I was working on a web app which supported 20+ languages across the world. One report which we developed was using ChartDirector (http://www.advsofteng.com/gallery.html) in verdana font. After development we found that ChartDirector is not displaying chinese/japanese/korean characters. it was displaying  junk boxes instead. On Investigation, it was found that the issue was with  Verdana as Verdana does not support Unicode characters for japanese, chinese , korean etc. I searched in the net for a solution and found in the ChartDirector forum that the tech support of ChartDirector is advising people to use a font called "MingLiU" (which I don't think is free). I didn't like the idea of installing seperate fonts for each locale that we support. Just then I thought why don't we use a common unicode font which is available with Windows. This thought took me to "Arial Unicode MS" which is the best bet for displaying all unicode characters and it was free with Windows XP/ Windows 2003. I replaced verdana with "Arial Unicode MS" in the code and it worked perfectly!!!

sample code:     bc.xAxis().setLabelStyle("Arial Unicode MS", 9);

First lets look in to the Architecture of this web application which I was working on:

The user will be redirected to a static HTML landing pagefrom where the user selects products using radio buttons and hits an htmlbutton which is coded as follows: 

<input name="image" type="image" src="../Images/buynow.jpg" class="buynowbutton_and"  id="BuyNow_0" onclick="return Redirect(this);"/>

As you can see, when the button is clicked, the javascriptmethod Redirect() is being called.

In this method, a url is constructed using the selected productids and redirected to the shopping cart page.

  document.forms[0].action= url;

 document.forms[0].submit();

Now the missing piece is that we should return a “false”after the redirection statement. This will prevent the page from posting  back again(which we don’t want to happen) aswe already redirected the page.

 Otherwise the browsermight get posted back ‘again’(This is quite random and depends on browser. Wehad issues with IE 7 ) and 2 ‘post backs’ will happen on the same page and itwill cause Page_Load to execute twice  ina multithreaded manner sharing the same session variables. This is a dangeroussituation. It leads to unexpected behavior of the ASP.NET application and itaffects the output.

In my case there was an if else loop in the Redirect()method which was causing the issue.

If(condition){

Do something;

//Missed the return false here.

}else

{return false;}

As you saw above the return false was not in if block, itsonly in else block. This code used to work initially and suddenly started tocreate issues.  

Are you searching for the missing solution file in your solution explorer of Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008??

If yes, go to Tools - > Options- > Projects and Solutions-> General . On the Right side, check Always show solution.

Click OK. And you are done. Now You can see your Solution file in the Solution explorer.. Happy Coding!!! 

Recently I had an issue with .NET 2.0 XML validation. Lets see whats the difference in .NET 2.0 from .NET 1.1 

Below given is the.NET 1.1 code for validating an XML File using an XSD File.

.NET 1.1 Code

//.NET1.1 code
///
/// Methode to validate XML File///
///

This method expects input XML as string
///
Path to schema file
/// true if xml is validated else false
private bool ValidateXmlUsingXsd(string XmlData,String SchemaPath)
{
XmlValidatingReader v = new XmlValidatingReader(XmlData, XmlNodeType.Document, null);
v.ValidationType = ValidationType.Schema;
v.ValidationEventHandler +=
new ValidationEventHandler(MyValidationEventHandler); 
 

while (v.Read())
{
// Can add code here to process the content.
}
v.Close();

return isValid;

}

///

public static void MyValidationEventHandler(object sender,
ValidationEventArgs args)
{
//these two variables should be initialized as class level variables
isValid = false;
errorMessage = “Validation event\n” + args.Message;///
/// Method to get XML in a string from an XML file
///
///

}

///
private string GetStringFromXML(string fileName)
{
StreamReader rd = new StreamReader(fileName);
string str = rd.ReadToEnd();
rd.Close();
return str;
}

Calling the method :
bool valid = ValidateXmlUsingXsd(str, txtXSD.Text);