Week Review.. over 300,000 all time views

This week my blog managed to reach a target that I previously set in my mind, 300,000 all time views. Most popular websites manage to reach that amount in only one day. But I’m happy with the result.

Moving Forward

These last few months, I’ve been trying to add a post, if not daily, at least 4 times a week, and am almost managing it, to help more developers with the solutions to the daily problems I find, and other utilities that help users.

During the next weeks I will be shifting this blog to  personal domain name, www.ciappara.com, to make it more customizable. I’ve been meaning to do this for years, but now it’s time to do it

Blogging Solutions

I have been happy using wordpress for these last 4 and a half years, but now I would like to start using a .Net Blogging solution. This would help make customisations more easily, as I’m a C# guy , and can add anything I want. I’ve been searching for a few solutions, and I found BlogEngine.Net and Graffiti, or else develop continue developing a blogging engine using Project Nine. I will be testing and reviewing them and let you know what I’m choosing.

But more info on my new blog later. Till then continue watching this blog ciappara.wordpress.com! Thanks for all your reading!

Start the Weekend with Great Music Downloads

Start your weekend with some good Music from Ian Carrey, Snoop Dog, Mischa Daniels, and J-Son.. and Download them for your pleasure!

Ian Carey ft. Snoop Dogg & Bobby Anthony – Last Night

Continue reading »

Order BY Not Working in SQL Server Functions | Quickie

Ever created a function and needed to include the Order By clause. It would result in the following error being loaded:

The ORDER BY clause is invalid in views, inline functions, derived tables, subqueries, and common table expressions, unless TOP or FOR XML is also specified.

The problem is that to use, it requires a TOP clause or FOR XML. By if you specify TOP 100, you’ll only get the first 100 rows. You can specify a big number that you might think will never exceed. But what if you do? The best bet is to use TOP 100 PERCENT.

This will get you all the rows and works in Functions.

First month in my New Job

Last month, on the 22nd of February 2011, I started working with deVere-Group as a Web Developer. It’s already been a month and I thought to share my experience with you. It is nice working here at deVere, the people here are great and I like the job, it’s interesting and allows me to gain experience in Finance. I’m working on the Devere Fund Platform which handles the funds of over 60,000 clients around the world.

The only thing that I was worried about when I started was that, since I’m a C# guy, here we use VB.Net for the development of websites and apps. For me it was like “Oopps” but now am getting accustomed to it… and let me say that VB.Net is not that bad – though I still prefer C#.

I’m also in deVere’s football team, but till now, we didn’t have a lot of success, but I’m sure we will!! Last week, we got new shirts for our team and I think this will help us! Continue reading »

Happy St. Patrick’s Day…

I’m thinking that you look like I need another beer! Happy St. Patrick’s day for all the Irish, and non-Irish people. I thought I’d make a few searches to find:

• Drinking Games
• Irish Music for the Drinking Games
• Green Beers for the Drinking Games Continue reading »

Improved Alexa Ranking by 1 million positions in 12 hours | Project Nine

Yesterday early in the morning, at about 2 o’clock I was still up, and spared a few minutes to try out some optimisations on my own site, www.nine.com.mt. In the afternoon I had a great surprise, the optimisations I did improved my Alexa ranking position by much over 1 million positions. I know I’m still far far below but using some simple optimisations, your website can also start ranking higher.

Click here to find out the simple optimisations I did on Project Nine’s website to get this result with your own site…

For Loop with Negative Step | Quickie

Cannot believe that I’m writing some helpful examples using VB.Net, but that is the language that we’re using at work, so have to adapt now. Next find how to make a loop with a negative step (decreasing step):

Imports System

Public Class MainClass
 Shared Sub Main()
 For intCount As Integer = 10 To 1 Step -1
 'Add the item to the list
 System.Console.WriteLine(intCount)
 Next
 End Sub
End Class

Add AutoNumber to GridView showing the RowNumber | Quickie

<asp:TemplateField>
  <ItemTemplate>
    <%# Container.DataItemIndex + 1 %>
  </ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>

Hope this helped

Solution | Unable to write output file ‘…pdb’; unspecified error

During this weekend, I started having a problem when building a solution in Visual Studio. It would load the following error:

Unable to write to output file Solution_Name.pdb

This Visual Studio solution has 8 projects, and a lot of files and folders. I tried several solutions that I found on the net, which worked for others, but none worked for my case including:

• Delete the .pdb file from the solution – Didn’t Work
• Delete the Debug folder – Still Didn’t work
• Delete the whole obj Folder – Nothing Continue reading »

Updated – Earthquake in Japan.. of an 8.9 Magnitude

Update 3: Tsunami Alerts for possible affected countries in the next minutes or hours!!

Video Update 2: Live Coverage from BBC News – 4 million houses lost electricity in and around Tokyo – in 4 hours the Tsunami will hit Hawaii!! Continue reading »