iFinity

This post shows how to setup automatically created 'tooltips' on links within your DotNetNuke site using the iFinity Inline Link Master and the jQuery clueTip plugin.  The links are created automatically at run time and provide a powerful way of giving context and extra information on links and increasing the amount of links in your content by matching simple text search phrases.

Anyone who visits this site reasonably frequently will no doubt have come across some serious downtime in the last 10 days or so.  The errors ranged from out-of-disk-space to out-of-memory and just plain old ‘server unavailable’.  The casual visitor must have thought that it was running on some dusty old 486 box with a 52k modem hanging out the side.

The truth is, disaster always strikes when you are least are able to handle it.  In this case, disaster kept striking while I was at the hospital welcoming the arrival of a new baby into my family.  Being somewhat busy with this more important event meant that the outages probably went on for twice as long as they should have, but that’s life in the small end of the business world.

Symptoms of the Outages It’s well known that sometimes, servers just develop a problem and a quick reboot gets them on their way.  This was the first strategy I used, and at first it seemed to work OK.   When the server needed to be rebooted several times a day I knew something...

Working with GUID variables is a highly useful way of developing software.  If you don’t know, GUID stands for ‘Globally Unique Identifier’.  It’s a way of generating a value that is guaranteed to be different from any other value, generated anywhere else in the world.  It’s a neat idea.  I once read there are more possible values for a GUID than there are stars in the universe.  I don’t know how accurate that is, but at least it makes me feel better everytime I ‘waste’ a Guid by creating it and then not using it again.

Moving right along, the reason for the post is that I came across an issue today where I was generating records in .NET code, and then saving those to a Sql Server database.  So far so normal.  In this case, however, I am using a GUID type to link a foreign key record to a table.   The problem I had was that the .NET equivalent of an empty guid (detectable by the statement Guid.Empty) is a string of zeroes, like this:

00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

In this case, I’d rather...