web design, asp.net and SEO blog

Has it been delayed?

Google aquired mobile software company Adroid in 2005 and started on developing a new advance mobile software. Google heavily announced the launch of this platform by end of  second quarter 2008.

Many of us are eagerly waiting for the launch since long, and it seems like the wait is going to be continued. Some news resources have confirmed that it is going to be delayed by a full quarter!

Application is compiled properly and runs on local server but it throws the following error when uploaded to a web server:

vjslib.dll Solution

It is most probably the compatibility issue. The server can not execute the x32 reference on x64 environment, so for this J# application (vjslib.dll) Install J# redistributable on your server and it should work fine.

Did you also upload the VJSLIB.DLL on to the bin folder of your application? If not, please do so and apply reference to it in web.config file.

Asp.net does not recognize LinkButton as <A> tag.

set the cssclass property for the linkbutton (i.e: cssclass="linkbutton5") then in your css just add the following:

.linkbutton { text-decoration:none;}

.linkbutton:hover {text-decoration:underline;}

That's it!

80% of your business come from 20% of your customers - Every marketing manager knows this fact. This helps allot as marketing expense does not reincure. However, the accounts administration and collection costs remain the same for most companies.

If you spend good amount of money on account administation and collections, this is the time you look at employing an automated web based "autmated invoicing and colleciton system" and you can surely save a good amount of money each year!

Benefits of web based invoicing system

Affordable

Having "my account" tab on website and allow clients to check their billing history in real time is not only for big companies, there are many pre-designed modules available out there that can just do the job.

KM Websol's own advanced auto invoicing, payment and collection module package is available under only $1500 (one-off setup cost, no monthly charges). This comes with free setup and integration to your existing website.

Minimise administration time

Enter the service invoice details once only and specify recurring interval, your web based sytem will automatically generate a new invoice on a specified interval and send to your client by email. This will save time generating and sending the invoice each month.

Creative and professional

The system can send the invoice in a profesisonal looking PDF format just like those big companies.

Direct debit option - never forget to process

If your client agrees, you can set the direct debit for the client's account and system will automatically process the payment on specified day.

Collection is easy for non-subsription items!

Let's say the invoice is not for a subsription and there is no direct debit setup, no problem, the system will send the outstanding reminder to client and will keep sending it on a specified interval.

Manual reinder emails can sometimes offend some clients who have been with you for long period of time, however, when automated email is sent most people take that for granted as they understand that system sends it automatically to all customers, nothing personal.

Once only set-up cost

If you have a website, you are already paying hosting costs so there are no extra ongoing costs for employing such system. Just get your web designers to upload the system on your website.

Could you re-send the invoice please?

Now your clients do not ring you to get a copy of their invoice, they can use "my account" tab on your website to login to the system and check their billing history and pring-off any of the invoice if required.

Easy dispute resolution

With client being able to view their billing history online, they can find most of their billing related answers there and reduces the amount of phone calls with those questions and gets disputes resolved before they arise.

Know your accounts better at no extra costs

Most good auto invoicing systems like KM Websol Web based invoicing system come with cool features such as graphical representations, reports and reminder tools that does not only help you save time but also provides you with vital informations. Your bookkeeper no longer need to send time on generating monthly outstanding reports, received reports etc. and can focus on more important things.

With these you can easily know the status of cash flow and receivables.

Interested?

Contact us today to know more about KM Websol's unique Automated billing system.

Search engines count every outgoing link as your vote to that site. Sometimes we like some sites and add their link to our sites to let our website visitors know about the cool products / service or free stuff available on the XYZ site.

However, people are allowed to put their website links on some blogs and forums, in this scenario, anyone can use your blog to get a link to their site. In other words they can make your site submit a vote to their site. In some cases it could be the site that is penalized by search engines. You surely don’t want to submit your vote towards that site!

The best approach to overcome this situation is to have “no follow” attribute in the link property so that search engines will not count these as outgoing links.

How to add the “no follow” attribute to link property?

Here is how your link property looks like

<a href=”http://www.not-good-website.com”> Website Designers </a>

Link with “no follow” attribute

<a href=”http://www.not-good-website.com” rel=”no follow”> Website Designers </a>

My inner salesman requires me to advise you to get a content management system enabled website from KM Websol. With our CMS you can add link by just highlighting the texts you want to apply link to and then click on the chain icon and enter destination URL.

For your existing static website (static website means the sites without CMS), you will need to open the site in HTML mode. Your texts will look like this:

site body area start

paragraph start

These are some demo texts. click here to read more.

Paragraph ended

site body area ended

Apply web link to word "click here"

These are some demo texts. <A href=/0about.aspx>Click here</A> to read more.

