Shane Henderson | Life at Match.com

Today I figured out how to Scroll back to the top of a Page when one of my users click on the Pager Controls at the bottom of a Page. I wanted all of the other AJAX postbacks to not scroll, but I did want the postbacks to scroll to the top when the pager controls were clicked.  The pager control's client ID's are not set, so the postbackElement ID is set equal to the DataView, so knowing that information you can use the PageRequestManager to scroll to the top only if the the pager controls are clicked.  (This works for both the Top and Bottom Pager controls):

WOW. Just WOW.  I submitted 5 designs for the project I'm working on to the folks over at XHTMLized.com to be cut into proper XHTML and CSS late last week and they delivered everything today.  XHTMLized.com is a company that will take a design (mine were .psd's) and cut everything for you into valid XHTML and CSS that works on all major browsers.  They said it would be done by Wed. of this week (which was already a major plus), but they delivered everything a day early. I showed everything to Jason Alexander and Rob Howard and all they could say was WOW too.  The markup is the best I have ever seen - standards compliant, SEO optimized, works on all major browsers including IE7, Opera, Firefox, and Safari!  These guys just saved me at least two weeks...I'll definitely be using them again.

-Shane 

I had quite a few problems with ASP.NET Ajax today when I was converting some of my pages in my new product over to Beta 1 because I kept getting "Element 'XXXXXX' is not a know element" in the source viewer.  The designer was also freaking out on me and changing my source HTML! I felt like I was using the Visual Studio 2003 designer again!  Talk about a flashback...

Here's the fix:

Change this in your web.config:

<controls>
        <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="Microsoft.Web.UI" assembly="Microsoft.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
        <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="Microsoft.Web.UI.Controls" assembly="Microsoft.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
        <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="Microsoft.Web.Preview.UI" assembly="Microsoft.Web.Preview"/>
        <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="Microsoft.Web.Preview.UI.Controls" assembly="Microsoft.Web.Preview"/>
</controls>

to this:

<controls>
        <add tagPrefix="ajax" namespace="Microsoft.Web.UI" assembly="Microsoft.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
        <add tagPrefix="ajax" namespace="Microsoft.Web.UI.Controls" assembly="Microsoft.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
        <add tagPrefix="ajax" namespace="Microsoft.Web.Preview.UI" assembly="Microsoft.Web.Preview"/>
        <add tagPrefix="ajax" namespace="Microsoft.Web.Preview.UI.Controls" assembly="Microsoft.Web.Preview"/>
 </controls>

 This should be fixed in the next version of the Beta.  Please note that I am using the CTP web.config configuration.  Wheew that was a close one, I was about ready to eat my own monitor.

This is a really good list for you startup folks out there written by Evan Williams of Odeo.com.

I tried to jump on the bandwagon and switch to Google Reader but today was the last straw; I'm switching back to reliable old Bloglines. Here are my reasons:

1) A few of my feeds have mysteriously "disappeared".  Enough said on this one...still in beta I guess.

2) For some reason my folders have all been changed - all spaces and periods have been removed and no special characters are allowed.  So my folders labeled .NET General, ASP.NET, Lucene & Nutch, Health & Nutrition, Web 2.0, etc. now say net-general, aspnet, lucene--nutch, health--nutrition, and web-20 - not cool.  Why would you change this for your users when the original implementation was already working? 

3) It's not easy to subscribe to a feed and add it to a folder.  If you added the Subscribe... link on your toolbar or as a bookmark then you have to view the feed in Google Reader first, click on the Subscribe link at the top right hand corner of the page, then click down at the bottom left hand corner on Manage Subscriptions... then scroll down through every one of your feeds until you find the one you just added (there are no descriptions here either so it's difficult), then click on the dropdown list on the right hand side of the screen and add it to the folder you want.  Oh, and if you try to click on one of your folders named "web 2.0" - forget about it - you get an error.  Why? Because Google doesn't accept periods in the folder name anymore - even though the invalid selection is still in the list for you to choose.

4) Since Google conveniently renamed all of my folder names with dashes in place of spaces and special characters like &, exporting to another reader is now tough because the names are all different now.  So any new feeds that I've added in existing folder won't match up in my OPML file when I do my export.  No more switching back and forth easily without some manual cleanup. 

5) I miss all of the nice icons in Bloglines in the feed list on the left hand side of the page.  It adds a little character to each feed.

Right now I'm reading "The Art of the Start" by Guy Kawasaki.  One of the things he talks about is getting to market quickly and not waiting to release the perfect product before you go broke.  But, he says not to release too early or you might release something that is unusable or riddled with bugs.  The key is to find the right balance, then listen to your users and then you'll end up with the right product.   Did Google release to early? Are they listening to their users?

