Billy Leo IT blog

HTC Desire HD - Lag Fix

Billy Leo — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 11:05:28 GMT

I recently upgraded from the HTC Hero to the Desire HD.

I might post more articles about this phone but for now I feel the most important thing to spread the word about a bug fix that doesn't seem to have been sorted but the latest firmware.
After using the phone for a few hours I noticed that it was becoming more and more choppy or laggy. It was as bad if not worse at times than my old HTC Hero which had a third of the chip power.The lag was most noticable when attempting to view pictures or videos in the gallery. It might load 8 thumbnails after about 2 minutes and browsing between them was nearly impossible. I was very disappointed with this and was close to bring the phone back to the shop. Just yesterday I found a simple solution online.
How to fix it?
Go to Phone settings > Applications > Development and check Enable USB Debugging
After doing this your phone should be running a lot better!
Spread the word!
If you see someone with this phone set make sure he/she knows about this.

Trouble Shoot SQL Locks

Billy Leo — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:36:56 GMT

Recently I've been having a number of performance related issues with SQL Server 2005.

I was finding it hard to figure out why I had so many processes stuck in AWAITING COMMAND status.

After extensive googleing I came across this little beauty: http://www.sommarskog.se/sqlutil/aba_lockinfo.html

Basically, Erland Sommarskog has created a stored proc that will get you a list of current locks happening in your database. There's a range of information given back showing you all sorts of useful data to help you identify to cause of the locks.
Process Id and if it is locking other processes or process ids with a reference to the process that is blocking it. CPU usage and memory usage, what application, command or SP the problem is coming from along with a load of other measurement it would have taken me months to do on my own.

This sp has helped me. I hope it can help you!

Using CheckBoxes in a GridView - VB

Billy Leo — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:36:49 GMT

Check out my check boxes!

In this post I hope to show you how to create a gridview that has an extra column to house checkboxes. This will allow the user to select checkboxes in rows which will then be programatically assessed by the code behind. I will also show you how to implement a checkbox which will be contained in the header that will select all or deselect all the checkboxes in that column.

Lets take the following gridview as an example:
This is the .aspx code:

<asp:GridView ID="gvConfirmOrders" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False" DataKeyNames="OrderNumber">

<asp:BoundField DataField="OrderNumber" HeaderText="OrderNumber" ReadOnly="True"

SortExpression="OrderNumber" />

<asp:BoundField DataField="OrderDate" HeaderText="OrderDate" SortExpression="OrderDate" />

<asp:BoundField DataField="ShipMethod" HeaderText="ShipMethod" SortExpression="ShipMethod" />

<asp:BoundField DataField="Weight" HeaderText="Weight" SortExpression="Weight" />

</Columns>

</asp:GridView>

This gridview(gv) gvConfirmOrders will show you 4 columns.

The gridview is populated programatically in the vb in the page load as follows:
gvOrders.DataSource = dtOrders 'I'll assume you can make the datatable yourself
gvOrders.DataBind()

You want the user to be able to check the relevant boxes he wants to do something with.
We do this by putting TemplateFields into the gridview. These boyos are customisable columns where you can insert controls that will be shown in each row. In this case we will put in checkbox controls. These will go into ItemTemplate within TemplateField. Item template is the area that will be repeated for each row in the gv. Here is the code we will stick in as the last column in our gv.

<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Print Order Documentation">
                <HeaderTemplate>
                       Check Box Column
                    </HeaderTemplate>
            <ItemTemplate>
                <asp:CheckBox runat="server" ID="RowLevelCheckBox" />
            </ItemTemplate>

</asp:TemplateField>

So now the gv code should look like this:

<asp:GridView ID="gvConfirmOrders" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False" DataKeyNames="OrderNumber">

<asp:BoundField DataField="OrderNumber" HeaderText="OrderNumber" ReadOnly="True"

SortExpression="OrderNumber" />

<asp:BoundField DataField="OrderDate" HeaderText="OrderDate" SortExpression="OrderDate" />

<asp:BoundField DataField="ShipMethod" HeaderText="ShipMethod" SortExpression="ShipMethod" />

<asp:BoundField DataField="Weight" HeaderText="Weight" SortExpression="Weight" />

                <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Print Order Documentation">
               <HeaderTemplate>
                         Check Box Column
                            </HeaderTemplate>
              <ItemTemplate>
              <asp:CheckBox runat="server" ID="RowLevelCheckBox" />
           </ItemTemplate>

</asp:TemplateField>

</Columns>

</asp:GridView>

So that's part 1, you now have a column with a checkbox in it for each row in the gv.

Part 2: How to find out through vb which rows were checked by our user.