In the given example, we provided the link to the page in root directory of your website. The root directory means the first directory in your HTTP folder. Let's say if the webpage was located inside a folder called "About", you would have applied A HREF link by adding the folder in front of / sign. It would have looked like "About/0about.aspx".

This is a simple tutorial I came across on You Tube. I have often got clients requesting information on how to customise their product image size etc. This is the best video to address that and it also shows the effect of customisation on resolution etc.

Silverlight vs. Flash

As Microsoft describes Silverlight is a cross-devise plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. In other words, it is something and only format to date that may be a threat for Macromedia Flash.

As a .net developer I am all excited about Silverlight. I am also a big fan of Macromedia Flash and as Silverlight is in first stage of its life cycle it is difficult to comment if it will be better then Flash. however, we can not deny the possibility.

As you may know when Flash was first released there were many a thing that did not seem right, file sizes were bigger, load time, animation quality but over the time we have seen it getting better.

When we say there is a possibility that Silverlight may eventually be better than flash, following factors may play a big role in making it a reality.

Animation – Flash is frame based without notion of animation while Silverlight is better in this regards as it supports the WPF animation model so it lets you define the start and end motion conditions.

Shapes - Flash shapes are stored using binary shape records which may make it a bit too technical for beginner users to write shape definitions. Silverlight’s XAML is text based and can be output using a simple XML object.

Text - Flash stores font’s glyphs using the same shape definitions that are used for any other shapes. Silverlight WPF/E lets you embed true type font information directly into your projects.

Scripting - A .net developer can reuse C# classes for Silverlight while flash requires writing Action script. This means that a .net developer can reduce a lot of work load by using Silverlight.

Tools – As with scripting, Silverlight content can be created with the same tools that you use as a .net developer. Visual Studio.NET is by far the most powerful and most popular IDE.

This does not mean that Flash is not great, it certainly is. It will surely keep getting better. However, for a .net developer, Silverlight may turn out as an extra bonus from Microsoft!

This is very commonly known setup yet very important so I think it is worth sharing. One of our developer partners struggled with this problem for 2 days! Finally he did the right thing - contacted someone extremely intelligent like myself. :)

Does the C# Convert.ToDateTIme function read date as "dd/mm/yyyy" or "mm/dd/yyyy"?

When the application on the local machine is uploaded to remote shared server, it started giving date/time error. It was working perfectly on local machine reading "dd/mm/yyyy", but on remote machine, it seems to read dates as "mm/dd/yyyy". The culture setting was checked  and there is same culture setting "en-GB" on both.

Here is the culture-proof way of reading date strings from a SQL Server 2000 database? 

Answer:

The format of the DataTime will depend on the current culture of your application. In order to have a specific format throught your application you can set the <globalization> tag in the web.config file under <system.web> section. In such case you need not write code to convert the datatime to proper format. By default all the dates will be set to the format specified.

<system.web>
 <globalization culture="en-GB" uiCulture="en-GB" requestEncoding="utf-8" responseEncoding="utf-8" />
</system.web>

Hi ,

In asp.net 2.0

"<input id="radAllFields"  checked="checked" runat="server" />"

I am getting the following error message Cannot create an object of type 'System.Boolean' from its string representation 'checked' for the 'Checked' property. Can anyone help me to solve this?

Solutation:

Radiobutton checked property accepts only Boolean values

It may be Checked=True or Checked=False

I hope this will help you

Hi Websol Team,

I am not sure if you guys answer to photoshop questions, I will give it a shot.

A strange problem occured in my Photoshop CS,  it now allows me to type in Caps only (Yes i have checked, CAPS lock is not on).

Solution

Check  your Photoshop character pallet to see if the Caps style is ticked. Untick that and it should allow you to type lower caps.See below:

The character pallet is accesible from the Top menu Windows / Characters.

1. Speed

Like all .NET applications, ASP.net has an in-built compilation available.  This makes the .net applications much faster than PHP.

You would require installing accelerator on PHP to achieve the same effect. This will be rarely the case at most Web hosting companies. Also, Object Orientation (OO) is much faster in ASP.NET than it is in PHP.

 
2. More Language Support

This makes ASP.net a real star. ASP.NET is written using "real" Object Oriented programming languages of your choice, like C++, VB.NET or C#. PHP is just a simple scripting language. Needless to say that real object oriented programming gives you more control, and more reusability.

ASP.net is not as easy as PHP and might be a difficult option for a starter or for someone who has not been programming for a long time. PHP can be picked up easily. However, the sky is the limit with ASP.net multi-language support. You can write (or will be able to in the very near future) ASP.NET applications in C++, C#, Visual Basic.NET, Jscript.NET, Python, (J#), COBOL, Eiffel and Delphi.  In the near future you can probably find yourself writing your ASP.net application in PHP as well!

