OK so here it is, the latest release of the RS-Downloader, available for download HERE, don’t forget the following needs to be done before using the program:
- You should mark the ‘direct downloads‘ in your rapidshare options on the website.
- You should have installed the .NET framework 2.0 (usually this is already done…)
Some documentation / HOWTO material will follow in the next couple of days. Don’t forget to post feedback here on the blog or to mail me at:
d.dierickx@gmail.com
Have fun!
Also: If you wish to support the program, feel free to post links on all kinds of forums 
One of the most horrific problems in database-access are fields which allow Null-values, I remember all the IF statements it took in COBOL to handle this problem (with a CSV file) and I was afraid I had to go through the same hell as back then. By making use of the ISNULL method we were able to remove the evil at it’s root, the database…
An example :
SELECT username, ISNULL(email,”") FROM tblUser
This query will set the emailadres to an empty string instead of a null value if no value is entered.
Since the abilities to handle Null values with Typed Datasets are rather limited, this was a fine solution..
This is something I already know for a while but it’s a very handy features which the Visual Studio developers have made quite hard to find. When your declaring your business logic / domain classes, this feature will surely be handy. When you want to encapsulate a private/protected field (the good OO way…), you’ll probably make accessors for it. Writing all of these getters & setters is a lot of work if you’ve got around 10 attributes you want to cover.
Here’s the trick, just right click the field you want to encapsulate
And Visual Studio will create the property methods:
Everybody who has coded with Visual Studio before is probably aware of this tip but for new coders, this is a real timesaver!
The other refactoring options are also extremely handy for code optimization. The Extract Method options is also one of the features I use quite frequent…
While finishing our Interactive Course project, we decided we had to do something about the rather oldschool way we parsed our XML files. The code to parse an XML file was divided into two classes, a parser and a schema validator, totalling for some 150 lines of code. Luckily Kurt (who is guiding our internship) let us in on the whole XmlSerialization thingie…
Click for a larger view…
Using the xsd.exe program, which can be easily found in the Visual Studio directory, we made an XSD scheme for our xml file. After the XSD was created by the program, we fed the program the XSD and a serializable class is created for our XML file. After we had imported this class file into our solution, the code to load the course from an XML file looked like this:
XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Course));
FileStream fstrm = new FileInfo(fileName).OpenRead();
return (Course)xs.Deserialize(fstrm);
These 3 lines replace the 150+ lines we coded to parse and validate the XML file, if only we would have known Luckily, now you do! So don’t go using the good old (even deprecated) XmlReader class, serialization is the next best thing!
The new version is almost finished, here are some screencaps…
Above: The main download screen
Above: The downloadlink grabber and checker…
Above: Adding non-rapidshare links
Some new features include:
- Improved usability & stability
- Stopping / removing downloads
- Better link grabbing
- Console Mode (you can schedule downloads now, no user interference required, handy for nightly downloading :-))
- VISTA Compatible
Be sure to post some feedback / request for the new version, normally it’ll be out start of next week! I have to say I’m very pleased with the popularity of the previous versions, over 5000+ people are already using the program!
I spent the morning trying to figure out how we could migrate the ASP.NET membership database (which is a SQLExpress DB) to SQL Server 2005. This great article gave us more than enough info to do this, although we ran into some problems along the way. Nevertheless we got things up and running again…
Good news today, we’ve finished developing a small additional project for our internship at Ordina Belgium. It’s an ASP.NET Ajax powered website that will enable the competence leaders to post online video courses on the net for the consultants, here’s a list of features:
- Completely XML customizable
- Customizable themes
- Animated Text while the video is playing (like subtitles…)
- Nice & simple Ajax GUI!
I have to say I’m pretty exicted about the result, I like it alot 
I have to say we’ve had a bit of trouble updating the playtime of the video with the text, the final solution is a mixture of iframe,ajax,javascript and a good old Session variable. The text also fades out and in when it changes, cool 
For anyone who’s interested, we based our mediaplayer code on this article, we had to recompile the DLL and make some code modifications first to optimize things. There was also an error in the code so that the height of the videoplayer wasn’t set, luckily we managed to fix this to!
Took us just a few Google lookups, but we’ve had some problems with the Panel control in the standard ASP.NET toolbox. The panels were drawn over the other content of our site. The solution: simply remove the height attribute of the panel… Guess solutions don’t have to be that hard all of the time…
