Pavan Kondepudi's Blog

Response.Redirect in new window

2008-06-25T14:31:00.002-06:00

public class RedirectHelper
{
///

/// If you don't specify a target or you specify the target to be "_self",
/// then it will redirect within the current window, so a regular Response.Redirect occurs.
/// If you specify a different target, like "_blank", or if you specify window features,
/// then you want to redirect to a new window, and we write out the appropriate script.
///

///
///
///
public void Redirect(string url, string target, string windowFeatures)
{
HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current;
if ((String.IsNullOrEmpty(target)
target.Equals("_self", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) &&
String.IsNullOrEmpty(windowFeatures))
context.Response.Redirect(url);
else
{
Page page = (Page)HttpContext.Current.Handler;
if (page == null)
throw new InvalidOperationException("Cannot redirect to new window outside Page context.");
url = page.ResolveClientUrl(url);
string script;
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(windowFeatures))
script = @"window.open(""{0}"", ""{1}"", ""{2}"");";
else
script = @"window.open(""{0}"", ""{1}"");";
script = String.Format(script, url, target, windowFeatures);
ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(page, typeof(Page), "Redirect", script, true);
}
}

Total Madness: 1 Billion Z$ is 1US$

2008-06-05T09:22:00.010-06:00

Todays news read Zimbabwe's currency crashed to a record low. 1Billion Zimbabwe dollars is equivalent to 1US dollar.

1,000,000,000 Zimababwe dollars is 1 US dollar.

The reason for the currency crash is , the country is suffering from internal politics and economy is really bad.

Prices of some of the basic goods is so high, I mean , it is REALLY high.
A loaf of bread is 600million Z$. Can you believe that?
2 litre cooking oil 5millionZ$.

According to latest official poverty line data, an average family of five needs a monthly income $35 to survive while remaining living in poverty.

Zim had 8 successive years of inflation. 4 out of 5 people are jobless. It is the world's fastest shrinking economy.

I've read few articles about the places one can visit in Zim, looks like its one of the biggest tourist attractions and destination for many tourists.

I hope it comes out its inflation, currency could get better.

Interview with Infosys

2008-06-01T11:24:00.006-06:00

Summer of 2006, this was when I completed my master's and was doing internship at Mayo clinic
They said they do not have any open full time positions, but can hire me in a contract to hire position.

But in the mean time I was job hunting. That was when I got a call from Infosys, banglore, India.
i want to share my experiences trying to get an interview call from Infosys. So, this is how it went.

I remember it was a wednesday, a lady from Infosys, banglore called me and said they found my resume on some job hunting website and would like to interview me. The strangest part of my conversation was she said she wanted to interview me between 6pm-12pm CST(yes this was still wednesday).

So, I came back from work @5PM. Tried to brush up all my basics and was sitting pretty to take the call. Remember, the recruiter told me that a developer would give me a call anytime between 6pm-12pm CST.

It was 6, clock started ticking, I waited, did not get a call, then it was 7, then it was 8. I waited for 2 hours, I wanted to call recruiter, call India , but I did not know her number, so I thought I would wait for some more time. Its 9 now, I was feeling really hungry, wanted to have some quick bite, but was too cautious. I did not want to munch if I get a call, so I skipped my meal. It was 10, then clock ticked to 11 and then 12. I gave up (oh yeah, I did send the recruiter an email ),no dinner, I was feeling really tired and I had to go to work next morning, so I slept.

Next morning(thursday), I got a call again from the same recruiter, she said the developer who was supposed to interview me was Out of office, so could not conduct the interview(Dont they have any back up plans, we are talking about Infosys???). Then she said, they will for sure interview me today (Thursday evening), same time , which is 6pm-12pm, I was like, freaking ediots, dont they have a specific time, instead giving me a range, like 6pm-12pm, what do they expect, they want their candidates from a different country to just keep waiting and expect a call? Dorks...

Well, anyway, I needed a job, so I waited like wednesday night, Deja Vu, I waited , waited, waited.....waited.............
Today, I waited for an hour more, yeah It was 1 in the morning and Iam expecting a call from Infosys, weird....very very weird....
Yes, I did not get any call .

So, on friday morning, a lady from Infosys, US, called me, a bummer...........
She said, they were not actually looking for college grads, but someone who is more experienced, so she said they can not go forward with the interview.

As Iam writing this, it reminds me how much pissed I was on Infosys, a company I respected most, because of my Indian roots, and the way they were trying to conduct an interview just blew me off. Like what kind of BIG company is this??

This might me my personal experience and I know there are people who respect Infy for whatever it is, but I think Indian Software companies need to take a leaf out of american companies and be more punctual and respect their candidate's time (remember I was waiting for 6 hrs for 2 days, and ended up without a phone interview).

If anybody from Infy is reading this blog, dude....whats up with Indian standard time, infosys??

Google Analytics

2008-05-30T13:40:00.017-06:00

After adding google analytics to my blog, I was curious to know my site's analytics, I know , I know its too early to look at those numbers.