3. Your Choice of Development Environments

This is an area where ASP.NET shines!
Microsoft has released a free development environment for ASP.NET called Web Matrix, which blows all other free development environments for PHP out of the water. It has a built-in Web server, database administration interface FTP integration, and more. Not only that, Microsoft has also released MSDE -- a free development edition of MS SQL server. It has precisely all the features of the full MS SQL server 2000, and any application you write for MSDE will run fine on MS SQL Server.
If you can afford Visual Studio .NET, it, too, offers some amazing qualities. It allows you to:

• automatically create reports and diagrams from your databases, 
• debug the code line by line, while at the same time seeing what happens in the application,
• assign a temporary value to a variable in the middle of execution, in order to test out different scenario, 
• hover the cursor over variables in your code while debugging, to see what value they have "right now", ...and much more.

4. It's Part of .NET

ASP.NET is a part of .NET, and that benefit is too large to simply ignore. If you know how to write ASP.NET applications, you know how to write ordinary applications too. Even windows apps, if you read up a little on the Windows Forms classes (as opposed to the Web Forms). PHP has PHP-GTK, but it's currently very immature compared to .NET.

5. It's Cheaper to Develop for

Didn't expect that one did ya? It even surprised me! Due to the fact that ASP.NET is such a powerful application, and it's offered for free (including the code editor, Web server, and FTP client), At KM Web Design Melbourne I actually ended up paying less ($0) than I did for my PHP Development Environment composed of UltraEdit ($35), Bullet Proof FTP ($30) and mySQLfront ($0). With that said, hosting ASP.NET is still more expensive than PHP.

6. It's Cross-Platform

.NET is currently pretty much tied to the Windows platform. This is a bad thing, but I'm quite confident that .NET will become very cross-platform in a few years. Why? A while back, Microsoft released Rotor, a Shared Source implementation of the CLR (CLR = The thing that runs code) and most of the non-windows specific class libraries for Windows and BSD Unix, with source code for both. When I first heard this, I didn't believe it -- that REALLY didn't sound like something Microsoft would do. And when I realized that it was in fact true, I expected Rotor to be the smallest and most feeble implementation Microsoft could possibly get away with.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Rotor hasn't been built on the cheap -- it's practically identical to its commercial counterpart in most important respects. .NET also has a very powerful Platform Abstraction Layer, making ports to other operating systems pretty easy to achieve. Not only that, but the CLI and C# are now standardized by ECMA. And the Mono project, with Ximian behind it, is working on an Open Source implementation of the .NET framework right now. All these factors lead me to believe that the chances for .NET to become cross-platform are very high.

Article references:

Site Point - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/v-php-top-6-reasons-use-net/2

Check for DBNull in VB.NET

for String:

If Convert.ToString(rowProduct.DiamondType) <> String.Empty Then

array = Split(rowProduct.DiamondType, ",")

End If

for Number:

Firstly, the page rank algorythm is Google's secret recepe and I can tell you only what google has made public about the system.

We all know that Google is the best when it comes to finding anything from a pizza shop arond the corner to a web design company located in your town. Google's effective listing system is mostly the result of its unique "page rank" algorythm.

As the name suggests "page rank" system ranks your web pages. When someone searches using a keyword google takes page rank in to considertation to decide the relevency of your web page to that keyword and also determines the listing order based on that.

Main aspect of the page rank algorythm

As google has advised the main aspect of the page rank algorythm is the popularity of your web page decided based on the incoming links to the page. When site "A" links to a web page on site "B" it is considered as a vote towards site B. Also, it takes in to consideration the popularity / page rank of the site assignign the vote, in this case being site A. Further it determines the relevency of the link anchor tag keyword to the content on site "B". When site B has so many links comming from reputed sources (reputed source menas the site that votes has a higher page rank), it is likely that site B will have a higher page rank as a result.

More comming soon!

Hi KM Web Design Melbourne,We have the flash movie with menu on our site. I tried to edit the links today and surprisingly it does not have the GET URL link in the action script. I also could not find any XML link to modify target page link.

Here is the button code, any idea how i can add GET URL line to this code?

The flash menu code:

Hi,

You can modify the on (release) code to have GET URL element there and this way you can link the target page. Modify it as follows:

This should do!

Do not forget to replace get url link with your target page url!

On April 7, 2008 Google launched the Google App Engine which allows developers to run their applications on Google infrastructure.

This does not only give your application an easy start  but it also grants you an access to all of the tools that google uses to build its own applications!

Like it? check this out at Google App Engine Blog

We at KM Websol Web Design Melbourne are keen to try this out!