Category Archives: Tools

Deleting Hidden Files in FTP apps

Tools

I was trying to clean up old unused folders on my website but there were empty folders that I just could not delete. The error message was that the folder was not empty. But it sure looked empty. I finally was told by my webhost that there were hidden files in there. Mostly the evil frontpage _vti_cnf folders. After a little googling, I found the secret to seeing and deleting these little devils.

In WS-FPT (I’m using the 2007 version, but this is not new at all), what you need to do is use the masking feature and in doing so, tell the app that you want to see hidden files by masking on “-la”.

The way to do this is make sure you have the File Mask showing on the Command Bar. Then type -la in the little File Mask box. Now when you dig into folders, you can see and then delete hidden files and folders.

Outlook 2007’s in-your-face tasklist inspired me to clean up my email

Tools

As noted in my previous post, I have flagged and forgotten over 500 emails since 2001. With Outlook’s new UI, flagged items are up front and center and now really useful, but not with 500 dead emails floating around in there. So I started going through them and got it down to 200 so far. Then  I got even more inspired. For the first time ever, Iused the archive. I always thought archive meant that it would be stowed away somewhere but difficult to access. Now I see that it just mean creating an addtional PST file and putting emails in there (duplicating my folder structure also). My main PST is now somewhat smaller and much more responsive. What the heck took me so long to do that?

CSS Friendly Control Adapter Toolkit Version 3 is released

Tools

From Russ Helfand, creator of the CSS Friendly Control Adapter Toolkit, announcing a new version! (Of course, this comes just weeks after my article about them in aspnetPRO is published :-), but I knew that was coming…)

I’m pleased to announce that we have upgraded the CSS Friendly ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapter kit.  The new release is Beta 3. 

The whole kit now serves as a sample of designing markup and CSS that scales gracefully. This includes scaling of the menus, trees and forms.

All forms rendered by the adapters (think: membership controls) now implement a solution for the accesskey issue. It’s simple but incredibly effective… and totally addictive.

There are other things in beta 3 besides accessibility improvements. The TreeView adapter now restores the tree’s expansion state. That’s a huge usability improvement but more importantly it’s our first demonstration of an adapter that leverages the ASP.NET view state framework.

To get familiar with all the new features, please read the “what’s new” section of the kit’s home page at http://www.asp.net/cssadapters.  Also, try out the “quick cool demos” listed in that section.  They are:

  • Go to the Menu sample. Increase your browser’s font size. In Internet Explorer use View > Text Size > Larger.
  • Go to the CreateUserWizard sample. Navigate with accesskeys. If using Windows, press Alt + e to set the focus to the textbox for the Email address. (In Internet Explorer you must also hold down the Shift key to use the accesskey for the password textbox.)
  • Try out the redesigned TreeView sample. Expand several nodes in the tree. Select a node to cause the page to post back. Notice that the tree maintains its expansion, visibly marks the selected node and uses its value to change the page’s sample content.
  • Play with cascading checkboxes.
  • Validate that these pages conform to the XHTML 1.1 Strict standard.

    Best regards,

    Russ Helfand