Sun Yat Sen Memorial, Taipei

This is part of the fun Taiwan travel series. View the full itinerary here.

Sun Yat-Sen memorial park is another famous attraction in Taipei.
Most tourists like to go there to witness the hourly changing of guards.

It is very conveniently located within the Chung-Shan vicinity and reachable by MRT.
If you have time to space, you could enter the memorial hall and view some of the artifacts on display, as well as visit the library.

Convert PowerPoint slides to Images in C#

One of the challenges I have come across is to have a component that could batch convert PPT and PPTX files into images.

I know there are really good components out there like Aspose, but IT budget is always a constraint.
As we already had Office 2010 installed on our machine, I came up with a quick console application t perform the function.

Obviously, you need Office 2010 installed on the machine where you need to run the tool. I compiled the project for the .NET 2.0 Framework.

Just add some references to your Visual Studio 2010 solution like below:
Microsoft.Office.Interop.PowerPoint (from .NET, v14.0.0.0)
Microsoft.Office.Core (from COM, v14.0.0.0)
Others like System.Configuration (as I am using app.config)

After creating a basic C# Console application, add the references mentioned above.

Developing SharePoint Visual Webparts: How to check if jQuery exist or is already loaded

When you try to create a SharePoint visual webpart that makes use of jQuery, it is generally known that any conflict will cause the javascript rendering to fail, e.g. any document.ready() function.

It is common when you have a lot of customized components that were activated as a feature.

You can easily check whether you have loaded conflicting versions of jQuery from viewing the source on the web page. But how do you control whether or not to load the jQuery if it already exists?

Solution:
Check whether the jQuery object can be created, before loading the .js file using javascript.
if (typeof jQuery == 'undefined') {
            var jq = document.createElement('script'); jq.type = 'text/javascript';
            // Path to jquery.js file
            jq.src = '/_layouts/Test/jquery.min.js';
            document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(jq);
        }

躼腳日本料理

This is part of the fun Taiwan travel series. View the full itinerary here.

A part of me was really reluctant to release this post - this had to be one of the best kept secrets in Taipei! And I hope that it remains that way so that it won't be overwhelmed by hordes of tourists, ha ha.

Located in the Zhongshan district, the restaurant facade was unassuming enough that passers-by would not give it an extra glance. And yet, the telltale signs of a popular eatery gave it away - before 11:30AM, a long queue was forming up at the entrance.

National Palace Museum,Taipei

This is part of the fun Taiwan travel series. View the full itinerary here.

Finally, I have more spare time to continue my notes on my trip to Taiwan.
One of the highlights of my Taiwan trip was (gasp) a visit to the National Palace Museum!

It was said that the best of China artifacts were actually secreted away during the Chinese Civil war - it hosts one of the largest collections of Chinese antiques in the world. Must be the reason why I see a lot of tourists from China.