2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Infragistics UltraWebGrid column format not being applied

Just a short post today, recalling an incident I came across recently, which I thought I should jot down here, and hopefully It’ll save someone else a headache.

If you have been working with the 3rd party UltraWebGrid control for asp.net offered by Infragistics, you would have worked with columns where you might have wanted to display numerical values formatted in a certain way (for example, you may want to show 12, 300, 450.0 instead of 12300450.0000). This is done by setting the format expression in the column.Format property inside the ‘InitializeLayout()’ UltraWebGrid method. This is exactly what I was doing but was puzzled to have rows of integers merged from two DataTable sources showing different formats, even though each Integer in the rows were applied the same column.Format expression in code. The first few integers would display in the correct format I apply, but sometimes the last few integers don’t have the formatting applied.

This was getting way too frustrating till I (out of curiosity, and nothing else to try) wrote the following line of code before the ‘column.Format’ expression:

string dType = column.DataType;

When I debugged the code, one set of integers from the original DataTable was of type ‘System.Decimal’, and displayed correctly, but the second set of merged integers from the second DataTable was of type ‘System.String’. When I set the following line of code inside the loop applying the formatting to the column.Format property, all the integers displayed in the correct format:

column.DataType = “System.Decimal”;

So bottom line? The UltraWebGrid control cannot format columns with decimal format expressions if even one value in the column is going to be of a type other than ‘System.Decimal’. If there are several columns which will display numerical data in a certain format that you need, it would be defensive coding to write the logic in UltraWebGrid_InitializeLayout() as follows:

foreach (<column in UltraWebGrid that is going to display numeric values>) {

column.DataType = “System.Decimal”;

column.Format = <your numeric format expression here>;

}
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2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 5,600 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 9 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

99X Technology Wins ‘Arch of Europe’ International Award for 2012

‘Business Initiative Directions‘ (BID) is currently the most important private organization presenting a Quality Award, in the same stance as the standards in Japan (Deming), USA (Baldrige), and European companies (EFQM). Established in the late 1980’s, BID has recognized global companies who are a clear cut above the rest and leaders in their fields in terms of quality, innovation and technology, for the better part of two decades.

Thus, there was a mixed sense of profound admiration and pride when I heard that 99X Technology had won the ‘Arch of Europe’ Gold Award this year for Quality and Technology, presented by BID.  It has been a great achievement and stands testament to the work done at 99X Technology.

The short Video below shows our CEO Mr. Mano Sekaram receiving the Award from BID President and CEO Jose E. Prieto, in Frankfurt, Germany.

Colombo SharePoint Camp

After a successful Colombo Code Camp and Agile Camp, now its time for Colombo SharePoint Camp! The Colombo Camps are a series of tech/industry events that are the first of their kind featuring globally acclaimed technologists and business leaders. The events are absolutely free for the invited attendees. This time, it’s the Colombo SharePoint Camp that’s around the corner (28th of this month to be exact). Following the same caliber of speakers as the previous camps, Colombo SharePoint Camp will be graced by Bjørn Furuknap, a renown SharePoint Guru and author. If you are a SharePoint geek or junky who wants to be up to date on the latest developments on SharePoint, you know where to be on the 28th of this month! Make sure you register at: http://colombosharepointcamp.com/register.html

 

Cool and addictive HTML5 game – 99challenge

Am playing a really cool and addictive HTML5 game these days, called 99Challenge (just navigate to 99challenge.com in your browser). The quirky, interactive, and challenging game play makes it really addictive in my books. The objective is to use a bow and arrow to pin 99 circles (which will be dropped by a frog in a balloon) to the other side of the lake. That would be pretty easy, if not for the bombs and the floating debree that your arrow has to dodge! Sadly, I’m still in last place in the list of high scores (told you it was challenging!)… but am working hard to come up the ranks 🙂

The interesting part is that you stand to win prizes when you score higher and higher, with netbooks, cameras, phones and much more in the prize list. So grease up your archery skills and have a go at the game…. it can be played here: 99challenge.com

Here are two screenshots for good measure:

Starting the game...

Me trying to up the scores!