I really liked the way google analytics gives you feed back about your site.

G analytics generates a report about Visitor loyalty. So, you see I've got 1 time visitors,2 time...4 time...

Looks like I have equal number of Firefox and IE users. 50% IE and 50% Firefox.

What Flash Version are my visitors using, 80% are using 9.0r115 and 20% are using 9.0447

Data about Page visits

Benchmark, this is in Beta stage, gives oyu data about #of Visits, %bounce rate, PageViews, Avg.Time spent on the site, etc....

Traffic Source: It tells you about how people reached your website. So, I've got 60% direct traffic and 40% from either referrer sites or from the search engines.

DashBoard, this is prettly cool. Its got this world map and countries painted in green, which means, those are the countries from where people visited my blog. And you can drill down to each country and then to each state.

These are just few of many features I could find in Google analytics. Its really amazing how google comes up with these new tools. Give it a shot, Iam sure you will appreciate these cool tools as well.

Vista's Features on XP

2008-05-30T11:22:00.007-06:00

I know many of us still dont find Vista navigation friendly, and I know many of my colleagues still prefer XP over vista. So, here is a link http://lifehacker.com/389735/get-vistas-best-features-in-xp, which tells you how you can get the best of Vista features on your XP machine.

I use Vista and I agree that there was a bit of learning curve to get used to the new vista, but I love it now, more than xp.

Personally, I would try to get these features on my old XP laptop

Better Explorer , it is so much improved on vista
I love task switching atl-tab, and its 3D
Integrated start menu search, IT IS Intelligent, but Iam so used to using SlickRun, I barely use it, except when I dont bookmark them in slickrun, thats when Integrated search comes to play.
Thumbnail previews, its nice.
and last but not least, Renaming of files, you hit F2,name the file , dont put the extension, it just gets it, cool huh!

so get those features on your XP Box.

301 Redirect

2008-05-23T11:23:00.000-06:00

Why do we need a 301 redirect?
I would say, if you have redesigned your website (may be you redesigned using the new .Net 3.5), may be reskinned etc etc...

Will I lose my page ranking if i implement 301 redirect?
No, you wont lose you page rank, 301 is the best method to preserve you page rank while redirecting the traffic to the new webpage.It usually takes 2 weeks for 301's to pass page rank and all related information. It is a SEO friendly redirection

How to implement it?
response.StatusCode = 301;
response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
response.RedirectLocation = http://www.newurl.com/;
response.End();

done!

What is Frame-Busting /Frame-killer

2008-05-22T09:35:00.001-06:00

What are Frames used for?
HTML frames (FRAMESETs and IFRAMEs) are a feature of all modern web browsers that enable content from multiple pages to be displayed within a single view. Historically, frames were primarily used to enable partial page updates, where page navigation was contained in one frame, and page content was contained in another. Over time, use of frames expanded to include advertising, mashup, and AJAX scenarios. Today, the majority of popular websites use IFRAMEs for various reasons.

What is Frame Busting?
A framebusting page is a web page that will open your page within a frame from an "external" web page.
What actually happens is your site is aggregated, which is ok, but there is more to it, they will start framing your website and will show "ads" , like they run google adsense beside the pages they stole from you,which is not good. So its your content, he stole your content and added google adsense and all the revenue will go to him.
Besides, your website's pagerank may go down, and I imagine all the stats tagged to google analytics will drop. Also, I read somewhere that it is against the Adsense TOS (Terms of Service).
So essentially they benefit from your content.

How to bust them?
Solution is simple.
Add Frame Busting code, add these three lines of code and it will fix it.
the basic idea is :
if (your site is in someone else's frameset)
{ top frame location = your frameset/homepage}

<script type="text/javascript">
if(top.location != location)
{
top.location.href = document.location.href;
}
</script>

So you have to find out if your site is framed, and if it is you should change the top frame location. Finding out if you're framed is easy, but changing the top frame location is not allowed in Safari, even though all other browsers support it.

That is all it takes to "bust" out of a frame and ensure your site is displayed on top.

C#: Shallow Copy

2008-05-21T22:13:00.000-06:00

In C#, the shallow copy is also referred as memberwise copy.

A shallow copy creates a new instance of the same type as the original object, and then copies the nonstatic fields of the original object. If the field is a value type, a bit-by-bit copy of the field is performed. If the field is a reference type, the reference is copied but the referred object is not; therefore, the reference in the original object and the reference in the clone point to the same object. In contrast, a deep copy of an object duplicates everything directly or indirectly referenced by the fields in the object.

