I’ve just returned from a really nice weekend on this lovely hotel. Bar services could be a little better and it’s not the easiest place to find, but the hotel is just great! Highly recommended if you’re looking for a nice place to say and relax for a couple of days. Here are some pics I’ve taken during my stay there. And now, it’s time to go back to vacations mode.

I recently submitted a Facebook development article to ASP.NET Pro magazine.  It was quite the challenge initially to get it started.  But once I got going (I think I’ll blog on this later), I was off and running but there aren’t a lot of examples on the WIKI.  I put a combination of items together in order to figure it all out.

First, the core content I used to extract user’s information was the Facebook JavaScript API, available here: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/JS_API_Index.  The core object in Facebook to extract data from its servers is the ApiClient object (http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/JS_API_T_FB.ApiClient).  Unfortunately, for most method calls, there isn’t any documentation.  A few things to note:

• If you google on these methods (like groups_get, friends_get, or photos_getAlbums), you’re likely to come up with something.  Usually, it’s PHP examples, but it’s something you can go off of.
• You can post in the forums, but in the questions I had, there really wasn’t any movement.
• If you see the method return FB.PendingResult, this is because it returns data asynch from the server.  In most cases that I saw, it fires a callback with the signature function(results, ex) { }.  This callback can be specified in the parameter list where the SequencerBase parameter is defined.
• Speaking of SequencerBase, the WIKI has an example of how you can use a SequencerBase class to download all of the user data on one shot simultaneously.

Some other notes/general issues I found are:

• The user ID of the user is a long that represents them.  When logged in, you can get this via the ApiClient.  Assuming the ApiClient object is stored in the api variable, the code to get the user’s ID would be: api.get_session().uid.
• However, a lot of the rest API’s use a string for the user, so you need to ensure it’s a string.  Don’t know why.
• The ApiClient.users_getInfo method takes a concatenated list of strings of fields to download for the user.  There is a long list of information that can be retrieved can be found here: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Users.getInfo
• The groups_get method returns a collection of groups, each group with a specific API: http://www.app-developers.com/index.php?topic=11.0
• The photos_getAlbums objects also has a specific API: http://www.app-developers.com/index.php?topic=13.0
• Certain features require permissions, which means a call to FB.Connect.showPermissionDialog: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/JS_API_M_FB.Connect.ShowPermissionDialog

I hope this helps, and more content will be coming.

Issue with SBS2008 Sending email out on a Dell PE2900
Mail would receive just fine into the SBS2008 however sending email out would get stuck halfway and never get delivered.
No Return Bounce NO indication of any issues.

Found out that Broadcom NIC was the issue in the Dell PE2900
Even though it had Version 9 drivers Dell claimed that version 12 “Might”
I repeat “MIGHT” work.

Instead of dealing with it not working after new drivers, I disabled Onboard NICs
Purchased a DLINK 1GB Nic Card.

Installed and mail going out correctly now with no issues!
Information Courtesy of Lafayette Jefferson.

In yesterday’s post about the in operator, Bertrand mentioned that it would be interesting to show the differences between the in operator and the hasOwnProperty method defined on the Object “type”. As always, he’s right and I guess that I should write up a small post explaining the difference between these two.

Both of them check if a property belongs to an object, but there’s an important difference between them (besides the fact that in is an operator and hasOwnProperty is a property which references a function): the in operator will check the property name against the properties of the object +  the properties defined on the prototype object; on the other hand, the hasOwnProperty property will only check that name agains the properties of the object.

Here’s a really simple example which tries to show the main differences between these two:

var User = function(name) {
    this.name = name;
}
User.prototype.printInfo = function() {
    alert(this.name);
}
var user = new User("luis");
alert("printInfo" in user); //true :checks prototype
alert(user.hasOwnProperty("printInfo"));//false

From an usage point of the view, that’s really main difference between the operator and the method. Since hasOwnProperty is a property of object, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind:

• every object has access to it (because all JavaScript objects end up “inheriting” the Object’s type prototype functions);
• its use might be “compromised” by a redefinition of that property (which can be done by adding a property to the new object with that name or by changing the prototype’s hasOwnProperty property to a new value – which, btw, could even be a non function value!)

And that’s it for now. Keep tuned for more on JavaScript.

