Searching the contents PDF files is a common requirement that seems to cause some confusion regarding how best to implement it. A simple and flexible solution is using an Adobe PDF IFilter. IFilters are a Microsoft specification that scans a document for its text and properties, allowing Microsoft’s Indexing Service to extract portions of data. Step 1 – Install the IFilter downloaded from Adobe. Accept all default steps. Step 2 – Configure the Indexing service. Basic steps include: Open up computer management > Services and Application > Indexing Service Create a... [More]

I recently discovered a really useful tip when using Visual Studio .NET. The Toolbox can be used to store snippets of your code, ready to be re-used. Simply select the code you want to store and drag it onto the Toolbox. To paste the snippet into your code, place the cursor in the correct position and double click the toolbox icon. Alternatively Ctrl + Shift + V will cycle through the last 20ish items added to the clipboard

Using flash movies in a website is a great way to enhance a user’s experience, deliver content and interact with the user. However there have always been concerns regarding the ability to implement flash whilst remaining SEO friendly and W3C compliant. Below are some of the practices I’ve implemented to overcome these concerns. Make flash file content indexeable A feature added to Flash 8 was to allow meta data to be embedded in swf files making them easily indexeable. You can add a title and description to the flash file by selecting Modify > Document. This text can be read by most... [More]

Recently I was working on a .NET 1.1 Windows form project and wanted to make use the common icons buttons seen in many windows applications.  e.g  New icon, Save, Copy , Paste   Unfortunately the feature to ‘insert standard items’ was only introduced in VS2005 upwards and I needed to use VS2003 for .NET 1.1. Fortunately there’s a very simple solution to this. Open up VS2005, create a windows form project, Insert a tool strip and select ‘insert standard items’ from the tool strip task menu. Switch to the code behind view. In the constructor acces... [More]