Author Archives: Steve
A recent site visitor had a fairly simple requirement which involved crawling a specific web page and clicking a button. Pretty basic stuff. And then it happened… clicking that button produced a javascript “confirm()” dialog with OK and Cancel buttons. “Well this won’t be easy” I thought to myself. Just to ensure there wouldn’t be [...]
Well if you’re a student attending the University of Phoenix Online, you may have noticed a number of changes, both to the eCampus and their student tools. They’ve completely redesigned the eCampus site, which of course meant the Phoenix Fetch tool needed to be updated. They also have a new “App” that is similar to [...]
Well I just started my Master’s degree program with the University of Phoenix! While I do love the online structure and tools available, I quickly noticed that I found myself logging in repeatedly throughout the day to see if there were new posts. Many times there are no new posts, so it gets frustrating after [...]
Detecting completely loaded page using VB.Net WebBrowser including all frames
By Steve | February 5, 2011
Something I depend on quite frequently is determining when a web page in a WebBrowser control has completely loaded, including all frames. If you’ve ever worked with this control and relied on the DocumentCompleted event, you may have come across the inconsistency with it when dealing with pages that contain HTML frames. The little snippet [...]
So, in this week’s installment, we’ll look at some basic HTML parsing methods and also how to fill out forms and submit them via code. I still see a lot people asking how to get the text from a specific hyperlink or setting the value of an input box on a web page. In this [...]
Here is a handy little method that will automate the login process of a WordPress blog/site using VB.Net. This has many uses, such as scraping data from WordPress blogs, adding new posts to a blog from an application, or any other uses you can think of. Private Sub LogInToWordpress(ByVal username As String, ByVal password As [...]
If you’re a user of LiveJournal, or receive any correspondence from someone associated with the site, you may be vulnerable to inadvertently clicking a link that appears to reside on the www.livejournal.com domain. The exploit involves a specific URL format that will redirect the victim to a site/file of the malicious user’s choosing. While the exploit itself is simple in nature, its effects could potentially be very harmful.
The
Scraper – Custom .Net Class for HTML/WebBrowser Document scraping and automation
By Steve | December 21, 2010
Scraper – Custom .Net Class for HTML/WebBrowser Document scraping and automation Hey All, Noticed a lot of threads on forums lately asking how to “find hyperlinks” or “click a form button on a web page”. I’ve been working on a Class to make this easier for not only myself, but hopefully others as well. While [...]
PathManipulate – A custom .Net Class for displaying long file paths in different formats
By Steve | December 18, 2010
Here is a Class that can be used to display long filepaths in different formats depending on your needs. You can specify a desired length, the location of ellipses, and whether the filename is always displayed. It can also be used to return only the filename (with extension) when passed a full path. Updates will [...]
If you’ve ever encountered the “A generic error occurred in GDI+” error, it may have resulted in the pulling of hair, throwing of blunt objects or the creation of new swear words! I recently faced this problem in a small app I did, and after hours of scouring Google, I couldn’t find a definitive answer… [...]
Long overdue for another VB tutorial! So for all 4 of my faithful viewers, here is one of the most asked questions on coding forums, “How do I read from a text file in VB.Net?”. Let’s go over the simple task of reading and writing to a text file. You know the drill… Grab your [...]
Had some interest in the Lookout keylogger application recently, so thought it would be a good time to provide an updated release. This one does a more thorough exception handling job, as well as provides an option to enable or disable error messages (to stay in stealth mode). Adds itself to the Startup folder so [...]
Tonight I finished putting together a GUI front-end for a font tool my buddy is using. This free tool, ttfpatch (http://www.derwok.de/downloads/ttfpatch/), originally coded by Wolfram Eßer is a command-line tool for editing True Type Font attributes. My buddy also wanted the ability to make changes to an entire directory of fonts (he had something like [...]
Been experimenting with php and web-scraping, mainly utilizing the DOM object model with the simple_html_dom class. So far I have it scraping hyperlinks and email addresses. I’m working on extending it to allow for a specified “depth” of recursiveness (recursivity?.. somethin’ like that) Scarpe some stuff and let me know what you think! [Continue Reading]