Thursday, April 30, 2009

Gravatar using ASP.NET

I’m always attracted with the fancy features in web. This time, I fall in love with Gravatar. Its a global recognition of “YOU”, with the help of an e-mail Id.

If you don't have a Gravatar account, create on here.

The SRC attribute a Gravatar Image has the below mentioned syntax:

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/[MD5_Hash_Value]?s=[Image_Size]

For loading your Gravatar image, all you’ve to do is to mention the Hash Value of your email id and the size of your Gravatar image.

Before start, drag-drop an Image control, TextBox (for accepting email Id) and Button control.

[Source-View]

   1: <body>
   2:     <form id="form1" runat="server">
   3:     <div>
   4:         <asp:Image ID="Image1" src="" runat="server" /><br />
   5:         <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
   6:         <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Button" />
   7:     </div>
   8:     </form>
   9: </body>



[Code-View]





   1: // Page Load
   2: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
   3: {
   4:     // Add SRC attribute to Iage1 at runtime
   5:     Image1.Attributes.Add("src", GetGravatarImageURL(TextBox1.Text.Trim(), 80));
   6: }
   7:  
   8: // Return Gravatar Image URL
   9: public static string GetGravatarImageURL(string emailId, int imgSize)
  10: {
  11:  
  12:     string hash = string.Empty;
  13:     string imageURL = string.Empty;
  14:  
  15:     // Convert emailID to lower-case
  16:     emailId = emailId.ToLower();
  17:  
  18:     hash = FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(emailId, "MD5").ToLower();
  19:  
  20:     // build Gravatar Image URL
  21:     imageURL = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/" + hash + ".jpg?s=" + imgSize;
  22:  
  23:     return imageURL;
  24: }



Now just run/build(F5) your page. The image will looks like below:



noGravatar_Sample



This is the default Gravatar image.



noGravatar 



Now just, enter your email Id used for creating the Gravatar account. & hit the button.



Hurray you’re done. Just integrate at the comments section of your blog.





 myGravatar





This is my gravatar image



That's it & Thanks.

Posted by Abhilash at 4:13 PM 2 comments
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Saturday, April 25, 2009

Change GridView row values using RowUpdating event


The contents of this post has been moved to here. Please visit the link to view the contents.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Thanks!

Posted by Abhilash at 11:12 PM 5 comments
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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

FF3 Ad over IE

Does anyone noticed this?

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ie.html

ff3_vs_ie8

See, the courage, confidence and power of Mozilla corporation; directly advertising over IE. Nothing to say more, IE market-share dipped to 66%. But, this time IE is losing the market-share in a quicker pace. IE8 have to struggle a lot to gain the market again and again.

Good luck, IE.

BTW, I’m an addicted IE user.

Posted by Abhilash at 3:19 PM 0 comments
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Thursday, April 2, 2009

Inserting selected attribute values into a Table

Just imagine you’ve five fields (columns) in table & you only want to insert 2 values (say, in Col2 & Col3) of the table; then use as follows:

   1: INSERT INTO Table_Name (Col2_Name, Col3_Name)
   2:     VALUES (Col2_Value, Col3_Value)

Posted by Abhilash at 4:03 PM 0 comments
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Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Programmatically accessing RSS Feed using RSSToolkit Control

An awesome RSS Feed control (Dmitry’s RSSToolkit) was released years before, I came to knew about ASP.NET.

Last months, I’s spending some time with the control.  I must say, its really cool. One problem I encountered; lack of documentation (or my lack of knowledge), What ever it may. But, it was really nice to write some cool codes using the control.

Ok! In this article, I’ll show small piece of codes demonstrating how to retrieve RSS Feeds from sites programmatically.

Before we start, please download RSSToolkit 2.0 from codeplex, and add the control to your Visual Studio toolbox (?).

Step 1: Drag-drop ‘RssDataSource’ control from your toolbox to the webpage.

Choose RSSDataSource

Now just keep an eye on the source-view. When you drag-drop the RssDataSource, you’ll get a Register tag in the source-view like:

<%@ Register assembly="RssToolkit" namespace="RssToolkit.Web.WebControls" tagprefix="cc1" %>

Step 2: Drag-drop a TextBox for  accepting the feed-url.

Step 3: Drag-drop a Button to trigger fetching the feeds. Double-Click the button to generate the Click event.

Step 4: Drag-drop a Label control to show an error when you enter an invalid feed-url.

[Design-View]

Design-View

[Source-View]

<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
        <cc1:RssDataSource ID="RssDataSource1" runat="server">
        </cc1:RssDataSource>
        <br />
        Enter Feed URL: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" Width="300px"></asp:TextBox>
        <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" onclick="Button1_Click" Text="Fetch" />
        <br />
        <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Font-Bold="True" ForeColor="#FF3300"></asp:Label>
    </div>
    </form>
</body>

[Code-View]

using RssToolkit.Rss;

// Fecth RSS
    protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        string feedData = string.Empty;
// Accepts Feed URL
        RssDataSource1.Url = TextBox1.Text.Trim();

        try
        {
            // Iterate through the RSS feed Items
            foreach (RssItem item in RssDataSource1.Rss.Channel.Items)
            {
                // Feed Author
                feedData = item.Author;
                // Feed Title
                feedData = item.Title;
                // Feed Link
                feedData = item.Link;
                // Feed Description
                feedData = item.Description;
                // Feed Publish Date
                feedData = item.PubDate;

                // Print the output
                Response.Write(feedData + "<br/><hr/><br/>");
            }
        }
        catch (UriFormatException exp)
        {
            Label1.Text = "Invalid Feed URL";
        }
    }

[Demonstration]
a) copy the url of an RSS feed, say http://feeds2.feedburner.com/DidYouSaynet.

b) Paste it on the TextBox & Hit the button. That's all.

c) See How the feeds are displayed.

Hoping it will help someone.

Note:

a) Do not forget to include the namespace using RSSToolkit.RSS.

b) One of the common question you may encounter is how to fetch feeds with a count limit?. That means you only want to fetch last 3 feeds, 5 feeds, etc. At this point I don't have the answer. Even though the RSSDataSource has a property named MaxItems ( where you can set the feed limit), it was not working when tried programmatically. Only way I believe you can do; is to insert a count value in the foreach statement  & break the loop when you feed-count limit is reached.

c) Next question will be how can I download updated feeds only from a site?. The answer will be my next post.

Also you can find some cool articles of RSSToolkit @ ScottGu’s blog and @ CodeProject, which inspired me to write this.

Thanks for taking time to read the post.

Posted by Abhilash at 5:55 PM 2 comments
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Adding Controls to Visual Studio Toolbox

 

The contents of this post has been moved to http://blogs.cametoofar.com/post/Adding-Controls-to-Visual-Studio-Toolbox.aspx.

Sorry for inconvenience.

Thanks

Posted by Abhilash at 4:18 PM 6 comments
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