Dashain is over

Dashain is over and we are back at work! Although Dashain is our great festival, I enjoy it very little. It is no more fun as it used to be before, when we were child. When we were in school, we used to get full month of holiday. Then, we got 15 days off in collage days. Now, it's only 5 days. Damn! :-( Also, people are not in festive mood as political situation of Nepal is not so good.

Festiv Season

It is festival season in Nepal. It's Dashain! We will be on vacation from 20th to 26th of October. But, I will be working on my pet project 'Worklog Application' at home. My target is to finish it by the end of the vacation.

Popup calendar component

I was looking for good calendar component for my pet project, which must have feature to show calendar with pop-up. ;-) Googling gave me several links. Some of them were javascript based and some were written in C#. None of them were promising. While looking into some more links, I came to know about this site. Along with calendar componet I was looking for, there are several interesting components in this site. Also, there is a deployment tool for ASP.NET application known as 'Unleashed It'. Above all, every thing is FREE, except source.

Delphi 2005 announced!

Borland has announced Delphi 2005, new version of Delphi(code name "DiamondBack"). According to press release, it is expected to ship in Nov. 2004.

Introduction to the .NET Framework Class Library

Very interesting post on .NET FCL by Corbin Dunn.

Change image on condition in Datagrid

In my ASP.NET pet project,there is a page where list of users is shown in a datagrid. I wanted to have one column showing active status of users. I mean, if user is 'active' the grid will show color image. Similarly, if user is inactive, it should be represented by gray version of same image. Google was not able to find the solution(may be, search word was wrong). There was one forum where question was asked for this kind of functionality. Sad but truth, there was NO answer. So, I moved forward with other work in same project. After few days, while I was working with Repeater control, I had to look into it's help. My eyes stopped at a sample code for ItemDataBound event. That code gave me an idea to change column value at runtime. What you will see below is a code to show image in datagrid's column which change according to condition. First, insert an image in itemtemplate section in .aspx as shown below;

......
....
<asp:templatecolumn>
   <itemtemplate>
      <asp:image id="imgActiveStatus" runat="server"/>
   </itemtemplate>
</asp:templatecolumn>
.....
...

Then, write a code for ItemDataBound even for grid as below;

if (e.Item.ItemType = ListItemType.Item) Or
   (e.Item.ItemType = ListItemType.AlternatingItem) then
begin
    if DataBinder.Eval(e.Item.DataItem,'Active').ToString = 'True' then
      (e.Item.FindControl('imgActiveStatus') as Image).ImageUrl := 'images/user_active.gif'
    else
      (e.Item.FindControl('imgActiveStatus')as Image).ImageUrl := 'images/user_inactive.gif';
end;

Delphi 8

I've been using Delphi since it's first version. It is my first and last choice as application development tool. Now, after using Delphi 8, I am little disappointed. Even after installing update 2 and applying unofficial patch, it is messing up my code. I use this 8th version mostly for ASP.NET application. It is only .aspx files that Delphi is messing around. Beside that, I love Delphi 8. I thank Borland for giving Delphi lover like me a chance to develop .NET application using Delphi language. Also, I feel very confident and productive developing ASP.NET application these days. I still have more to look into Delphi 8, namely, BDP, VCL.NET etc. But I think I will be looking all these stuffs in Delphi 9 only.