Pushing Electrons: January 2011

Monday, January 24, 2011

Documentation for my class

It is important to develop the skill of effective communication, especially in written form. I have developed the following criteria for an effective blog post:

There should be some sort of introduction, a sentence or two, setting up what you are about to demonstrate. Included in this could be reasons why they need to know what you have to share and areas where the information would be helpful.
Example: http://www.bennadel.com/blog/112-ColdFusion-Query-of-Queries-Uses-NULL-Values-Returns-Empty-Strings.htm
The code should be set apart from the rest of the text. This allows the reader to find the code they are looking for. You can use the following code formatter to accomplish this: http://codeformatter.blogspot.com/2009/06/about-code-formatter.html
The code should be cleanly formatted. This means that code inside of methods, tags, ifs, loops, etc should be indented. At times it's helpful to put a blank line between blocks of code to logically set them apart from other blocks.
If the code is more than a few lines, a break down of what each line means is also helpful for the reader.
Screen shots are a great way to demonstrate what you are trying to share. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Proper punctuation, spelling and sentence flow. In factoring your blog grade, I will be taking this into consideration. This means that you need to get into the habit of re-reading your post to see if it sounds right. Once you've done that, you need to re-re-read your post to check for additional readability and spelling problems.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Set an integer variable

Description: here is an example of setting a variable and showing it. Yay

Dim x As Integer
x = 6
MessageBox.Show(x)

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Installing CF9 with IIS7

Note: The following instructions are primarily meant for Mayville State University students that are running Windows 7 64bit laptops.

Open up a browser. Chrome, Firefox, or IE will do.
Type in http://localhost/. If you see the following image, then IIS is setup and ready to go. If not, follow these instructions and come back here.
Next, we need to make sure that IIS is configured in such a way that coldfusion can interact with it. Run through this tutorial to make IIS coldfusion ready.
Now let's go to the coldfusion website and download the installer. Download it here.
Next... run the downloaded program and follow this tutorial, keeping in mind the following:

Step 4 - choose the developer edition
Step 5 - choose enterprise multiserver configuration
Step 6 - uncheck .NET integration services
Choose the default on the rest of the options.
Do not enable RDS on step 11

This should get you well on your way to being able to run coldfusion 9 locally.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Visual Basic popup message box

Description: This is useful for alerting the user to some new information. It's also helpful for debugging.

Example Code:

 MessageBox.Show("yay!")

Notes: If you need to see the value of a variable, you can always have it pop up a messagebox to show the value.

Basic HTML Template

Description: This is the code that is used for virtually all html pages.

Example Code:

 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 
<head> 
  <title>This is in the title bar of the browser</title> 
  <meta name="keywords" content="sample html body" /> 
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="theme.css" /> 
  <script language="javascript" src="jquery.js" /> 
</head> 
<body style="background-color:Gray"> 
   <!-- Main content goes in between the body tags -->
</body> 
</html>

Notes:

<meta> tags can be used to add keywords and descriptions for search engines, refresh or redirect to another page automatically, and control cache to name a few.
<link> tags will link a style sheet to your template/html page.
<script> tags are used to load in javascript. You can either load in a file or define your javascript on the fly.

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