Exchange: delay the startup

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The last time I had to change the company server hardware, I decided to use a virtual domain controller, while the Exchange Server remained on the physical machine.
Upon boot, Exchange couldn't find the domain controller and that gave me a lot of trouble. I needed to delay the Exchange Server service enough to allow the virtual DC to boot and be ready.
How can we do that?

Follow me and I will explain it to you.

CSS: IE hacks

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In March last year, I've published a post about CSS conditional statements. The article explains how to create conditional statements and load specific stylesheets for specific Internet Explorer versions.
We all know that, in order to guarantee a cross-browser full compatibility of our web sites, the above solution gives us a possible clean way out of the problem.
With that in mind, there are situations when we don't really want to create different stylesheets for each version of IE, and a simpler solution would be preferable.
Those are the cases where we can use the famous IE CSS hacks.

jQuery: how to use it only for mobile

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Developing responsive web sites is not always easy. We have seen something about it with media queries, but that was aimed to managing CSS stylesheets. Today I'm going to show you how to deal with jQuery.

I've found the following trick somewhere on the web, but I don't remember where, so if you are the author please leave a comment and I will give you credit for it.

Let's try to clear up a bit the situation. We want to trigger some jQuery or, generally speaking, some JavaScript code just when the visit is coming from a smartphone. Because we know that those devices mainly have a screen width of 480px, we are going to use that as condition.

VBScript: how to schedule the opening of an ASP page

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Following an exchange of ideas with Still_ASP, a loyal reader of the web thought, I thought to write something about scheduling events on a Windows server.
Sometimes we might need to trigger some events independently from the actual opening of a page or a specific action taken by a user. If nobody is browsing your page, how could we trigger an event anyway?

To do so, we need to use a little trick that I will shortly explain.

CSS: backgrounds with CSS3

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As I can see from the web thought statistics, there's a increasing interest in how to manage backgrounds with CSS and specifically with CSS3. So I decided to write down the following short tutorial. We are going to explore three interesting CSS properties: background-clip, background-origin and background-size.
I know, I've partially covered the subject in another post, however here we are going to see it more in depth.

Are you ready? Ok then, follow me...

CSS: how to forget about prefixes

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Writing CSS stylesheet today can be a nightmare. With the high number of specific browser prefixes, we might end up banging our heads against the wall in the effort of not forgetting how to be sure our code is cross browser compatible.
Just to make things clearer: let's consider the following CSS:

.container {
  -moz-border-radius: 4px 0px 0px 4px;
  -webkit-border-radius: 4px 0px 0px 4px;
  border-radius: 4px 0px 0px 4px;
  -webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 4px #9c9c9c;
  -moz-box-shadow: 0 0 4px #9c9c9c;
  box-shadow: 0 0 4px #9c9c9c;
}

jQuery, JavaScript & ASP: barcodes resources

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Following a brief exchange of thoughts with Carlo (one of the web thought readers), I have decided to publish a list of resources aimed to the creation of Barcodes. Originally, Carlo wanted to insert a barcode in a PDF document using FPDF, however the subroutine he found generates a HTML table that is almost impossible to embed in a PDF with FPDF.
Other solution are possible. The point is to create a Barcode image, save it on the server, and then insert it into the PDF. I haven't explored the above idea, but I think that the following resources might help some to accomplish the task.
Here's the list:

Barcode Coder (jQuery)

jQuery-Barcode (jQuery)

Pure ASP Barcode Generator (pure ASP)

ASP Barcode Script (pure ASP - Thanks to Carlo)

Barcode Generator (JavaScript)

Creating a Code 39 Barcode using HTML, CSS and Javascript (JavaScript)

Javascript Code128 Barcode (JavaScript)