Friday, October 28, 2011

Session state?

Every time I have used the Session["key"] in ASP.Net it has created a hell for the user and me! I have to promise my self to never use it again... I ought my self to build a class that makes cookies equivalent to sessions storage in ASP.net, so that I can search and replace them in legacy code.

The point with session[] is to save the client's state between calls (for one session dho!) and why do that on the server when there is a way to save the state in the client... And the talk about that some client can choose to not use cookies... Yeh right, try to use Internet without cookies!


Wednesday, October 26, 2011

A simple ticket system, for free.

Here is a solution for a simple ticket system. Sometimes the customers don’t have any ticket system available for the current project. To pass around mail with status of each task is cumbersome and hard to track and will eventually end up with undone tasks. The alternative to use an online system that cost money can sometimes be a political issue and it has to be approved by the project. And to make things harder, the nature of a ticket system, is that it is shared by many peoples and many peoples means many opinions.

This is a pragmatic approach, DropBox! Use it and share it in the project, eventually it will be adopted.




  • Here is one of the most important steps. For each project there is a RSS stream that you can subscribe to; add the RSS feed to Outlook (or your preferred RSS reader that you use). If you don't have events shown in a way that you are used to, you will forget to check if the document has been updated.
  • When somebody updates the excel spreadsheet you will get a notification in the Outlook client, and you can instantly see the changes in your synchronized DropBox folder.
The down side is that DropBox is considered as "unsafe" but I can assure you it is not more unsafe than passing the excel file through mail on the Internet. Another downside is that if you have a synchronization conflict, you probably have type in your changes again.