In memory of Steve Jobs

The world is not longer the place I knew. Since my childhood I knew Steve Jobs as a man who was making computers and working with them. I read about him and his NeXT in the first computer magazines I'd ever read. And every year added something about him: new movie from Pixar, film about Jobs and Gates, book about him and his work and hundreds of news every month about Apple and its CEO... He was a fairy magician from my childhood dreams, like forever young fantasy heroes.

But today he became real.

Live long Bill and Linus.

Joomla release roadmap

Joomla release support types:

Standard release
supported for 6 months (or month after the new release)
Long term release
supported for 18 months (or 3 months after the new long term release)

Estimated Joomla release and support plan:

Visual Studio code analysis and CustomDictionary.xml

When you try the Visual Studio code analysis it may report some errors related to correct spelling of the words in the project. Of course, Visual Studio does not know about all the words and abbreviations so it should be tuned to not display the warnings about words that are correct.

The following series of steps can be used to add the custom dictionary with the words for code analyzer and share this dictionary across solution projects:

  • Create CustomDictionary.xml in the solution folder in the format described on the dictionary page.
  • Add it as link (right click on project, Add -> Existing Item, select file, click on down arrow on the Add button and select "Add as Link") in each solution project that should use this dictionary and set Build Action to CodeAnalysisDictionary in file properties.

Sample CustomDictionary.xml file:

<Dictionary>
  <Words>
    <Recognized>
      <Word>drupal</Word>
      <Word>joomla</Word>
    </Recognized>
  </Words>
  <Acronyms>
    <CasingExceptions>
      <Acronym>PECL</Acronym>
      <Acronym>JED</Acronym>
    </CasingExceptions>
  </Acronyms>
</Dictionary>

ZIP with UTF8 file names in Windows 7

11 years of the XXI century.

Windows 7 cannot add the ɑ.txt file to the compressed (zipped) folder.

Maybe in the next century?...

References

Joomla internals
Information about Joomla! CMS, forms, modules and blocks and how they works.
Drupal internals
Information about Drupal CMS, forms, modules and blocks and how they works.

How to install FxCop 10

If you try to download FxCop 10, the only file you get is readme.txt with the following content:

FxCop Installation Instructions
1. Download the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 version 7.1.
2. Run %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\FXCop\FxCopSetup.exe to install FxCop.

Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework (ISO) is a 567.3MB file and it is should be downloaded to get the 2MB installation of the FxCop... Well, no problem, but what is the next?

Then FxCop installation can be extracted and installed without installing the rest. For this the Setup\WinSDKNetFxTools\cab1.cab file should be extracted from the ISO image with any appropriate tool. For example, you can mount image with Daemon Tools and then copy the file. Then the FxCop executable can be extracted from the cab file and then executed with the following commands:

c:\temp> expand cab1.cab -F:WinSDK_FxCopSetup.exe_all_enu_1B2F0812_3E8B_426F_95DE_4655AE4DA6C6 c:\temp
c:\temp> rename WinSDK_FxCopSetup.exe_all_enu_1B2F0812_3E8B_426F_95DE_4655AE4DA6C6 FxCopSetup.exe
c:\temp> FxCopSetup.exe
The installer will create the FxCop shortcut in Start -> All programs -> Microsoft FxCop -> Microsoft FxCop 10.0.

How Drupal servers requests

This article describes how Drupal 7 servers requests to pages and how to get information about executed page handler.

Month of updates

Debian Squeeze and Drupal 7, Joomla 1.6.1, Safari 5, iOS 4.3, Visual Studio 2010 SP1, Internet Explorer 9, Chrome 10, Firefox 4 RC... What's next? I'm tired of updates and upgrades and a half of month is still ahead.

Joomla 1.6.1 released

Joomla 1.6.1 is released last week and I've spend a few hours checking the changes.

Among a numerous changes in the administrator area, IU improvements and small security fixes there are a few that affect the templates:

  • com_contact/views/categories/tmpl/default_items.php - remove contact-count class.
  • com_contact/views/contact/tmpl/default_form.php - * for required fields is replaced with span.star.
  • com_content/views/article/tmpl/default.php - optional teaser for guests
  • com_content/views/categories/tmpl/default_items.php - remove article-count class.
  • com_content/views/category/tmpl/blog_item.php - option for displaying readmore title.
  • com_content/views/category/tmpl/default_articles.php - createdby class replaced with list-author.
  • com_content/views/featured/tmpl/default_item.php - option for displaying readmore title.
  • com_weblinks/views/category/tmpl/default_items.php - change displaying of the weblink icon.
  • com_weblinks/views/form/tmpl/edit.php - new field: alias.
  • mod_articles_category/tmpl/default.php - option for displaying readmore title.
  • mod_breadcrumbs/tmpl/default.php - breadcrumbs title wrapped with span.showHere.
  • mod_languages/tmpl/default.php - new classes for list of languages.
  • mod_login/tmpl/default.php - form secured with token, optional pretext and posttext.
  • mod_menu/tmpl/default.php - correct classes for deeper and parent.
  • mod_menu/tmpl/default_component.php - fix component link
  • plugins/content/vote/vote.php - span replaced with div.
  • $ is replaced with document.id and other functions all over the javascript code.
  • for some tables the border=0 was removed.
  • DS constant is depricated. The "/" character should be used in file paths.

The complete list of changes is in the CHANGELOG file.

JavaScript Garden

One page with straightforward way from basis to adnvanced JavaScript techniques: JavaScript Garden. Excellent link to read for JavaScript newcomes.

Pages

LinkedIn profile
I’m Alex Netkachov and I welcome you on my site, which is my technical playground and web log.