Refer to this article for more details.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2004/05/03/125427.aspx

ASP.Net / C# interview Question/Answer Bank

2008-04-09T16:02:00.000-06:00

http://www.cnblogs.com/fengzhimei/archive/2004/06/20/17206.aspx

May be this should be on top of my list
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WhatGreatNETDevelopersOughtToKnowMoreNETInterviewQuestions.aspx

http://www.emicrosoftinterview.com/Technical+Questions/SQL+Queries/default.aspx

http://halcyon.usc.edu/~kiran/msqs.html

http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/012700-1.shtml

http://www.geekinterview.com/Interview-Questions/Microsoft

http://www.coolinterview.com/type.asp?iType=3

http://www.princeton.edu/~canturk/ETC/puzzles.html

I will add few more good links, as I read them ...

Array declaration in ASP

2008-04-08T10:20:00.000-06:00

I know this sucks! I was assigned an ASP Project , we are converting our Website to .Net, actually we've been doing this conversion for last 2 years. We still have like 10% of site in classic ASP.

I was working on this ASP Page where we had some user critical data and we are putting that in a query string, so my task was to create a session and remove all the critical data from the Query String and store in a session.

In the process, I had to create a 2-dimensional array. I created an array the "Normal" way like this:

dim arrayList [2][5].

This worked perfectly!....no It did not. Little did I know that in ASP, when creating an array you dont use square brackets, instead we declare it this way.

dim arrayList (2)(5).
Now I know why everyone hate ASP (Classic right!).

Trust Relationship using ICertificatePolicy interface

2007-08-07T23:21:00.000-06:00

I was working on a project which involved webservices, I needed to write some code on .aspx page to accept all certifcates.
The reason I wanted to do this was I had a server (Say Server A) and was making a call to another web server (Say Server B).

In my .aspx page I have this code snippet:
HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(Url);

I am making this webrequest call to Server B, which has a valid SSL certificate installed on it. But this code works on my local box, because web service call was local. But when I mount this code to a test server like Server A it breaks right at that line where I make a webservice call to a different webserver, Url flips to null. Problem was my app did not accept certificates that the remote service sends in order to establish a connection.In simple words the webserver blocks you from accessing pages which start with https(SSL enabled).

This is the error I recieved:
The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship with remote server."

So, I wanted my code to implicitly accept all certificates whenever there is a certificate mismatch. After doing some research this is what I found.

Solution :
This is the code to accept all certicates.
.Net Framwork has System.Net namespace, and provides an interface ICertificatePolicy, with a single method CheckValidationResult.
So I decided to write a class which implemets this interface Code is real simple.

public class MyPolicy : ICertificatePolicy
{
public bool CheckValidationResult(ServicePoint srvPoint, X509Certificate certificate, WebRequest request, int certificateProblem)
{
//Return True to force the certificate to be accepted.
return true;
}
}

And just beforing establishing your connection (look code snippet above).
Call

ServicePointManager.CertificatePolicy = new MyPolicy();
and then establish your connection.
HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(Url);

References:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2003/12/04/41154.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.icertificatepolicy(vs.71).aspx
In msdn, they talk to you about ICertificatePolicy giving custom security validation for an app, more info about this on MSDN.

thanks

More on Globalization and Localization

2007-07-11T11:21:00.000-06:00

Hey-
I found this blog worth reading http://weblogs.asp.net/leftslipper/archive/2007/06/19/changing-the-request-culture-for-globalization-and-localization.aspx,
this is releated to my previous blog on Managing different cultures.

Creating a WebPage with multiple cultures.

2007-07-09T09:06:00.000-06:00

With .Net 2.0, it is so easy to create a webpage that supports multiple cultures.

Here are 10 simple steps that creates a webpage that supports English and Spanish.

Open a new ASP .Net Website in VS2005.
Lets make this a very simple app, so drag and drop a label and Dropdownbox from Toolbox. We use label to greet the user with a different language, depending on his/her selection from the dropdown list.
Remember there are no resx files on 2.0, so goto tools and click Generate local resource.
goto Solution Explorer: double click default.aspx.resx. For Label1Resource1.Text, type Hello, and for PageResource1.Title type English. Save it. Now copy default.aspx.resx, paste in the same folder App_LocalResources. Rename it to default.aspx.es.resx.
Now copy default.aspx.resx, paste in the same folder App_LocalResources. Rename it to default.aspx.es.resx.
Double Click it. For Label1Resource1.Text type Hola, for PageResource1.Title type Espanol. Now Save this.
Now, goto Internet Explorer, tool, Languages, Add Language Spanish(Mexico) and Move up. Click ok.
Thats it you are almost done. There are just 2 more things you need to do. In the Page_load event, write code to populate the DropDownList with the list of cultures. You can use Cultureinfo Object to populate.
And the Last step is to override the InitializeCulture method to base the page's culture on the item selected from dropdownlist. Use UICulture Object for that.
Press Ctrl + F5, you notice, when we select English from dropdownlist label changes to "Hello", and when you select Espanol, label changes to "Hola".

With 2.0, removes the overhead of writing several if-else statements to update text of all controls, which is so much time consuming and a complex task.

Just Started Learning .Net

2007-07-05T22:07:00.000-06:00

Hey i just started learning .Net. I will keep posting stuff, as I keep learning more about 2.0