Schooling the shit out of me

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.0/3.5 notwithstanding, I have been schooling the shit out of me.
It all started with XML/XSL, didn't know it at the beginning of the month, now I pretty much evangelize it since it solves one of my biggest problems (separation of content, presentation and function).

Then one of our partners in Bursapursuit needed a feed into our top 10 list everyday, I created a web service for them that returns a dataset, figured out how to consume it to test it and gave it to them.

Now, since one of our partners don't know how to consume a web service in a classic ASP environment, I am going to give them an RSS feed of the same thing. Hopefully they would know how to do this.

Because I really really do not want to write a custom program that churns out a top 10 everyday into say a flat XML file.

Then just the other day, one of our sites was behaving weirdly and it only happened under bad lag, I had to figure out how to overried the renderer on .NET to only render a page on a non postback and a non callback.

So in one month I managed the following:-
1) XML/XSL
2) Create/Consume web services
3) Override the renderer on .NET
4) LINQ on .NET 3.5

Cool huh?

Good old fashioned programming

After almost 4 days of messing around with RSS and XSL, the solution to my problem was actually just some decent programming on C#.

I wanted to select only the first two posts of a blog from its RSS feed. So I loaded the RSS feed into a dataset in C#, then created a pagedatasource object and pumped in the defaultview of the dataset.

I then turned on paging and set pagesize to 2. The datalist that I was binding to the new pagedatasource didn't like it, throwing IXPathNavigable errors.

After a day of tinkering around with XPath and producing no results at all, I switched strategy and decided to just go play around with XSL and not using a pagedatasource at all since not playing around with pagedatasource seemed to work, I could at least bind the dataset to my datalist.

Yesterday and most of today, I messed around with XSL trying to do a for-loop from 1st row to 2nd row to show only the first two entries of the rss feed.

Either my understanding of XSL is flawed or the feed that was being sent was weird, but my endeavours at XSL failed to do anything useful.

Around 3 hours ago, I decided to approach it from a very fundamental level.

I could load it into a dataset and display the dataset.

What if I looped through the dataset and take the first two rows of the blog?

After 10 minutes of coding, I managed to extract anything I wanted out of the first 2 rows. I then made a datatable, a datarow and another dataset.

Binded the results of the first two rows of the original dataset to the datarows, and added the datatable to the new dataset and used that dataset instead as my datasource :P

Kinda of a roundabout way of doing it but I guess if it works it works lar.

The state of England in Malaysia..........is damn powderful

The state of English in Malaysia is horrendous compared to what it used to be.

Malaysians used to be proficient in English, but the standard of English has detiorated into a mockery of the language. Most Malaysians won't know grammar even if it walked up and smacked them right in the face. I believe that there is a market here for a Grammar Nazi, maybe a blog based Grammar Nazi. In return for making your blog read like an etonian writes it, I will be remunerated in suitable amounts of the green stuff.

Lolz, I really shouldn't be writing this at work when I have something tough to code up.

Hellgate is disappointing.

I am very disappointed by Hellgate.

It at best is a 3.5 out of 5. I was expecting a full 5 out of 5 or at least 4.5 out of 5.

Sigh, the slowdown bug is pissing the shit out of me.

Maybe I should fire up Diablo 2, it might actually a better game?

And the intro videos were soooooooo good.

Look at it:-




It was so promising.

Sigh, now I guess I am waiting for Fallout 3 and Dawn of War: Soulstorm. Maybe its a sign of my age? Or the sheer amount of games I've played.
Most new games suck to me, cos anytime I look at any reputable top 10 or top 100 list, I would have played almost all of them!