Vlad Setchin

Tuesday, 1 September 2009

Joomla! Installing XAMPP on Vista

Currently I am working on installing Joomla! content management system and as a first step it requires to install XAMPP package. After some time of tweaking I finally managed to install and run XAMPP package on Vista. XAMPP installation completed fine and basic configuration steps made no problems. All services except Apache started.

Turned out that service was unable to start, because Apache process had no access to “C:\Program Files\xampp” directory. I decided to give SYSTEM account access to it and run Apache, MySql and FileZilla as windows services. To give access to SYSTEM account open properties of the directory and Security Tab.

Check that it has full access rights assigned. If not, use Edit button to assign access rights.

After trying to start Apache service again it still was failing to start. Apache log in C:\Program Files\xampp\apache\logs\error.log showed the following error.

“(OS 10013)An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions. : make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80”

This error happens when some process already uses port 80. My solution was to change “C:\Program Files\xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf” file and set port to something else like 8080 or any other number. Edit lines “Listen 80” and “ServerName localhost:80” to be “Listen 8080” and “ServerName localhost:8080”. Start Apache service. Success!

The next step will be to install Joomla! I will publish another post if there will be problems that required solution during install.

Sunday, 23 August 2009

ASP.NET Grid View Hidden Column Binding Problem

When I was using Grid View in my Web Application I run into problem where hidden column would not bind data. After searching I found a simple solution to this problem. Let’s have a look at example. We have a table called Person with columns ID, FirstName, Surname. In our page we want to show only FirstName and Surname columns and have ID column loaded but hidden.

For a Grid View component create RowCreated event handler with the code:

protected void GvRowCreated(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)    
{     
    // Hide ID Column     
    e.Row.Cells[0].Visible = false;     
}

The code above will hide all cells in column Cells[0], which is ID column. If Grid View has paging enabled we need to check e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow to hide only Cells that contain data.

Monday, 6 July 2009

CSS References and Tools

Every web designer and developer knows how powerful Cascading Style Sheets are and how much they can save in HTML coding.

I put together several links to CSS tutorials, samples and Internet resources.

CSS Books

The Ultimate CSS Reference

CSS Tutorials

CSS Templates and Samples

Sample CSS Page Layouts – Max Design
CSS Layout Templates - SSI-Developer.net
Layout Gala: a collection of 40 CSS layouts
CSS Zen Garden
CSSPlay
Solucija − Free CSS Templates
Faux Column CSS Layouts - Code-Sucks.com

Web Designer Tools

Rounded Graphics for CSS Box Corners - Cornershop

Resources

50 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools | Smashing Magazine
11 Useful Tools To Check, Clean & Optimize Your CSS File | MakeUseOf.com
50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography | Smashing Magazine
7 Principles Of Clean And Optimized CSS Code | Smashing Magazine
CSS Tools That Compress & Strip Unused Styles From Your CSS Files | Labnol
Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong | Digital Web Magazine
15 Must Read Articles for CSS Beginners | Line25.com
Ask SM: CSS Quick-Question Edition | Smashing Magazine
130+ New Tools to Make You a Better and Faster Designer | mashable.com
53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn't Live Without | Smashing Magazine
40+ Essential Front End Web Developer Cheat Sheets | tripwire magazine

Friday, 3 July 2009

How to get Virtually unlimited online backup storage with Live Mesh

As you may already know Live Mesh Online Storage currently offers 5GB of online storage. This amount of data is enough if you are backing up documents as DOCs or plain text files, but if you want to store music, photos, large multimedia files, storing them into one account will quickly add-up to the limit. To expand this 5GB limitation we will use an excellent sharing functionality of Live Mesh.

Lets looks at the example. We want to setup backup for our Photos, Music, Documents. We will need to create a separate live or hotmail accounts for each of them, say my_photos@live.com, my_music@live.com, and my_docs@live.com. All these accounts will need to link with main account say my_mesh@hotmail.com.

After creating my_docs account login into www.livemesh.com using it and connect to Live Desktop.

Double click on ‘Create new folder’ Icon and enter ‘Documents’ in the name field.

Once folder is created double click it to open it and click Members and then Invite to enter address of your main account.

After clicking OK Email will be sent to my_mesh@hotmail.com account which will have a link to accept an invitation. After that ‘Documents’ folder will be linked to your main mesh account and will be visible in the list of folders.

These steps need to be repeated for photos and music and add virtually unlimited number of folders.