Lynn Demarest's Blog, page 3

About Me

ASP.NET Developer, Writer, Chess Enthusiast

I am an experienced developer using Microsoft and open source technologies, including:​

Languages : C#, javascript, CSS, HTML, Razor, WPF, XAML, VB ​

Frameworks: .NET, .Net Core, Classic ASP, Angular, MVC, Razor, WPF, WEB API, JQuery

​Databases: SQL Server (with Entity Framework ORM), LINQ, MySQL, Oracle, MS Access 

File Formats: JSON, XML, CSV, Fixed-width

Tools: Visual Studio, VS Code, Git, NPM, nuget, Bootstrap, installutil.exe

Other: Node.js, Electron, handlebars, WinScp .NET client, spreadsheetgear, Selenium web automation, UI.Vision Kantu browser scripting, Log4Net, .NET Reflection, Async-Await 

I’ve also written a short novel called “The Soul Gene, which is about a pair of young geneticists searching for a proof of reincarnation. (The Dalai Lama’s in it!)

Finally, if you don’t mind being beaten, you can challenge me at https://www.chess.com/members/APope56

Rescuing American Democracy from the Oligarchs

It’s an old story, often told. American Democracy is on the ropes, controlled by crass politicians who gerrymander electorates into homogenous throngs easily manipulated by slick hot-button ads bought with bribes from the ones really in control, the monied few, for whom a few hundred million is a walk in the park. Money has polluted [...]

Windows 7 : Getting Rid of the Blank Gray Rectangle in the Top Left Corner of Your Windows Desktop

If you have a Dell PC, you might see a gray rectangle appear on your desktop, tucked up in the upper left corner. The only way you know how to get rid of it is to reboot, which is annoying. The culprit is the Dell Backup and Recovery Manager. To kill it, open the “notification [...]

Names Matter: ASP.NET’s SelectedIndexChanged Event Should Be OnSelectedValueChanged

I was rolling along one night, tired but making good progress, when one of my DropDownLists refused to fire its OnSelectedIndexChanged event. During the postback, Page_Load fired, but the OnSelectedIndexChanged event for the control did not. After some time, I finally realized that the VALUES of the ill-behaving DropDownList were all the empty string (“”) [...]

VB.Net and LINQ: How to Get All Possible Combinations of an Ordered List of Lists

Here's one way to calculate all possible combinations of several lists. In this example, imagine four dropdown lists stored in a global array named AllDDLs. I wanted to get all possible combinations of the four lists, each of which had a different number of items. This turned out to be trivial using LINQ for Objects, [...]

ASP.NET Page Life Cycle

The Easy Way to Use jQuery UI’s Sortable Widget

The jQueryUI sortable widget works like magic. Apply it to an HTML DIV that contains other DIVs and you can magically drag and drop the inner DIVs to reorder them on the client. Say, for example, you have an image gallery and want to allow the site administrator to reorder the images. Drop the images [...]

Repairing Thunderbird Email Files

I use Thunderbird as an email client. One day, my HTML emails started appearing as plain text, and contained content from what looked like several other messages. Of course some file was corrupt, but what to do about it? Right-clicking on the folder name and selecting Properties from the context menu held the solution. On [...]

Fixing My Pool Pump Motor

One day my pool pump starting humming loudly before starting up. Then it started flipping the breaker and not starting at all, except after several resets of the breaker. (This, I later discovered, was a dumb and dangerous thing to do. Breakers flip for a reason.) I went on the Internet and found that a [...]

The Water Project

So I’m writing this story about a hit man who decides, in light of the soul gene and reincarnation being real, to quit the business and rehab his karma a la Angulimala. And then I think to myself: I am Rocco. No, I haven’t killed hundreds like Rocco did, but I haven’t been as enlightened [...]