Component Workshop Ltd

Once upon a time ago you would have installed your Web Traffic Analytics software on your server which would process your logs, however Google have completely changed the game and made it so easy to record your stats by pasting a simply bit of JavaScript in to each page.

The down side of this is that Downloads and Other Server Side actions can not be captured, and if Conversion Tracking is your game (and why wouldn't it be) you really need this metric.

If like me you think that NetBeans is a superb IDE, but quiet often for some unknown reason end up firing up TextMate to fix a bug or add a new feature, only to realise you lose all of the lovely debugging tools that come with the IDE. Well we can take a step in the right direction by allowing you to break out of your controller actions and into a irb console..

Many enterprises have an Active Directory infrastructure setup. Wouldn’t it be nice if your jruby app could exploit this already in place infrastructure to authenticate your users. ruby-net-ldap has been around for a while and allows users to do exactly this with MRi ruby and now thanks to Ola bini it is now possible with jruby.

Sometimes it makes sense to use XML when passing data in to your database. For example, you might need to pass an arbitrarily sized list of parameters in to your function. Oracle has great XML support, and this brief article will show you how to include XML processing in your queries.

If you're trying to implement a scrolling marquee in your WPF application, or just programatically moving text and other elements around a canvas, you might find this example useful.

This handy little command line tool (C# source included) will hunt through the folders of your solution looking for AssemblyInfo.cs files. If it finds any, it'll prompt you for a new version number and will then update all values of AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion with the new value. This makes it very easily to ensure that your version numbers are always meaningful.

This code demonstrates how you can use the Bing XML api to generate Bing search results for your Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) application

This is a very quick beginners tip for those learning .NET. In it, I show you how you can convert between strings, which might be loaded from configuration files or user input, and Enums, that you use to define constants in your application.

This quick C# code snippet shows you how you can configure log4net for your application without the need for XML config files. This is useful if you need to enable/disable logging from within the user interface, for example.

Here's a very quick code sample that you can use to add Bing API search capabilities to your .NET application. You will need to sign-up and get an API key for this to work, but it's free and you can use an existing Live ID if you have one (for example, for MSDN).