Organizing repetitive code with Visual Studio solutions [closed] - version-control

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My team creates a lot of one-off web forms. Most of these forms just send an e-mail, and a few do a simple database write.
Right now, each form lives in its own separate solution in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. That means we have close to 100 different form projects, which makes it difficult to maintain consistency. Each form is unique in that the fields are different, but all of them do pretty much the same thing.
I'm looking to condense these somehow, and I could really use some guidance
Should I try to create one solution file with all of our form projects in it? There isn't a lot of plumbing code, although I could create a few helper classes to help with e-mail formatting and such. It would be very helpful to be able to share CSS, JavaScript, controls and images across projects.
Given that we're a Microsoft shop, are there any tangible benefits to going with something like MVC over Webforms for this specific scenario? I am sold on the concept of MVC as a whole, but would it help me pull together a 15-field data collection form more efficiently if all that form does is send an e-mail? The form that got me thinking about this had a good bit of logic built in to show and hide fields based on the user's responses and seems like it would have been less efficient to use MVC and jQuery.

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ItextSharp implementation across load balancer [closed]

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We're evaluating ITextSharp (now known as IText) for producing pdf documents. This will be used in our websites which will be published across a load-balanced solution amongst several servers.
According to Itext, this will require a production license per server (we're not open-source) in our load balanced configuration, as well as uat and developer licenses. This is obviously a considerable investment.
Could anyone recommend any alternatives to reduce the costs?
Also, is there a pattern we could adopt to minimise the migration effort of the existing website prototype if we were to use another product?
You could change your architecture a bit and have a dedicated PDF generation server. You'd then need to boil your requests down to something that could be sent between the servers. Depending on your goals, that could be something relatively simple, such as a user ID and a report name, or complex (text layout, that image there).
As far as distancing yourself from the commercial iText, there are two options.
1) Use the older MPL iTextSharp. It won't have all the latest features and bugfixes, but it's hard to beat the price.
2) The "wrapper" design pattern. Build a relatively generic interface, and have your current implementation of that interface sit atop iText. If you later need to swap it out, you're rebuilding the glue code, not your whole app.

Get data of website [closed]

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I'd like to get the data of a website. I'd like to display the table in an app. Do you have an idea how I could do it? Thanks for your answers!
Usually, you'd want the maintainer of the data you need to supply some API for machine-to-machine communication (a REST JSON web service, for example).
Since you are asking how to display the table in an app:
the easiest way would be to just point an UIWebView that way and go from there.
a more native look might be acomplished by parsing the data. As you included several 'parsing' tags, I guess this is what you'd prefer.
The problem with HTML scraping web pages (what you probably hope to do) is that the data you are looking for and foremost it's structure is prune to changes. If some unexpected changes can easily break your parser.
Thus, if you go for doing that (which might be prohibited by your school or other publisher, especially in germany), try to parse the data on your server and offer an web service for your app yourself. This way, you can react to changes of the structure faster and do not break the app for your users.
Seriously consider asking the school for an API.

Pros and cons of WordPress vs. own PHP Framework [closed]

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I have a website build in own php framework, complete with an elaborate product catalogue and cms system. Now I would like to add a blog and I wanted others' opinions on whether to keep using the framework and develop it as fully integrated with existing website and cms or if I should use wordpress. I am leaning towards the first option but was wondering if I'm not missing something important about wordpress that should sway me.
I have never used wordpress before so will have to learn it first to customise it fully to my requirements (will be creating custom template). I know it's a great blogging tool for people not that into code, but I'm wondering that if you do know coding, if it's still the best option.
Opinions, pros and cons will be highly appreciated.
There are several reasons why you would want to develop your own PHP blog, but also several reasons why you should use an existing framework like Wordpress.
Developing your own:
Better understanding of how things work, making it easier to customize it.
The blog is fully yours, no license applies.
Using Wordpress:
A lot easier to create blog post
You can easily install themes etc. to customize your blog.
All in all, I would recommend Wordpress, but thats just my opinion.
Go with whatever suits your needs :)

Advice on what path to choose for a website [closed]

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A friend has asked me to make a website for him, for a games arcade he runs. It's an extremely simple website so no big deal.
The thing is I'm not quite sure how to approach it, I haven't worked on sites in a while. It would probably be easiest for me to create the site entirely myself, a few pages, css and probably a bit of javascript. But then I thought what if he wants to change things himself in the future, so I should maybe use a cms like wordpress or drupal. The last cms I used was nopcommerce about 2 years ago so I'm not really up to speed with them and themes etc.
Back in uni we were making websites with xml, which sounds ideal as I could create pages that would remain unchanged then use xml for arcade machines and news updates which he could edit himself. But that was a few years ago, is that how things are done nowadays?
Apologies for sounding so stupid but I'd like to get into web design again and I just want the opinion of someone with a bit of experience as to how they would go forward with this so I can do things properly.
Thanks!
I found WordPress ok for smaller sites.
Things evolve quickly around the web and you would probably benefit from the large collection of available templates.
Use Wordpress. It's really easy to setup and you can find a lot of free plugins and themes to create a web site with professional aesthetic and basic functionality. Having your information in a database and the modularity of the product makes easy to scale to a bigger site later if it is needed.

Is there a system or framework for non-programmer form creation? [closed]

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Anyone know of a system or framework for a non-programmer form creation? Not a full implementation, but something that handles the designer aspect and something that handles the displaying for being filled in. All the logic we'll be doing. Maybe just a pair of widgets.
We've got a client-server application into which normal users enter and modify data in a thick client and we want to allow the customers to update and create forms with another thick client application, rather than calling us every time they need a letter changed. We want something to do the display bits while we implement the various hooks and functions the system uses.
We're a java shop, but we expect that we're open to writing these clients in another language if it'll be easier.
Possibly Xopus with a schema for the XForm could work.
http://xopus.com/
Try searching for XForms libraries and tools. XForms is a new-ish standard format for defining forms and there are some libraries and tools available for it. Haven't tried any of these myself.
EDIT:
This looks interesting: http://www.orbeon.com/forms/builder
Well, you're a Java shop so this might not be the best tool for you, but from you description you look like a classic case for Infopath:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/infopath/default.aspx