CommunityServer sucks?

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I think I'm about to give up.

I've spend the last 2 weeks of my life fighting with CommunityServer, and as far as I can determine, this is a product that is NOT designed for other developers.

Lack of documentation.  Lack of up-to-date examples or explanation of the layout of the SDK means that a typical developer spends weeks and weeks in the dark about where things are.

Forums are completely useless - with questions and answers relating to older versions that doesn't apply.

If you are after a good Blog/Forum/CMS software, look elsewhere.

AJAX, Tooltip, World of Warcraft (WoW)

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Spend a whole day trying to work around a simple issue.
I give myself one html page.  No server side code.
Write a javascript/css based approach to pull data from either Thottbot or Allakhazam and return the data, then render it as a popup.

The AJAX isn't hard, nor is the pop-up page, the problem lies in the "no server side code".

Both IE and FireFox don't like to make XMLHttpRequest cross-domain.  That is, it doesn't like being hosted on a http://localhost/test.html or even file host file:///test.html, making a request to thottbot.com.
On IE, you get a security question pop'up everytime you try to make such a call.  If the user clicks "OK", he'd be let through.
On FireFox, it's automatically denied unless you try to obtain UniversalBrowserRead privilege.  Extremely difficult and potentially a security loophole.

The solution seems bleak.

Use AJAX to query the origin server - without making a cross-domain call.  But use the server to make the 'translation' - possibly caching as well.

Be serious with the Lord

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I got quite a bit out of brother Ron's memorial service. Although there was a strong sense of loss, I am extremely glad he has finished his course and ran his race. Now he can finally rest in the Lord and pray for the Lord's coming and our overcoming.
  • be a proper person
  • have a living that can match our desire to be useful
  • turn to my spirit quickly
  • don't missing the gatherings

Generics, Casting and Anonymous Delegates and the Where clause

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I have a situation where the code looks like:

( ( TextBox ) ( _someParentControl.FindControl( "_childControlId" ) ) ).Text = "SomeText";
( ( TextBox ) ( _someParentControl.FindControl( "_childControlId" ) ) ).Enabled = someBool;

repeat about 10 times with different child control type, parent controls, child Ids, and properties.
obviously, there's a similarity and refactoring was in order.

private static void ExecuteOnControl<T>( WebControl parent, string id, Action<T> action) where T : WebControl
{
    T control = parent.FindControl( id ) as T;
    if (control != null && action != null)
    {
        action( control );
    }
}

The where clause is important because you can't cast "As" within the function without having some limits on the generc T.

Which allowed me to shrink the example down to:
ExecuteOnControl<TextBox>(_parentControl, "_childControlId", delegate(TextBox tb) { tb.Text = "someText"; });

This can be further simplified since the delegate can be declared once and used later.
Action<TextBox> tbDel = delegate(TextBox tb) { tb.Text = "someText"; };
ExecuteOnControl<TextBox>(_parentControl, "_childControlId1", tbDel);
ExecuteOnControl<TextBox>(_parentControl, "_childControlId2", tbDel);

One can argue here that the new code isn't really that much more readable though, but it was good hacking