I guess that you’ve written code like this in the past:

var user = document.getElementById("name");
var msg = "Hello, " + user.value;
alert(msg);

I can tell you that I’ve written several lines of code that resemble the previous snippet in the past. However, you should avoid it whenever possible. The main problem with it is that you’re polluting the global namespace and that is something you shouldn’t do.

In these cases, there’s really a simple strategy for avoiding this unneeded pollution: we can take advantage of anonymous functions! Here’s how I’d write the previous snippet:

(function() {
    var user = document.getElementById("name");
    var msg = "Hello, " + user.value;
    alert(msg);
})();

The syntax might seem awkward at first, but if you concentrate, you’ll see that it’s really simple. We define an anonymous function and execute it in place. (notice that the statement must end with the braces so that it is interpreted as a function invocation).

And that’s it for today. Keep tuned for more tips on JavaScript.

Since I’ve started blogging about JavaScript, I thought that it would be ok to share with you one of the most embarrassing bugs I’ve introduce in a code base. Now, when I look back, I do find it funny, but I can tell you that I didn’t laugh about it at the time. The code is really simple, but I guess it shows why I started putting braces on the opening line…

function doSomething(number) {
    //do some very interesting stuff here
    //return object
    return
    {
        x: number + 1
    };
}
var a = doSomething(1);
alert(a);

Really innocent, right? Unfortunately, it returns undefined instead of the literal object I was trying to build. Btw, this will only happen when the returned object only has one property. If you had more than one, then you’d be getting a parsing error (in JavaScript, it’s common to use anonymous objects for passing data around and it’s not uncommon to fill only the “used” fields).

I guess that if I had read the spec I would have found that JavaScript will automatically insert the ; after certain statements. Here’s what the 1.3 spec says about this topic:

Certain ECMAScript statements (empty statement, variable statement,expression statement,do-while statement, continue statement, break statement, return statement, and throw statement) must be terminated with semicolons. Such semicolons may always appear explicitly in the source text. For convenience, however, such semicolons may be omitted from the source text in certain situations. These situations are described by saying that semicolons are automatically inserted into the source code token stream in those situations.

I guess that the moral of the story is that in JavaScript, the C K&R style should be used always.

P.S.: a final note to say that I’ll be receiving Douglas Crockford’s book in the next couple of days. That means I’ll be learning a few more tricks to share with you

Suppose you’ve got a function and you expect it to receive some optional parameters. In these cases, you’d like those optional parameters to be initialized with a predefined value. Can we do that in Javascript? Yes, we can and all we need is to use the || operator. The following snippet should make this point clear:

function changeTextColor(color, elem) {
    elem = elem || document.body;
    elem.style.color = color;
}

As you can see, we expect two parameters. The initial check tries to ensure that elem points to a valid HTML element. It’s that simple and there really isn’t much more to say about it. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t get too fancy with this kind of tricks. For instance, I recall that a a colleague of mine which was getting started with JavaScript tried to be  a little too smart and wrote the following code:

elem = ( elem && elem.style) || document.body;

it seems good, right? The problem is that elem && elem.style will return elem.style! Was he right in performing the check? Yes, he was, but he did it in the wrong place. If you want to be that clever, then you’d better understand how && and || work. Btw, here’s a revised version of the previous method which checks for the style object before setting its color property:

function changeTextColor(color, elem) {
    elem = elem || document.body;
    if (elem.style) {
        elem.style.color = color;
    }
}

Keep tuned for more on JavaScript.

Coming this Friday, Apple are releasing the latest version of OSX, Snow Leopard.    Mine is on order, specifically so I can test the Exchange “out of the box” experience they promise.

What I did find interesting other than that was this nugget of information from Donna!   Malware protection in OSX!   Who’d have thought that day would come

http://msmvps.com/blogs/donna/archive/2009/08/26/apple-sneaks-malware-protection-into-snow-leopard.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2009/08/25/how-to-install-exchange-2007-service-pack-2-on-windows-small-business-server-2008.aspx

FAIL

Sheesh!   This saddens me.   I fear we have taken a huge backwards step here in SBS land.   I detest when a service pack comes out that causes specific issues with SBS, its like the days of SBS 4.x all over again.

My advice…       Wait…  

and lets hope that the SBS team build something that makes this process easier.

Oh, and to you guys on the Exchange team…     whatever you were thinking when you released this without a *proper* fix being available for SBS first, please don’t do that again.   I may have to beat you with a large stick.