By supplying the Application. ExecutablePath (in System.Windows.Forms), you extract the application’s own icon. ShareThis