SSIS Pain

hi
This post is basically a rant, a rant about SSIS, whoever designed this UI please take a good look at your career and either retire or consider a career change.

I think the idea behind this service is great; we all need data migration tools; but why make people suffer?
Some examples of why this tool drives me insane; in a data flow, you can createa Derived column, say for some crazy and ridiculous reason (please ntoe sarcasm here) you need to change your something on your source, well then the aforementioned Derived Column thing gies u a nice error(to a level fair enough), but then you deal with the problem you click ok, the dialog closes and then you have to open the same dialog again, why?

Anyone that say that they think SSIS is great is just because they haven't used it.
Rant over ( however i need to keep going with this data migration)

Time picker / PNG Transparency fix

Hi. at some point we all need a click time picker, found this one (in ajaxian)

Also in Ajaxian, I found a PNG fix I used the sample and it works, however I can't make it work on my server, it doesnt even hit the *.htc file.
The instructions say that you should give the path to the htc relative to index.html however I dont seem to be able to get it up and running for my web app, anyway... will try again with a little bit more time later on.

NVelocity Parse

A little thing that drove me completely insane

when using parse (appache ref) the path to the view includes the folder that you are in

say you are in the folder .../views/Blog
editing a view called one.vm
if you want to parse something in the same folder as one.vm you have to use

#parse("Blog/two.vm")
and if you happen to use a / before blog you ll get a nice exception that has a very unclear message

Just to note

NVelocity - creating urls

I always forget these two:

$Url.Link('label', "%{controller='controllerName',action='actionName'}")

and this:

To Create a form


$Form.FormTag("%{id= 'formId', action='save', immediate = 'true'}")
$Form.EndFormTag

I really wished there was a MR RC4 :D

Transparency Fix for PNG on IE

Saw this on ajaxian and i think is really handy and at some (not too far in time i ll need this)
http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/demo/ basically to add some transparency you just add a few files to your sever and a line of css and thats it.
Will tell when the time to use this comes :)

Small but interesting find

Yesterday I was coding and I needed to create a criteria like

....
Repository.FinOne(Restriccions.Eq("Email", email));
...

however I wanted to make sure that there was not prblems with caseing
it turns out IgnoreCase exists and can be used this way :D

Repository.FinOne(Restriccions.Eq("Email", email).IgnoreCase());

I was really happy to find this, thanks NHibernate in Action!

Speed is all

PDF Readers

I m thinking about a serious of "meaty" post for this weeked or at least the one decent one, but meanwhile I though I should post about the incredible diference in speed between Adobe Reader and Foxit. A friend of mine (one of the two suscribers to this blog) told me about foxit like a year ago, i went yeah yeah but then about two weeks ago i actually download it and it is really fast, i love it.

FF2 vs FF3
OMG i m so happy with FF3 I m still testing it in only one of my machines but so far much better performance and now that firebug is behaving, happy days. The Add ons I have are: Firebug with YSlow, Jiffy, Web Developer, and of course Google Toolbar. The best feature is no memory problems :D

Now tempted to install the Beta 2 of IE8....