Archives
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The Beauty of CSS Based Layouts
If you are taking advantage of the new skinable properties of ScottW’s weblog engine, you have to thank him for embracing CSS based layouts, instead of the old Table based layouts. It is not always easy to unlearn old habits, and by ScottW actions, a lot more people are learning the beauty of CSS based layouts.
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Software Legends Night – NJ Edition
Just a reminder that the Software Legends Night is coming to Morris Plains, NJ, tonight.
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IE Dead? Scoble Responds
Well, he did respond to the posts Rob Green, Frans Bouma and I made, but his answer is more vague than my initial response (if that’s possible):
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re: Is Internet Explorer Dead?
Ron Green (SlightlyBent) asks this question on his blog, and Robert Scoble is going to try to get an official answer from Microsoft. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and tell you what I think. Basically, it’s as dead as COM is. Now I know that the answer may seem pretty cut and dry, but it really isn’t. You really have to go back to Don Box’s December 2000 House of COM MSDN article to get an answer to the question, “Is COM dead?” The last paragraph sums it up:
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The Obsolete Attribute
I’m sure most .Net developers haven’t had the need for this little tidbit, but when the time comes, it will come in handy.
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MSDN Must See TV
If you haven’t seen Doug Purdy’s .Net Remoting spot on MSDN TV you’ve got to stop by and watch. .Net Remoting can be a very dry topic, but the first 30 seconds makes the whole segment. One of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while (Hint: a famous person makes a very “special” appearance).
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The Buzz Over Serializing User Interfaces
Onto Erik’s topic, serializing UIs. We already know that HTML does this, but it is limited to a few UI controls. You can reuse these controls to produce aggregate controls with technologies like Internet Explorer’s Element Behaviors, but you are still limited to a limited set of possibilities. You can build controls on the server, and then serialize them as HTML, a la ASP.Net Server Controls, but that only solves the server side coding issues. Well, if you know the client is IE 5.5+ you can kick Element Behaviors to the client, but in the end it is all just HTML. What if you wanted to create brand new controls that were nothing like the other controls (like maybe a Bar Graph, or a Bar Label). You need to get at the graphics level, and HTML doesn’t let you do that. You can use Flash, but then you are self contained box, and can’t interact with the other elements on the page. Now you decided that you need to get to the graphics level and you need to interact with the other elements on your page as an equal. You need another XML dialect to represent your control, so that it can be easily serialized on the server, and sent to the “browser”.
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Software Legends Night - Jersey Style
Software Legends Night
May 28th - Barnes and Noble - Morris Plains, NJ
6:30pm - 8:30pm -
MSDN Subscription Renewal
This question was recently brought up on the Win_Tech_OffTopic Yahoo Group, but never really answered, so I was hoping someone might enlighten the DotNetWeblogs.
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Life as a Reformed Mainframe Programmer in the .Net World
One of the skeletons in my closet is that at one time I actually wrote code for the mainframe. COBOL, Assembly, CICS, DB2, JCL (that still brings back nightmares), I've done them all, and survived. I've have been reformed mainframe programmer for a long time now, and haven't touched code for that platform in over 5 years. But still I get calls from recruiters, trying to tempt me back into the fold. I was very young when I got started (it definitely wasn't something others my age were doing), and did it for about seven years. I tried to quit for a number of years, but my manager's would never let me. I'd get a taste of freedom, by worked with VB (starting with VB 3), but I wasn't able to quit the habit until 1998. While everyone else was busy doing Y2K work, I escaped to a Microsoft DNA project, and never looked back.
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Applied XML Developers Conference 2003 West
Have you ever wanted to create your own UI widgets, but didn't know the low level APIs for your platform's graphics engine? Or, what if you wanted to create your widget but needed to be cross platform, or even rendered in a browser. Well Scalable Vector Graphics can be your salvation. This session will show you how to create your own graphic mark up languages, and render them as SVG, thus eliminating the need to learn the low level graphics APIs. The examples will include interactive bar graphs, gauges, and a label generating web service that uses the SharpVectorGraphics SVG to GDI+ rendering engine.
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Article - Basic Drawing with GDI+
Niklas Gustavsson (one of the key SharpVectors volunteers) has a new article covering basic drawing with GDI+. Niklas has been a godsend to the SharpVectors team, and does a great job with an intro to the System.Drawing namespace.
