Accessing email settings from web.config

Rather than using appSettings, a section from webconfig is a better use for email settings which gives you typed properties in .Net code.

Link: http://dotnetslackers.com/Community/blogs/kaushalparik/archive/2008/09/06/accessing-web-config-file-smtp-mail-settings-programmatically.aspx

What did Apple sold for 2 years comparison

A good graphical comparison of Apple sales between 2008 and 2009

http://www.newmaconline.com/apples-best-selling-products_2010-04-12/

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outputting all attributes except one in xsl

In order to avoid outputting one attribute among all the attributes of a tag, following xpath can be used

<xsl:copy-of select="@*[name() != 'AttributeX']">

Javascript menu goes behind Flash video

If you are using Javascript which goes on top of a video and it doesn't show properly since it goes behind it. Fortunately there is a very easy fix for this. You have to add two things to the object tag of your video and it should take care of it.

please visit adobe's site here

Deleting Rows in DataTable - .Net

A colleague asked me about deleting rows from DataTable. He was having an issue when removing the rows of the datatable because he was using method DataTable.Rows.Remove(index).

When you are looping through any collection using for each loop, you cannot modify the collection. In order to Delete the rows, the best way is to use the Delete method of the particular row(s) and once you are done with the loop, method accept changes of DataTable will remove the rows from DataTable. Code example is

' Loop though the table

For Each dr As DataRow In ds.Tables(0).Rows

If (dr("Name") = "ABC" Then

dr.Delete()

End If

Next

ds.Tables(0).AcceptChanges() ' this remains outside of the loop

How to avoid SQL cursors

Good article on sqlbook.com about how to avoid cursors. In short, there are two ways which the article suggests

1. Using temporary table with auto generated ID column and loop it through a while loop
2. Use SQL functions when possible to do calculation on a column

Read it here

I saw different articles on sites about the performance comparison between cursors and using while loop. Some places it made sense to use a cursor but the drawback is that it locks the table where while loops using temporary tables won't.

Due to its syntax and de-allocation procedure, I have never really tried using cursors which, not using them seems like a good practice according to some SQL experts. Read today on a site that one interviewer would ask people the syntax of using cursors and if they knew then he would consider it as negative since he wouldn't want people on his team to use them and knowing the syntax means that you use them :)

Querying SharePoint List Items using jQuery

Very good article by Jan Tielen about using jQuery in Sharepoint. He uses a web content editor webpart in conjunction with jQuery to load Tasks from Task list. This example queries list webservices from client side and loads task in a unordered list. Easy to use code, sort of plug-in play!