So I’m one of 53 participants (I hope) of the first round of CSSOff – Jabroni. (too many Ofs)

I always have a problem with world time zones. I had to ask two of my friends from US to check for the time. But their times are also different so they can only tell me the estimates. I did sent the entry a few hours before due time (I hope).

I don’t care whether it went in on-time or not; I’m just satisfied with myself that I’ve done something on my weekend and enjoyed it. It was interesting; took me a couple of hours to think the possible ways to slice and shape it up. I got bored on half way but my bro said I should finish up and done with it, so I did.

I’m not that satisfy with my CSS structure but I think I tried my best. It’s valid xhtml transitional. I don’t know why I didn’t make it xhtml strict…I guess I forgot and used to with my normal xhtml transitional Doctype. I thought of asking a friend to recheck my code but I dismissed that thought cos’ it’s a competition and I should participate it fair and square to find out what I’m capable of. I’ll upload my entry on my site soon.

Here is my entry: CSSOFF – Jabroni (2007-06-01)

Anyways, my weekend was meaningful and busy one…yah not bad. How’s your weekend go? Oh, Do you know any good world time site/application that list different types of time zones and country times? I’m too lazy to google.

Oie Turtle turtle, little tortoise, kuchi kuchi kooo…
Oh hello, I’ve just adopted a Tortoise recently. You see, we use to play with this creature called VSS before, but it got wild from time to time and the guys don’t like it much. I don’t like it in the beginning too. I did strangled and fist-fight with it for many times. But the thing is, you only need a bit of patience and time to tame him down. Once I start petting and playing with it, I tend to understand it’s tender part as well as bewilder sides. As you all know, everything has its own pros and cons; our VSS rode a bumpy road and came as an arse but it has soothen out after a while. At least for me, I’m on fair term with him.

Now I found a new pet. It’s really a sweet and gentle thing to start with. It says “Hello” and wags a little tail. Oh just so cute!

Before you start with the tortoise, you have to know its family tree; the big fat “Turtles” – Subversion (SVN) evolved from their ancestors called CVS back in ice-age. I’m not interested in CVS but I’m very much interested in SVN and how the little TortoiseSVN communicates to its parents.

So I did a bit of research on Googology and started learning about the whole Tortoise family and their neighborhood. So here we go…

What is SVN?

Subversion is an open source application for revision control, is a replacement for CVS. The goal of the subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community.

Subversion’s Features (# Parent Site) (# Wiki)

What operating systems does Subversion run on? (# Portability)

All modern flavors of Unix, Win32, BeOS, OS/2, MacOS X.

Subversion is written in ANSI C and uses APR, the Apache Portable Runtime library, as a portability layer. The Subversion client will run anywhere APR runs, which is most places. The Subversion server (i.e., the repository side) is the same, except that it will not host a Berkeley DB repository on Win9x platforms (Win95/Win98/WinME), because Berkeley DB has shared-memory segment problems on Win9x. FSFS repositories (introduced in version 1.1) do not have this restriction; however, due to a limitation in Win9x’s file-locking support, they also don’t work in Win9x.

To reiterate, the Subversion client can be run on any platform where APR runs. The Subversion server can also be run on any platform where APR runs, but cannot host a repository on Win95/Win98/WinMe.

It’s not necessary to set up Apache to use Subversion on the client sides.If you just want to access a repository then can use subversion client such as TortoiseSVN to integrate with the server. Only when you want to host a networked repository then you have to set up on Apache2 or an “svnserver” server. More info see FAQs (#)

What is TortoiseSVN?

It’s a free open-source client for the Subversion version control system, implemented as Windows shell extension. TortoiseSVN manages files and directories over time. Files are stored in a central repository. Its immediate ancestor was TortoiseCVS which talks to CVS server. (# Doc)

TortoiseSVN’s Features (# Doc)

• Shell integration
• Icon overlays
• Easy access to Subversion commands
• Directory versioning
• Atomic commits
• Versioned metadata
• Choice of network layers
• Consistent data handling
• Efficient branching and tagging
• Hackability

You can also integrade with Visual Studio.net using this tool called AnkhSVN. It is a Visual Studio .NET addin for the Subversion version control system. It allows you to perform the most common version control operations directly from inside the VS.NET IDE. Not all the functionality provided by SVN is (yet) supported, but the majority of operations that support the daily workflow are implemented. (#)

I think this is all for today’s learning about my new pet. I’ll add more detail on how to feed things and teach your pet A,B,C,D later.

So you want to adopt a Tortoise too? Here are where you can get it from and how to look after it.

# Get Subversion here
# Get TortoiseSVN here.
# Download AnkhSVN

I’m learning new things these days and am just sharing some notes here. I’m still learning and these technologies are very new for me, hence my notes gonna have heaps of errors and wrong information. You are most welcome to correct them, fill some more in and share you notes with me too. Alright, so we are set to go.

I’ll be updating this post with links so still tune.

• Windows SDK Setup
• Installing .NET 3.0 and Orcas
• Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Service Pack 1
• Basic N-Tier Recap
• Introducing O/R Mapper and LLBLGen Pro
• LLBLGen vs CodeSmith
• Dear DotLucene
• Greetings Subversion and TortoiseSVN
• Source Control Resources
• Versioning Models
• More coming soon…

All the notes are subject to change as I’ll be filling in with more info later.

Obviously, I’m for “Not to Cut”. How can it be good, if you get cut?
This is outrageous, demoralizing, depressing, disappointing, demolishing, deteriorating, d…d…d…damnation.

