IE 7 doesn't respect css property outline so you can't remove annoying outline using following css:

* :focus { outline: none; }

But you can remove it using JQuery . Most of sites already have Jquery include so you don't need to add anything except following code.

$("a").each(function() {
  $(this).attr("hideFocus", "true").css("outline", "none");
});

If you're using Mootools or Prototype - you can rewrite this code for these frameworks easily.

And this won't affect your css validation!

How to protect some controller action(s) from being accessed by unauthorized users?

Usually you can check this.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated in each action. But that doesn't look good, does it?

What if we can have an attribute to mark actions accessible only by logged in users?

Here is another iGoogle gadget ( you can also put it on webpage ) called Response Headers

It's quite simple. It shows response status code and headers returned by server. Again, you can put it on iGoogle and access quickly.

Click here to add to your webpage.

Here is a simple Google gadget to calculate MD5 or SHA1 Hash.

Click here to add to your websitte

Click here to add to your iGoogle

For some reason by default you can have "AUTOCLOSE" property of your database set to ON. That's not bad, but if you check your server Event Log you can find a lot of entries like "Starting database 'xxxxxxx' ". And log is not a problem, but for sure this takes a time and slow down your asp.net application response.

You can turn it off in Managment Studio.
or you can run a little sql to update all databases on server:

EXECUTE sp_MSforeachdb

'

IF (''?'' NOT IN (''master'', ''tempdb'', ''msdb'', ''model''))

   EXECUTE (''ALTER DATABASE [?] SET AUTO_CLOSE OFF WITH NO_WAIT'')

'

All databases won't close automatically and response instantly.

Here is one trick to greatly speedup asp.net compiler. First of all, assume you have enough RAM to give about 512Mb for this. RAM is cheap, so you always can visit store and buy it. And your time is priceless. 

Idea is in creating RAM drive and pointing asp.net compiler temp there. To create RAM drive you need to download following free software

http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html#ImDisk

IMDisk - awesome thing. Install it.

Now create ramdrive.cmd somewhere ( for example c:\ramdrive.cmd ) with following content

imdisk -a -s 512Mb -m R: -p "/fs:ntfs /q /y"  

create a shortcut and add it to Startup

Now everytime you start PC you'll see quick console window and you'll got a new drive "R"

Ok. Now you need to change your temp settings

Edit this file: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\web.config  

( I assume that you've Windows installed in C:\Windows . Change path if it's different )

 In this file you need to add attribute to <compilation> tag

After change it should look like this: 

        <compilation tempDirectory="r:/asp.net_temp" > 

That's all. Now you can build your asp.net projects much faster. You can try to point all windows Temp on that RAM drive, but I haven't gone this far yet. 

Looking for rows with some duplicate values in some column(s) is very common. I'm not saying that's something hard.  I was asked about this. Here is the solution.

   1:  SELECT [Name], COUNT([Name]) as NumOccurrences 

   2:  FROM [People]

   3:  GROUP BY [Name]

   4:  HAVING ( COUNT( [Name] ) > 1 )

And the query to get all PKs ( primary keys ) for rows with duplicate [Name]:

   1:  SELECT [uid] 

   2:  FROM [People] 

   3:  WHERE [Name] IN (

   4:  SELECT [Name]

   5:  FROM [People]

   6:  GROUP BY [Name]

   7:  HAVING ( COUNT([Name]) > 1 ))

That's all.

Hello everybody!

I've recently finished a new theme for BlogEngine.NET.

fruity.zip (51,19 kb)

Just unpack it to your themes folder. It works with 1.4.5.0.

That's all for today. 

What's better for your online video?

VP 6 is faster ( works on most pcs ) and requires only flash player 8. 

The BAD side of VP6 - it's hard ( or even impossible ) to find free (opensource) encoding solution for it. You need to ask on2.com guys to give you their framework or for personal use you can buy something like "Flix Standard" for $39. That's really nothing even for poor blogger.

H.264 is slower. Only last fast pcs can run it without delays. For example, I've old Celeron 2.4 and it can't handle h264, but good with vp6. But my Core2duo is good with h.264. Another problem of h264 is loosing of smoothness on low bitrate. Picture is quite good, but action is not... if you encode 1280x720 with 1Mbit/s bitrate you can see the problems with slow zooms... it jumps. Usually you can play with complicated settings, but in the end it does not matters. The good enough bitrate for h.264 if you are using 1280 x 720 is about 2-3 Mbit/s.

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