Smart Cutter iPad/iPhone app

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 07:20:45 GMT

Yesterday I released Smart Cutter, my first iPhone/iPad app in the App Store. The app is based on Algorithm 105 article I posted a few years ago which talks how to get the maximum number of small sheets cut from a large sheet with minimum scrape.

I took this algorithm and turned it into a small little tool for the iPad/iPhone device.

Day of the week as string in Objective C

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 09:22:36 GMT

I'm currently working on a small iPad project and I needed to display the day of the week (e.g. Friday, Saturday...etc.) on a UILabel, so I used the following code snippet to obtain the day of the week integer from the NSCalendar, and thought I'd share it with every one else here:

Flink Learning web site

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:04:37 GMT

For most of the last year, I've been working on the back end web development of Flink Learning web site, which sells over 4,000 educator-created games, e-Books and fun tutorials that engage kids in Grades K-5 and enhance learning. Flink's software also enables teachers and educators to author their own e-activities and offer them to their students.

I have been working on the setup of the backend admin components of the site in addition to the

How to transfer freelance money to your international bank account?

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:09:40 GMT

One of the biggest problems that face overseas freelancers is finding a way to withdraw the money they get paid by their clients to their international bank accounts in their countries. While most western clients prefer paying with Paypal, unfortunately, the later does not provide a way to transfer money internationally for most countries.

Software Engineer out of the job? Try freelancing!

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:08:07 GMT

As a software engineer who has been freelancing for the past 3 years, I came to rely fully on freelance work to make my monthly income, and I'm making a good chunk of money every month from the comfort of my home.

What is an 'assembly' with regards to ASP.Net?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:07:38 GMT

In ASP.NET, assemblies contain metadata called assembly manifest which includes info about the assembly version, author, security requirements needed to run the assembly. All this info can be accessed in ASP.NET from the System.Reflection namespace. Other than that, assemblies in ASP.NET are collections of one or more files that can be an exe or a dll, also there are private and shared assemblies in ASP.NET. Assemblies usually get placed in the bin directory, however shared assemblies go into the GAC folder

Looking for a job in ASP.NET - 2009 job search

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:37:44 GMT

After almost 3 years of doing freelancing work due to personal reasons, I'm now back looking for full time employment again, and in the process of doing the job search work, being interviewed...etc, I decided to publish some of the interview questions I have been asked as a benifet to others, and also to see if someone can give me better answers than I did during the interview :-)

So I have started an "Interview Questions" category on my blog, in which I will be putting all questions I get asked

Real Estate Site in ASP.NET

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 07:00:21 GMT

Over the past month, I've been working on a real estate site for one of my clients. The site is made in Arabic, and was written in C# ASP.NET from grounds up. It allows adding, removing and modifying lands for sale, and acts like an ASP.NET template kit for any similar content management system with an Admin area. The site is now live and can be seen by following this link: http://www.hishamkhraisat.com/

Convert CSS templates from LTR to RTL for developing multi-language sites with Right To Left web design

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 09:14:05 GMT

I was working on an Arabic language site for one of my clients, and needed to adapt one of the free CSS designs out there on the web, however my problem was that the CSS design was written for Latin based languages, or more accurately for Left-To-Right languages, and I needed a quick way to convert it to work for the Arabic language, which is a Right-To-Left language. So while I was just about to put on my heavy armored CSS gear, I googled around a little and found this very cool tool published by

Regular Expression to Screen-Scrape VIEWSTATE value from an ASP.NET Login page

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:39:40 GMT

I was working on a screen scrapping project, and was looking for away to automate the login form for an ASP.NET web page. Googling around, I found a very helpful article written by Scott Allen that lists the steps necessary to automate login using HttpWebRequest.

Finding strings of certain length in a bigger string using Regular Expressions

Fri, 30 May 2008 10:41:45 GMT

The other day I was working on a YoutTube auto uploader software for one of my clients, and I needed to prevent passing along single character tags to the uploader engine. If you are familiar with the rules of the tag field when uploading videos to YouTube, you know that tags must be 2 or more characters long.

Customer Management Web Application in ASP.NET

Mon, 05 May 2008 05:08:42 GMT

This is a proect I worked on recently, it is a simple customer email followup system done in ASP.NET.

You can add/delete/update customers. The app allows you to send emails to each customer, and records the last contact date.

You can also add/delete/update predefined/defaul email text, then use them to quickly compose email letters.

You can see a demo for the app here:

Customer Management Web App

How to Remove Selected Items from a ListBox, ComboBox ...etc

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:04:17 GMT

I was writing a Windows Application and I had a very simple need: Remove all Selected items from a ListBox control. If you have tried to simple use code like the one below:

Alogrithm #105 in C# - Optimizing Paper Scrape When Printing Pages on a Large Sheet

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:26:21 GMT

This is a project I worked on last year. It is an algorithm to to show the best way to cut small pieces of paper out of a larger piece. I wrote the algorithm in C# then used System.Drawing.Imaging to to demo its output on an ASP.NET page.

The project is also available as an iPad/iPhone app, named Smart Cutter.

SharedSection & Max Number of Open Windows on XP & Vista

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 08:24:00 GMT

If you are a RAM hungry user like me, leave many windows, apps and virtual machines open on your Vista System, you have probably ran into a situation where you could not open any more windows… even though your system has plenty of RAM… (2 GB in my case J ) you would still get to a point where you are not even able to get the context menu when you

Hide automatically generated column fields in GridView

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 07:04:19 GMT

When you bind a GridView to an ObjectSource in ASP.NET, sometimes, you don't want to display all of the columns returned from the ObjectSource DataTable, but if you use a GridView and let it autmatically generate the columns, it becomes not a striaght forward deal to hide the individual selected columns. Here is a way to do that:

Simply catch the RowDataBound event on the GridView and if you know the index of the column to hide, just use it as follows:

Primary And Secondary Sorting for a DataTable in a DataSet

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 05:30:20 GMT

I recently stumbled across the following C# code that allows sorting and filtering rows in a DataTable using DataTable.Select method:

http://authors.aspalliance.com/olson/methods/FilterSortData.aspx

However, what I needed was to sort on a primary column, then if DataRows had the same value for the primary column, perform a secondary sort based on another secondary column.

Free FTP client in Windows XP!

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 18:56:00 GMT

Not many people know that you can use your simple Windows Explorer with as an FTP client to upload and download files... Well maybe I'm the only one who doesn't know, but it surely made my day today when I found out.

The nice thing about using Windows Explorer as an FTP client is that you get all the drag and drop features that come with it, while uploading and downloading remotely, and no need to buy an FTP client software.

YouTube Like Project in ASP.NET

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 18:23:18 GMT

I recently finished working on a YouTube-like project where you can upload any video file (mpeg, avi...etc.) and automatically convert it into FLV then display a link to the converted video into an online flash movie player.

The project involved using the free open source utility ffmpeg along with some other utilities from around the net. In addition it shows upload progress as the user is uploading the movie file.

From Relative Path to Absolute Path in ASP.NET without using the Tilde ~

Tue, 29 May 2007 07:36:58 GMT

We all know in ASP.NET, to get the absolute path from the relative path, you can prefix your relative path with the Tilde character as follows:

MyHyperLink.NavigateUrl = "~/Catalog/ASP/Products";

My C# Corner