Socialist Measures? I just don’t understand any of those socialist, communist, democratic, republic, lic, flic, slic, nist, dick!

F%*# Banimarama, if they are blaming on him, but I pretty much doubt it’s cos’ of political situations. Some teams are just slack and management is taking this opportunity to slide along with current situations.

It’s already been crappy pay and 15% is just too much to bear.

(Ignore me, I’m just screaming out my work related issues.)

I’m starting my hand on sql05, vs.net 05, sdk 3.0, WCF, WPF, WWF etc etc… and…

Arrgghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!

Windows SDK Setup Wizard

Setup file: 400KB
Installation: 958.8MB ?!!!??!!!!
Estimated Download Time: 20 Days, 18 Hours !!!!!!!!!

Arrrggghhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

That is just so great! What am I to do???
I want to start test now, NOW! NOW! NOW!!
Garrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

In WSS, there is no default header or whatsoever, it only has “Top Menu Bar” with those main navigations like “Settings”, “Document Libraries”, etc.
My understanding of the “Header” is the image that go on top of the “Top Menu Bar” which span through out the site.

Header image is the first thing you set to customise your WSS sites. There are numbers of CSS files for you to play with for the look and feel of the whole site.

For this header part can be manipulated from OWS.css file, which sits at
c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\STYLES

Place your header image here: c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\IMAGES

For WSS adding the header image tips, you must read this first two articles. #1 A Quick Way to Add/Change the SharePoint Header Area Graphic and #2 Adventures in CSS: Putting a banner image above the menubar in WSS

My version include abit of adjustment from the second article. The main difference between #2 and mine is that, #2 made use of second table’s CSS ie. .ms-bannerframe to apply the header image whereas in mine, I’ve use the first table’s CSS – .ms-main as you seen in the following code.

The image is added in .ms-main as followed. Once you add the image, the top menu bar still sit on top. To move the top bar down, you have to add margin-top space to .ms-bannerframe.

.ms-main{
background-image: url(“/_layouts/images/ats_intranet_header.jpg”);
height: 170px;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

.ms-bannerframe, .ms-GRHeaderBackground, .ms-storMeFree {
margin-top: 170px;
background-image: url(“/_layouts/images/topgrad.gif”);
background-color: #002d96;
background-repeat: repeat-x;
}

The method in #2 is mainly for default theme sites but once you apply it with different themes, the top-menu bar appear out of control. It is due to the image height set in .ms-bannerframe which is applied to second table and it acts as a background image for top-menu bar as well.

margin-top: 170px; this leave the space for the header image. The height of your header image should go there, ie. the one you use in .ms-main class. In my case it’s 170px.

.ms-bannerframe, .ms-grheaderbackground, .ms-stormefree {
background-image: url(sitelogo.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
border-bottom: 0px solid;
height: 72px;
}

Article 2 style effect: Theme1, Theme2, Default Theme

My Style effect: Theme1, Theme2, Default Theme

The disadvantage of my method is that, you need a fix image width. You cannot apply background color to it cos’ it will cover the whole page background as well. Also it doesnt work for individual webpart pages ie. a separate webpart .aspx pages that you created in document library. I’m yet to figure that out.
What is the advantage? hehe well it serves my purpose cos’ none of #1 and #2 work with my requirement.

This is just an extra note added to the first two articles, so that whoever with similar to my case can make use of it.

Thanks Ian for the articles.
Links: A Quick Way to Add/Change the SharePoint Header Area Graphic
Adventures in CSS: Putting a banner image above the menubar in WSS

Technorati Tags: WSS, Windows Sharepoint Services, Banner, Header, Menubar, OWS.css

Whenever you get this kind of error messages with instructions, do not follow the instruction straight away.
Always turn to your best friend, google, to see how others solve it and search for the best possible answer.
May be this is a bad advice but I never trust error message instructions. Of course you must read the message and instruction properly to see it is a sensible/reasonable instruction on the problem. As for me, I just have to find out whether others are actually following the instructions as mentioned or not.

The error:
Unable to find script library ‘/aspnet_client/system_web/1_1_4322/WebUIValidation.js’. Try placing this file manually, or reinstall by running ‘aspnet_regiis -c’.

The error dialog box pops up on those pages with form validation.
This problem happens whenever the system cannot access aspnet_client folder either you don’t have a permission or it is not in your root directory, ie. when you changed the root directory for your virtual folders, from Inetpub/wwwroot to some other folder, and when you use Validation controls (eg. RequiredFieldValidator, ValidationSummary, etc) on input TextBoxes in one of your site.

You can check whether you are using the default root or not by checking the property > Home Directory of your IIS virtual directory as shown on the following images.

Default virtual root

Custom virtual root

For this error, I don’t like uninstalling IIS and reinstall again just for the sake of one site error. There got to have some easier way to solve it and yes, there is.
I’ve also found out that when you follow the error instructions straight away, you might screw up the problem more and some of the google results shows that it actually got screwed in some cases.
Some people uninstalled and reinstalled IIS but that doesn’t solve the problem and they have to uninstalled and reinstalled .net framework as well.
Different solution for different cases I’m sure, but for my case, I tried the easiest resolution ie. copy the aspnet_client folder from wwwroot to my new virtual root folder, and voila it works!

Read more in the following sources:

• When running ‘aspnet_regiis -c’ still doesn’t fix it…
• http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-1257776.php
• http://www.experts-exchange.com/Programming/Programming_Languages/Dot_Net/Q_20762240.html