Reddnet Scribbles

Microsoft has removed the dynamic help feature from the new version of visual studio. It is somewhat sad. I've been a big fan of dynamic help and will miss that feature.

I suspect that we'll see an extension that adds this functionality back, but until then...

There is this like really old mechanism that does nearly the same thing. Just highlight the member in the text editor and hit the F1 key. This will bring up MSDN help for the member you have selected.

It isn't as slick as dynamic help. Dynamic help was smart enough to scan for related topics and display them in a ranked list for you to pick from, where the F1 mechanism only goes to the most likely topic.

It has been well over a year now, so I thought I'd take a bit of time to revisit my old review of ReliableSite.net that I put up last year. This was prompted by a request I received from the original review asking me for my updated opinion.

So...would I recommend ReliableSite.net for your shared hosting needs today?

Depends on what you are doing with it...

While working with the TicketDesk 2.0 MVC project, I came across a really unusual situation within the relational database that TicketDesk uses.

The resulting voyage of discovery lead to me finding my first legitimate use of a "non-enforced foreign key relationship" in a relational database... The situation required an explicitly defined foreign key relationship, but also prohibited the server being able to enforce the relationship.

Here is how it happened...

I've formally packaged a new version of TicketDesk at Codeplex. TicketDesk 1.2.3 is a minor update. The most significant change is that the HTML editor has been replaced with the markitUp! editor using the markdown syntax. This should hopefully work around some problems many users were reporting with adding comments in IE8 as well as some display problems that could occur when a user cut/paste content from a word processor or other sources with embedded rich formatting....

As I've mentioned before, I'm working on the next major version of TicketDesk 2.0 on the  ASP.NET  MVC framework. The project is still a little early in development, but is starting to resemble a real application now.

I've put demo site up to give the public a preview...

[UPDATE - 1/12/2010]: MarkItUp! version 1.1.6 inclues a fix for this issue (thanks Jay!)

I've been working with the wonderful markitUp! editor by Jay Salvat. Specifically, I'm using markitUp! as a markdown editor for TicketDesk and a few other apps I'm working on. I'll probably post more about using markitUp! as a markdown editor later, but for now I wanted to address a specific bug that markitUp! exhibits in IE8. 

By default, markitUp! uses an iframe element for a preview window. 

In IE 8, closing the preview iframe will cause IE 8 to try to close the entire hosting window or tab. IE 8 will prompt the user before it does this, but if you click yes when prompted it will indeed kill the window/tab... which is not good. 

After some digging, I've located the problem... 

Now that the ASP.NET MVC Framework is out, I've decided to tackle learning the new platform the same way I usually do... by writing a real application for the new platform.

It has been just over a year since I introduced TicketDesk over at CodePlex. While it hasn't taken the world by storm or anything, it did generate a lot more interest than I would have expected. There are several companies using TicketDesk in production environments, and there have been a few thousand downloads from other people that may be using it too.

While TicketDesk isn't generating the kind of download numbers that I'd want to base a software startup on, for an open source project it is what you might call "wildly successful".

If there was a major failure on my part with bringing TicketDesk to the public, it would be that I didn't do a good job explaining the ideas behind the overall design. So let me take a stab at explaining the philosophy behind TicketDesk.

The general idea behind TicketDesk was to take my 15 years or so of experience, much of it spent being frustrated by help desk issue trackers, and use that experience to design a different kind of help desk system; one that avoids those problems.

And believe me, I have a very long list of complaints with help desk systems!

I suppose the best way to explain it is to discuss the fundamental design idea then illustrate how TicketDesk implements them.

Another undocumented "feature" I ran into when playing with the MVC.

I have an ajax action link that sorts a list on the page. To accomplish this, the link performs an ajax request to the controller's Sort action and in the end redraws the part of the page contianing the list's data with the new sort settings. 

No biggie... except that when using Mozilla Firefox, it never worked right. The list would be redrawn, but would always contain the entire page's content including the menus, headers, and all the other stuff.

This was another one of those things I had hoped would magically go away with the RTM of the MVC framework... but when it didn't I had to go figure it out.

I chased my tail for a while last week after the final release of the ASP.NET MVC framework went RTM. I'd been having a few "issues" getting my app working right, especially in IE 8.

I'd been hopeful that the RTM releases of either IE 8 or the MVC framework would magically fix these problems for me, but after both went to RTM last week I discovered that I was going to have to tackle the problem myself.

The main problem was that, in IE 8, I was unable to update a table when I was using Ajax  to fetch a partial view containing the table's contents. I had been planning to use this technique to handle paging and sorting of the table's data and for an auto-refresh of the data periodically.

This worked fine on other browsers, but with IE 8 this always threw an unusually crytpic and unformative Javascript error (an "unknown exception") and the update would not complete.

I did finally get to the bottom of the problem...