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SharpVectors Presentation Schedule at the SVG Open
2:45PM - 3:30PM Intro to SharpVectorGraphics Project
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New Must Get Book – Designing With Web Standards
Simon Jessey turned me onto Jeffrey Zeldman, and his new book Designing with Web Standards. Zeldman has a really good blog on creating Web pages using a Rules-Based Design approach with CSS2. If you like his ideas in this entry, you’ll want to go out and buy the book.
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Northern Jersey User Group Meeting Tonight
I almost forgot to remind everyone that the monthly N3UG is tonight at 6:00PM.
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Web Standards and the Meaning of Life
I was trolling my usual standards oriented blogs when I ran across this cool entry called Web Standards and the Meaning of Life on Acts Of Volition. This old-school HTML to XHTML/CSS convert has a very good point:
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Creating Bar Codes in .Net
Paschal L asked for an example of creating BarCodes using .Net and SharpVectors. What you need to start with is some markup language to describe you BarCodes. In this example I’ll use a Code39 BarCode and XML developed by Krysalis. The XML looks like this:
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DonXML Action Figure
Check it out, I got my very own action figure:
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GotDotNet – Off Topic Discussions Board
I know it has been a while since my last post, but things have been busy, and very interesting. There are a bunch of general discussion boards out there for us developers, but here’s another that most people don’t know about, the GotDotNet Off Topic Discussions Board. A few of the regulars from DotNetWeblogs stop by, plus a host of others. If you want to find out what some of your fellow .Netters are thinking about today, stop by and give it a browse. Topics range from future technologies, to what music people are listening to, to intellectual questions like “What’s my Worth?”.
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Getting Behind A Great Idea
It's not often that DB's world and mine cross , but his latest blog is right in line with my feelings. We got to get out of the XML mime types hell if we are ever gonna accomplish our vision. DB's goals are with SOAP in mind. Mine is for a rich multi-namespace XML based UI. The current mime type hell is a hindrance to both. We need to get a posse together and fix this. Sounds like Mark Nottingham and DB are working to get this going. Count me in.
DonXML
[Listening to: Supernatural Blonde - Marvelous 3 ] -
Dimitre Novatchev Where Art Thou's Blog
Saw Kirk's blog on MIA web logs and and my name to the list of folks that are waiting for Dimitre's weblog. Dimitre was a fixture on the VBXML boards, and did a lot to teach XSLT to the early adopters. Thanks for all your help Dimitre, Don XML
[Listening to: Book Of Thel - Bruce Dickinson ] -
re: Cool Tabs
Scott mentions DotMenu and it is pretty cool. If you get a chance stop by and check out some experimental work my friend Chris (CMI Studios) and I worked on for a new navigational system. It was originally nicknamed XBox, but we changed it to HotBox because of the MS gaming platform. It is a bit old, but makes use of some cool IE 5.5+ features (so it will not work in any other browser). The idea was to create a menu system that let you navigate via a map of the site, but also was hidden when not needed. But in the end it was too advanced for most sites, and add a bunch of bloat to every page.
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Producing Reports With XML and PDF
If you are using CrystalReports for your report generation, I'd suggest checking out using XML and PDF instead. The way I architected my latest app was an n-tier approach that uses a Dal that returns datasets to a Lob layer that converts them to custom collections that are serializable. One of the cool advantages was when it came to writing reports. Since both the DataSets and the Custom Collections are interchangeable with XML, the majority of the data acquisition piece was already done. All I need to do was transform it into something that could print easily, and maybe something that could be saved (for nightly batch reports).
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Web Standards and Accessibility Weblogs
For any of the .Net folks out there that are interested in Web Standards, I started a thread on the W3C's Evangelist Mailing List looking for Web Standards Bloggers. What I'd eventually like to see is something like DotNetWeblogs, but for W3C related bloggers hosted on the W3C site. Most of the what I've found doesn't have RSS feeds, but for now you can get a list of Standards Evangelist sites off of Ed Nixon's site.
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The .NET Abstraction Pile
I ran across this really cool article by Eric Sink that does a good job at reminding us not to forget all the abstraction layers that we as software developers tend to rely on, and the tradeoffs we make by using them.
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Lack Of ServicedComponents Knoweledge
I wanted to jump right into Jesse’s ServicedComponets thread, but instead I decided to sit back and try to understand the real problem here. After a couple days, and plenty of different ideas tossed around in my mind, I think I distilled the problem down to its basic components.