I’ve been dabbling in HTML game development with Phaser IO and I have found some things really difficult to figure out because they just aren’t very intuitive. So in this blog post I will write up short lessons learned as I come across things that I feel really should not have taken me so long to figure out.
Author: Bob Crowley
3 Ways to Create a MS Word Table in Office.js Add-In
Here are some handy code snippets for inserting a table into a Word document through a Task Pane Add-In. If you don’t know what that is, you can get up and running with this hello world example.
I demonstrate inserting at the selection, inserting at a named binding and inserting HTML. There is another way, you can insert raw Office Open XML (OOXML), and while that provides the most power and flexibility, it is also by far the most complex way to do it. Continue reading
Execute a Java process in a .Net Azure WebJob
I recently had the need to execute a .jar file from within an Azure WebJob built with C#. I found a few resources that showed how to upload a .zip file, for instance, and have that run a .bat file as a job. Or, how to create a Java web app. But my webjob needed to do more than just run a .jar, and I didn’t have the time to get up to speed on Java and the Azure Storage SDK for Java. As the Google let me down, here I demonstrate the solution. Continue reading
OUTPUT parameters are the most efficient way to retrieve a single row from a Stored Procedure
T-SQL stored procedures that return a single a value (scalar) or a single row can benefit from the use of OUTPUT parameters. This is not appropriate for multiple row result sets, but if you just need one value, or the results of a single row, you can do it most efficiently with OUTPUT parameters as opposed to SELECTing into a DataReader or DataSet. Continue reading
A Basic Example of CRUD with DataGridView in VB.Net
Intended for new developers, or at least new to ADO.Net, this post will demonstrate how to Create, Read, Update and Insert data into a MS SQL Server database. We will use a VB.Net winforms project, DataGridView and SqlDataAdapters. You can pull down the complete project from GitHub here.
UPDATE: I have also published a similar example application done with Code First EntityFramework 6.
The finished Form looks like this:
Continue reading
66% chance of new car
Do you remember, or have you at least heard of the old game show “Let’s Make a Deal”? This was the show where a contestant had to opportunity to win a car. All they had to do was guess which door the new car was behind. Two of the doors had a farm animal but there was a trick to it. After choosing a door, the contestant was shown one of the farm animals and then had to decide to stick with their first choice or switch their guess to the door they didn’t choose. What do you think the chances are of winning when keeping the first choice versus switching guesses?
You can find out here. This little javascript simulator uses one or two fancy new javascript tricks so you need a modern browser. If it isn’t working for you then switch to Chrome or Firefox.
enjoy.
Restore SQL Server backup to localdb in Visual Studio
The Visual Studio integrated tools for SQL Server are getting better all the time. While working solely in VS might not always be optimal, it is very convenient to not have to switch over to SQL Server Management Studio to do simple queries. Although the VS SQL tools may not be full-featured, you might just be able to get by with them and not need to install SSMS at all.
One of the less intuitive things to do is to restore a backup file that was created on another server. In this post I will show you how to easily do this in the absence of a right-click restore shortcut. For this you must run the SQL for RESTORE.
Grouping DataRows with Linq from DataSet in VB.Net
Today I thought I’d break out of the mold a bit and give the VB.Netters a little love.
I recently came across some code that was generating server-side HTML from rows of a DataTable. The data was similar to this one, rows would contain redundant header values (Category) and unique content values (Name, Value):
Interactive Search Builder for Javascript now on NuGet
Interactive Search Builder for javascript has been released in NuGet. ISBjs is a configurable javascript “widget” that empowers your users to build their own search queries, significantly reducing the complexity for you, the developer from providing many search options.Read more about how it works, how to make it pretty, etc. on the github page HERE.
Printable Reports Using only CSS and HTML
As a .Net developer, I have naturally gravitated toward Asp.Net for building web applications. However, the past few years I have eschewed web forms for the modern ajax style of development, especially the SPA. One reason I do still create .aspx pages is to build reports with tools like Telerik reporting or Microsoft .rdlc. I couldn’t find a good way to make reports without a server-side technology and The Google lead me down many sub-optimal paths. Finally, I have figured it out, and it was easy. I am embarrassed to announce that I didn’t know this before, but maybe some of you are as dumb as I am and this blog post could help.
contrived example 