We will find this out via the code behind for a button called btnGetChecked

       Dim intSelected As Integer
       Dim orderid As String
       Dim arOrdersToPrint() As String

        intSelected = 0
        'For each row in the gv we want to assess where or not the checkbox was checked
        For index As Integer = 0 To gvOrders.Rows.Count - 1

            'Here we create a checkbox in memory and make it equal to the check box of the row which the for loop is currently on
            Dim cb As CheckBox = CType(gvOrders.Rows(index).FindControl("RowLevelCheckBox"), CheckBox)

            'You then see if it was checked
            If cb.Checked Then
                intSelected = intSelected + 1
                    orderid = CType(gvOrders.Rows(index).Cells(0).Text, String)

                   'Make an array to hold the ordernumbers using intSelected as the index point in the array to store the ordernumber
                    ReDim Preserve arOrdersToPrint(0 To intSelected - 1)'This will add another row to this array
                    arOrdersToPrint(intSelected - 1) = orderid

Session("arOrders") = arOrdersToPrint

End If

OK, so as you can see above, we have cycled through all the rows in the gv and where the checkboxes were ticked we then added the value of the corrosponding OrdeNumber to the array arOrdersToPrint. this array will store what orders were selected by the user. I then made a session variable called arOrders which can be accessed across the website.

Now so, Part 3 Check / Uncheck all checkboxes

This is very useful if there are many rows and the user wants all or nothing to be checked.

--- I'm going to stop here for now and continue this post another day

SQL Server 2005- Impot Export DBs

Blog Author — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:32:40 GMT

As part on mu final year project in college I was required to setup and interactive town web page.
I needed a strong and fast database for use with the webpage, I chose SQL Server 2005 Express edition for the page. I have spent many hours getting the database just so and was ready to upload it to my host a few days ago.

I logged onto the host's database server with the uid and pss I was given. From what I had found out from the internet and my lecturers, getting the database onto the server would only take a few simple steps. NO, not the case at all.

Problem

I could not figure out how to migrate the data from my database to the database my host had given me.
I logged into the Database host with MS SQL server management studio 2005 Express.
I right clicked on my database and looked for the import/export option... It wasn't there; it wasn't in the tasks sub menu either.
I was boggled, Why wasn't there an option for me to upload my database? What was Microsoft’s idea here? They give you all the tools you need but no functionality to upload your work... What's that all about?
After an extensive Google search I found one possible solution to my problem.

Solution 1:

I could restore the database on the server with the backup(.BAK) file of my project's database. This would be effectively the same as the import/export option I was assuming the program would have.
SO I created a backup on my database and logged onto the host server, I right clicked my db and clicked restore from backup option. I was presented with the E,F and D drives of the server computer but not my local computer. There was not option for me to navigate to my local computer at all. The only way I could restore from my back up file was for me to get the file onto the server somehow. With the customer support of my Web Host being so poor I doubt they would upload the .bak file any time soon.
I needed another way of getting my DB uploaded.
I tried to output my database to an sql query and then run that on the hosted db, I couldn’t get this to work correctly and neither could I get the records to go with this. I am new to MS SQL so I'm sure that this could have been done. However I opted for the easy option.

Solution 2

EMS DATA PUM 2006 for SQL Server
I downloaded a trial version of this program to help me get my DB online. The program promises to migrate all the tables and records from one DB to another. As this was only a trial version it would only copy over 5% of the records in the tables. However, it did set up all the tables on the host and that was one of the main problems for me because there were 20 or 30 tables to upload.
MY next step was to attach the hosted DB to Visual Studio .net. Now that I had the two databases attached to visual studio I created some code to set up Data Tables for each table in the local database. For my local database I set up table adapter method which took a parameter for the row and returned the record details of that row. Also in my dataset I created table adapters for each of the tables that had been uploaded by Data Pump and removed the records (5%) that it had put in. I set up INSERT SQL Queries on the table adapters for each of the tables. The code would then call these tableadapter.INSERT methods passing in the strings from Get methods that had been created by the local database earlier in the loop. This all happened with in a loop that would run for as long as i(row) was equal to or less then the row count of the local database table being used.
In this way I managed to transfer all my records into the hosted database. I'm pretty sure, in fact I’m positive that there are better ways of doing this but this is all I could think of at the time.
I probably could have saved a lot of time if I had just downloaded a crack for the data pump software but I wanted to do it via the code anyway cause it allowed me greater control over what was copied over and what wasn't.

I will go through this post again some day and improve the methods described but I just want to throw up an initial description first.

Hopefully my next post will shed some light on how exactly how to get the ASPNETDB database that attaches to MS's login controls in visual studio to work on your hosted web page. As of this moment I have no Idea how this is done seeing as there are no connection strings in the webconfig file and there is no access the functionality behind the login controls. I guess this make it more secure, but impossible to work with.
I hope this post helps someone out there with similar problems...
Thanks,
Billy

Cool Music Site

Blog Author — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:56:24 GMT

www.musicovery.com

Saw this on Click Online last night.

It's a website that plays music to you based on the mood you select or category.

I like the idea, the controls are nice but there is a lot of room for improvement.

I've heard the same songs once or twice even though I click a different mood area.

Check it out.