Archives
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Developing a Database Driven Accordion Menu Using WCF and jQuery
Web sites often use menus to display available options to the end user. The data required by these menus, such as menu text and URL, is frequently stored in XML files. Though this arrangement works great for small number of menu items, in certain applications it is required that you display menu options based on the security credentials of the current user. At times you may also need to display menus in Unicode character set. In such cases storing menu data in a database table can be more beneficial than maintaining separate XML files. In this article you will develop an Accordion menu that fetches data such as menu text, menu items and URL from a database table. An Accordion menu essentially displays menu options in collapsible panels. At a time only one menu and its options are expanded while other menus are collapsed. In order to develop our Accordion menu we will make use of ASP.NET, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and jQuery.
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Book Review : ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook
When you start learning new technology, one way is to follow start-to-end kind of approach where step by step you build your skills from basic to advanced concepts. The other approach, which is often fast and efficient, is to learn by working examples. ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook by Packt Publishing follows such an approach. The book presents over 70 code recipes in ASP.NET MVC to make you up and running with MVC 2 quickly. Note, however, that book doesn't delve too much on the theory of MVC. It focuses on practical implementation of MVC with the help of small small examples.
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Creating and Using a jQuery Plug-in in ASP.NET Web Forms
Developers often resort to code reuse techniques in their projects. As far as ASP.NET framework server side programming is concerned classes, class libraries, components, custom server controls and user controls are popular code reuse techniques. Modern ASP.NET web applications no longer restrict themselves only to server side programming. They also make use of client side scripting to render rich web forms. No wonder that Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 includes jQuery library by default as a part of newly created web site. If you are using jQuery for client side scripting then one way to reuse your client side code is to create a jQuery plug-in. Creating a plug-in allows you to bundle your reusable jQuery code in a neat way and then reuse it across web forms. In this article you will learn how to create a simple jQuery plug-in from scratch. You will also learn about certain guidelines that help you build professional jQuery plug-ins.