By Brian Swanson on 9/16/2009 10:00 AM

I haven’t been blogging much lately, as I’m working full-time on TotalRM trying to get it to Beta very soon.

One of the things I’ve had to do for one of the companies that is using TotalRM internally on a limited basis, is importing data from an Excel spreadsheet.   As a result, I had need to parse a column number into an Excel column (column 1 is ‘A’, column 27 is ‘AA’, etc).  I searched the internet and found a solution which seemed to work perfectly until I ran into a spreadsheet that went beyond Excel column AY (column number 52).  Below is my updated function for creating the Excel Column from the column number being passed in:

 

1: Public Shared Function GetExcelColumn(ByVal ColumnNum As Integer) As String 2: Dim Result As String = String.Empty 3:   4: Dim Primary As Integer 5: Dim Secondary As Integer 6:   7: Primary = Int((ColumnNum - 1) / 26) 8: Secondary = ColumnNum -...

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By Brian Swanson on 2/24/2009 8:09 PM

Purple Ant is pleased to announce the immediate launch of PaleDNN.com, a partnership with Lokheed Enterprises, created for the development and marketing of DotNetNuke modules.  Our first module launched earlier today, a Weather Module, that has completely customizable layout based on CSS (along with many other features). We have several other modules in the works, and will be working to get the released as soon as possible.

Also, with the launch of PaleDNN.com, I am going to start posting my DotNetNuke related blog posts on PaleDNN.com, instead of on this blog.  I have many interests, and write about (when I do actually write) a lot of different topics that may or may not be of interest to everyone.  Separating my DotNetNuke related...

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By Brian Swanson on 2/11/2009 4:13 PM

Purple Ant LLC in partnership with Black and White Medical Consulting LLC, a Raleigh, NC-based medical consulting firm, is pleased to announce the immediate availability of SnagDaBits v1.1, an advanced data export tool designed and built specifically for customers of PatientImpact, a healthcare provider patient-survey company. 

The initial set up of a doctor's office or clinic with Patient Impact typically requires more than a casual understanding of the database driving their Practice Management System (PMS) or Electronic Medical Record (EMR) applications.  Black and White Medical Consulting having a deep understanding of PMS/EMR applications in general, and a specific knowledge of many vendors applications, can provide the technical knowledge to "mine" the necessary data from the database.  After this initial set up, SnagDaBits takes what used to be a manual process of running queries against the database, and exporting to a specific file format, and automates the process via a Windows Service....

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By Brian Swanson on 2/3/2009 2:05 PM

Snowmint Creative Solutions has released version 4.4 of their personal finance software Budget.

This release has several fixes and enhancements:

• Balance window almost completely re-written, for faster performance and easier filtering/sorting functionality.  Fixes bug with “view more info” checkbox on balance window.
• Find Transactions now works beyond December 31st, 2008.
• Text Export of Transfer records (includes history export for deleting an envelope) now includes an eighth field for whether the transfer was in or out of the envelope.
• Enhancements to the registration process to improve issues with 64-bit Vista, and others experiencing errors during registration.

Purple Ant is responsible for creating the Windows versions of several of Snowmint Creative Solution's products.

By Brian Swanson on 1/15/2009 12:00 PM

DotNetNuke is more and more being used and implemented in enterprise environments.  Having recently celebrated its 6th anniversary, it has become not only a full featured application framework/content management system, but a VERY stable environment for deploying high quality sites that demand high availability and quick response times.  Different companies, of course, go about providing the "high availability and quick response times" in different ways: load balancers, web farms, etc.

As of version 4.5.x (I believe) DotNetNuke introduced support for SSL as a core feature of the framework.  This functionality allows you to enable SSL on the site, which instantly cause all host and portal admin pages to be redirected to an HTTPS URL, and selectively individual pages on the site to be required to be viewed over HTTPS as well.  By enabling SSL on DotNetNuke, and marking a given page as "Secured", DotNetNuke will no longer allow that page to be viewed over the unsecured HTTP URL.  This presents a HUGE challenge...

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By Brian Swanson on 1/14/2009 3:33 PM

I recently went through an upgrade from a custom compiled DotNetNuke release 4.0.3.  It was interesting to say the least, but I faced quite a few challenges.  All of which would have been so much easier if I just thought about what I was doing instead of blindly following someone else's guide for the upgrade.

Keep in mind for minor revisions where you are only upgrading to a release that is a couple revisions newer the upgrade process SHOULD be fairly straight-forward.  In the past, when upgrade from 4.7.x, or 4.8.x to version 4.9.x it was as simple as unzipping the upgrade package and copying the contents into your website folder overwriting whatever files already exist.  Since this was a major jump in revisions, I assumed at least some things had changed significantly enough that I'd do a search on the Internet for a guide on the upgrade.  I couldn't find anything to go from 4.0.x to 4.9, but I did run across Mitchell Seller's...

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By Brian Swanson on 1/12/2009 8:58 PM

I've participated in the local Memphis .Net User's Group on and off for the past couple of years...More off than on to be completely honest.  I always have the best of intentions of going to the meetings, but then something comes up and I don't end up making it.  Last month I made a concerted effort to attend as I had contacted the current president of the group, Colin Neller, about running a food drive for the Memphis/Mid-South Food Bank, an idea that came from Steve Andrews and GeekFoodDrive.com.  During the break at the meeting last month, I introduced myself to Collin, and we discussed a few things about the food drive and potentially starting a "geek lunch" in the Memphis area. 

...

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By Brian Swanson on 11/4/2008 6:30 AM

Snowmint Creative Solutions has released version 1.1.5 of their expense tracking software Budget Workbook.

This release REALLY fixes a minor bug found in the previous version that kept the preferences file from being saved. Ah the joys of different operation systems and their nuances...

Purple Ant is responsible for creating the Windows versions of several of Snowmint Creative Solution's products.

By Brian Swanson on 10/22/2008 8:09 AM

Snowmint Creative Solutions has released version 1.1.4 of their expense tracking software Budget Workbook.

This release fixes a minor bug found in the previous version that kept the preferences file from being saved.

Purple Ant is responsible for creating the Windows versions of several of Snowmint Creative Solution's products.

By Brian Swanson on 10/22/2008 8:02 AM

Snowmint Creative Solutions has released version 1.0.4 of their financial planning software Budget Planner.

Purple Ant is responsible for creating the Windows versions of several of Snowmint Creative Solution's products.