I decided to integrate some code highlighting into my blog rather than taking screen captures of my code and posting those into the blog. As I found this requires integrating a code inserting plug-in for TinyMCE 3.x to insert code into the editor and format it properly and syntax highlighting extension for the actual posted code. The two I chose were:
David Pokluda’s Windows Live Writer Source Code Plug-in found here. I simply took the BlogEngine.NET bits from the download and followed the instructions to install it. This download also included Alex Gorbatchev’s syntax highlighter - v. 2.0.296 – found here. The idea is there is a BlogEngine.NET extension that writes the SyntaxHighlighter js code to the pages.
And the code inserting plug-in for TinyMCE v3.x I got from Nawaf’s Blog found here.
I had to do some tweaking to get the TinyMCE plug-in to work the way I wanted. By default the plug-in wraps the code in a HTML textarea along with some attributes (settings) in the class attribute. I really don’t like that approach (having a textarea in a post and or the TinyMCE editor when editing). So I ended up changing the plug-in code to output a HTML pre tag and mapping some of the settings from the plug-in to the settings of the syntax highlighter code since Alex Gorbatchev’s code looks for a pre tag anyway.
The changes I made to the plug-in were in the codehighlighting\js\codehighlighting.js file and these are the changes I made:
function Save_Button_onclick() {
var lang = document.getElementById("ProgrammingLangauges").value;
var code = WrapCode(lang);
code = code + document.getElementById("CodeArea").value;
code = code + "</pre>";
if (document.getElementById("CodeArea").value == '')
{
tinyMCEPopup.close();
return false;
}
tinyMCEPopup.execCommand('mceInsertContent', false, code);
tinyMCEPopup.close();
}
function WrapCode(lang) {
var options = "auto-links: true; first-line: 1; light: false; ruler: false; smart-tabs: true; tab-size: 4;brush: " + lang + ";";
var html = "";
if (lang == 'js' || lang == 'jscript' || lang == 'javascript')
options = options + "html-script: true;";
else
options = options + "html-script: false;";
if (document.getElementById("nogutter").checked == true)
options = options + "gutter: false;";
if (document.getElementById("collapse").checked == true)
options = options + "collapse: true;";
if (document.getElementById("nocontrols").checked == true)
options = options + "toolbar: false;";
html = "<pre class='" + options + "'>";
return html;
}
function Cancel_Button_onclick() {
tinyMCEPopup.close();
return false;
}
As you can see most of the changes were to the WrapCode function (if you compare the original to my version side by side). Other than that nothing really needed to be done to the syntax highlighter code or the BlogEngine.NET extension.
Instructions for installation can be found on each respective website.
Note: There is a bit of weirdness with the TinyMCE plug-in where if there is HTML tags in your code you will need to manually encode them, I am not sure what is going on but I find it's not that much of a big deal.
Enjoy
So I decided to update my blog engine to the newest version and along with that I wrote a simple extension to detect IE6 users and redirect them to a non-supported browser page. Not that my theme cannot handle IE6 but I feel I should get on board and help as much as I can with the movement to rid the internet of this outdated browser.
The extension is pretty simple and uses the built in Response.Browser object which should work for IE6 nicely. To make an extension for BlogEngine is pretty easy just create a class with a constructor with no parameters and then wire up one or more events that the BlogEngine raises to your event in your extension class. Below is my extension class for the redirect logic.
using System;
using System.Web;
using BlogEngine.Core;
using BlogEngine.Core.Web;
using BlogEngine.Core.Web.Controls;
using BlogEngine.Core.Web.HttpHandlers;
[Extension("Redirects users with non-supported browsers to an alternate download page", "1.0", "thefrozencoder.ca")]
public class NonSupportedBrowser
{
public NonSupportedBrowser()
{
Post.Serving += new EventHandler(ServingHandler);
Page.Serving += new EventHandler(ServingHandler);
}
void ServingHandler(object sender, ServingEventArgs e)
{
HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current;
if (context != null && !context.Items.Contains("NonSupportedBrowserTest"))
{
System.Web.UI.Page page = context.CurrentHandler as System.Web.UI.Page;
if (page != null)
{
context.Items.Add("NonSupportedBrowserTest", 1);
if (context.Request.Browser.MajorVersion <= 6 && context.Request.Browser.Browser.Equals("IE"))
{
string file = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["NonSupportedBrowser"];
context.Response.Redirect(file, true);
}
}
}
}
}
As you can see in the constructor I wire up the Page.Serving and Post.Serving events to my own method. I create a context item (NonSupportedBrowserTest) and check for it because the event will be called more than once in the lifetime of the request. I also store the file name in an appSettings key/value so I can change the file to be redirected to (simple HTML file in this case). All that is required is to place the code file in the App_Code\Extensions folder and add the HTML file with the instructions to download a newer browser.
If you are looking for some ideas for this page I simply used the code from the IE6 No More website.
I was able to install Windows 7 Professional (x64) on my Dev laptop today. It didn’t take that long to install and once up and running I had 6 Unknown Devices present in the Device Manager. All I had to do for 4 of them was right click on the device and Update Driver from internet. Windows Update recognized the 4 devices and downloaded drivers for them. This is a list of the drivers that had to be downloaded or installed manually:
-
Ricoh Memory Stick Host Controller (driver downloaded from windows update)
-
Ricoh SD/MMC Host Controller (driver downloaded from windows update)
-
Ricoh xD-Picture Card Controller (driver downloaded from windows update)
-
AuthenTec Inc. AES2810 (Finger print sensor) (driver downloaded from windows update)
-
HP Drive Guard Driver (download HP 3D Driveguard (Vista) softpaq sp39410.exe)
-
Direct Application Launch Button (download HP Quick Launch Buttons (softpaq sp43616.exe))
Once the drivers where updated manually I noticed that I had 4 new Windows Updates to download all of which were the following drivers:
-
A newer AuthenTec Inc. AES2810 driver
-
A newer ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 driver
-
A newer Intel(R) 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection driver
-
A newer Agere Systems HDA Modem driver
All in all a pretty clean and simple install. That probably more so because the the hardware is fairly new.
The only thing that does not work properly is the mute button (part of the quick launch buttons). Not a big deal I will probably just have to update the software when HP updates its library for Win7 in October. Other than I am really liking Win7 so far on this laptop, it runs very well alongside the 8GB of RAM I have installed.
Update: 2009-08-08 - Seems I was wrong about the mute button it does work, however it does not register to Windows that the mute button is enabled so Windows does not display the little red disabled symbol on the speaker icon in the notification area.
Update: 2009-08-29 – I was able to get the AuthenTec Inc. AES2810 finger print reader setup to login to Windows 7 with my fingerprint, it works like a charm. To do this you will need to download the BETA version of the enrolment software here:
The blog site Three Wise Men has a tutorial on how to actually install, setup and enroll your finger print so you can start using this feature.
Update: 2009-10-22 - HP has started to release updated drivers for the 8530p which the new audio driver has fixed my mute button issue listed above. As of todays date (2009-10-22) there are no Windows 7 Professional (x64) drivers. I have installed the Windows Home (x64) drivers and they seem to work as expected. Visit the HP site here.
In some cases there is an issue with installing the following update “Security Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (KB971092)”. The workaround to properly install the update you must set the security on the files vsvars32.bat and vcvarsall.bat to allow the local Users group write permission on those files. I am not sure why this is an issue but from reading other posts and such on the issue most of the affected people do not have vc++ installed.
They can be found in the following folders:
x86
x64