Thanks to our Website Director, Wade Wright, the North Dallas .NET Users Group launched our new website today.  New features include the ability to RSVP for meetings directly from your account, manage your email subscriptions,  new look and feel...and much more!

With a new location, new sponsor, new website, and a ton of new members we are growing strong! If you live in Carrollton, Addison, North Dallas, Plano, Frisco, McKinney, Allen, or The Colony you should join us for our next meeting.  It's a great opportunity to meet like minded peers, look for a new job, or learn about new technology through our network of great speakers!  Membership is free, we have a ton of giveaways at every meeting (like copies of SQL Server, Visual Studio, and even Xbox's), and we even feed you dinner!  What more could you ask for?  :) Register today.

NDDNUG welcomes INETA Speaker Scott Cate to North Dallas to talk about ASP.NET and the Model View Presenter Design Pattern!

Please join us for an evening of open discussion, lots of demos and an overall great time! As always, we’ll have free pizza, drinks, and prizes for attending!

Topic: Separation of Code and UI with MVP

Date: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 Time: 6:00pm

Where: Intuit's Headquarters in Plano Texas! (NEW LOCATION)

About This Session: This session starts off with a simple ASP.NET "Frequently Asked Questions" application. The first application is a level 100 application that directly binds the user interface to the database. Then we'll abstract the data layer away from the Application. This is about as far as most people go when writing web applications and the UI ends up tightly coupled with the application. So we'll go a step farther. Let's abstract the UI layer away from the application, so the application is no longer dependant on the UI. Finally to prove this theory, we'll build a new UI with Windows Forms that binds to our application. At the end of our presentation you will have been introduced to the "Model View Presenter (MVP)" design pattern.

About Our Speaker: Scott Cate is the President of myKB.com, Inc., in Scottsdale, Arizona. myKB.com is a technology company specializing is commercial ASP.NET applications. His product line includes myKB.com (Knowledge Base Software), kbAlertz.com (Microsoft Knowledge Base Notifications), and EasySearchASP.net (a Pluggable Search Engine for ASP.NET sites). Scott also runs AZGroups.com (Arizona .NET User Groups), one of the largest and most active user group communities in the country, and is a member of ASPInsiders.com, a group devoted to giving early feedback to the Microsoft ASP.NET Team. Scott has also been awarded the ASP.NET MVP for three years in a row, from 2004-2006. In addition, Scott has co-authored "Beginning AJAX with ASP.NET" ( http://BeginningAjax.com ) released in 2006 and the non-fiction novel "Surveillance" ( http://surveillance-the-novel.com ).

If anyone has ever needed to use (or write) a robust search engine, you should check out Lucene.Net.  It's been around for a while and has gone through several phases/iterations.

 Here are some of the features that are touted on dotlucene.net (a website that provides some great info on Lucene.Net):

• Very good performance
• Ranked search results
• Search query highlighting in results
• Searches structured and unstructured data
• Metadata searching (query by date, search custom fields...)
• Index size approximately 30% of the indexed text
• Can store also full indexed documents
• Pure managed .NET in a single assembly
• Very friendly licensing (Apache Software License 2.0)
• Localizable (support for Brazilian, Czech, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Russian included in DotLucene National Language Support Pack)
• Extensible (source code included)
• Lucene.Net is a port of Jakarta Lucene to .NET (C#) maintained by George Aroush
• Project home: http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/
• Index is compatible with the Java version (Lucene)
  

One of the really awesome capabilities is that the indexes are compatible with original Java Lucene project, so you can use products like Nutch or Hadoop and access the Lucene index from an asp.net frontend (or whatever application has a reference to the Lucene assembly).

Lucene.Net also has a very active community of developers behind it, and they just had a release on Sept. 30.  The latest release is built on the 1.1 Framework, but yesterday I was able to convert Lucene.Net to the 2.0 Framework in less than 10 minutes. The developers are working on Lucene.Net version 2.0 and should have an official release for the 2.0 Framework soon.  But so far I haven't see anything that would prevent anyone from running Lucene.Net on the 2.0 framework today.

A note about versions: The lastest release is Lucene.Net 1.9.1 - the old project on Sourceforge is not longer valid and is not maintained there since Lucene.Net is an incubator project now. 

IMPORTANT NEWS: September's Meeting Is Postponed - New Date TBD.

Unfortunately, SMU recently decided to discontinue new student enrollment for their SMU ACEC traning program. As a result, that group is no longer able to sponsor the meeting facility. :( We would like to take a moment and Thank the ACEC and SMU-in-Legacy and for their past sponsorship. This means that NDDNUG needs a new home. We are hard at work - have a lead on one location, and are beginning discussions with them now. If you know of any potential meeting locations in the North Dallas/Frisco/Plano area that can hold from 90 - 150+ people, we would love to hear from you! Email us at officers@nddnug.net