Swift Byte Blog

The ASP.Net Ajax Library is a JavaScript library used to build high performance web applications. The library includes the Ajax Control Toolkit which contains a set of 40 client controls which you can use within your applications. In this post I will cover setting up the Ajax Control Toolkit within Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

The first thing you will need to do is download the ASP.NET Ajax Library. You can download the latest version from the Ajax Library from the Microsoft ASP.NET Website. Once downloaded extract the files to your system. In my case I simply extracted the files contained within the download to a folder I created named C:\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax Library BETA 0911. Feel free however to name the folder whatever you like.

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Yesterday Google released Asynchronous Tracking Code for Google Analytics. Usng the asynchronous code snippet supplied below should help with web site performance and page load hanging if for some reason the connection to the Google Analytics JavaScript file is slow or unable to load. When using the classic style code to load the script used to collect Analytics data users were forced to wait at times for the entire page to load until the Analytics script was downloaded. By using an Asynchronous call to receive the Google Analytics code there is no longer a pause while downloading images or other files needed to create your page while the Analytics script is being downloaded. Instead the Analytics JavaScript file is now downloaded asychronously on a separate connection from that used to deliver your sites content. The end result should mean faster page download times and less hangs due to waiting on Analytics to load.

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I have put together some screen shots I took from the Chromium OS build I created for those interested in seeing what Google’s Chromium OS is all about. Quite honestly there is not much to it but that’s the goal. The system is very light weight and boots lightning quick on an Acer Aspire One AOA150 the system easily booted in the times claimed by the developers even running off of a hard drive but when all you are basically loading is a platform to run only a browser this is to be expected. The virtual machine image however runs kind of slow though and speed should not be judged by its performance in this environment. The “UI” is labeled as “under development” and is basically a list of bookmarks with icons representing them.  System options are very basic and mostly deal with browser settings.

Anyways here is basically what the system consists of at this time in the form of screenshots I created from the Chromium OS running within VMWare Player.

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Recently Google made available the source code for Chromium OS at http://www.chromium.org/. I like to check out new things so over the past couple days when I found the free time I began the task of compiling the new operating system to give it a try a see what all the excitment is about. Anyways more about the actual operating system later for now I will cover the steps I took in order to build the operating system from the source supplied.

First off Google did a great job documenting the build steps at http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/building-chromium-os but things kind of hop around to diffrent pages alot and a few things were a little fuzzy so basically all I will post in a single page all the steps I took to build Chromium OS and the Chromium browser from source.

For my build environment I used as recommended Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 as recommended although Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 or newer should work so the site says. There are extra steps which may need to be taken if not running Karmic those I have not posted here so if your running an older version please alo referance the build instructions supplied at Chromium.org

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One intereseting way of utilizing the ability to identify the type of credit card automatically that I ran accross was on New Egg. The idea is to automatically mark the type of card entered such as Visa, Mastercard etc. automatically without the need for the visitor to physically select the card type from a list of types. How it works is when the page loads greyscale images of the diffrent card types are displayed next to the text field in which the visitor will be entering their credit card number. As the visitor enters their credit card number into this text field JavaScript is used to run the numbers entered and once the type of card number entered has been determined swap out the greyscale image with a full color one of that card type.

A demonstration of the end product of this post can be found here.

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This post is part of a series of posts covering the validation of credit card numbers in forms using JavaScript in conjunction with either PHP or ASP.Net. The series starts with an explaination of how to identify diffrent types of credit cards as well as cover how the Luhn Algorithm works before moving on to the code you can use within your forms. I will be sure to keep a list of the links to the other related posts at the bottom of these posts for faster referance to the portions you may be more interested in.

Identifying Credit Card Types

It is possible to identify the type of credit card being used by taking a look at the prefix of the card number as well as it’s length. I have used this information in the past to automatically figure out the card type presented by the user allowing the user to skip the need to select from a drop down list the type of card they are using. It basically subtracts a step while filling out the form thus making the check out that much quicker and more enjoyable to the customer.

The following are the formats used to identify the type of card using the prefix as well as the number length for the most popular credit cards in use such as Visa, American Express, Diner’s Club, Discover and JCB.

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This post is part of a series of posts covering the validation of credit card numbers in forms using JavaScript in conjunction with either PHP or ASP.Net. The series starts with an explaination of how to identify diffrent types of credit cards as well as cover how the Luhn Algorithm works before moving on to the code you can use within your forms. I will be sure to keep a list of the links to the other related posts at the bottom of these posts for faster referance to the portions you may be more interested in.

The Luhn Alogrithm (MOD 10)

The Luhn Algoithm, also refered to as Modulous 10 or MOD 10, is used to help you identify a possible valid credit card number. However keep in mind this formula is only capable of if checking if the entered number is a correctly formated number and can not validate if the number given exists as a live credit card number or even has the funds available if it is an active credit card number.

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