June 2007 - Posts
ASP.NET AJAX has a cool UpdateProgress control that provides a visual indicator while one or more of the UpdatePanel controls are being updated. However, it will be much more useful if all other elements on the page could be disabled when the UpdateProgress is shown. This led Ting Huang to build the ModalUpdateProgress control in which the UpdateProgress will act as a modal popup.
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I discovered today an interesting site about CSS templates, and you can use in your projects.
Read more on CSS Templates
UPDATE: check also this interesting blog about CSS with plenty of resources --> CSS Layout
I find the whole Microsoft Ajax library powerful but still messy to implement.
It is very hard to manage all the events, trying to not get lost between what belong to the client side and what should fire a server side event.
It looks like this technology need to mature a lot and I expect that with Orcas, we should have something really usable.
One positive thing however, and this is why I stay with Microsoft Ajax, are the Ajax control toolkit.
It's true that the lists of existing controls is already impressive, and doing the sam controls out of the library would be a waste of time.
I am not totally sure, but I believe those controls will be delivered as standard in Orcas.
Writing ASP.NET 2.0 applications is harder than before. Yes you read well, harder. If you are a newbie or an amateur of declarative programming, you're safe. I am not an expert, I place myself in the middle ground, but yes damn it it's hard.
I am struggling today with the real deal, a new project where as a serious programmer you have to do all the plumbing from behind the curtain.
Yes I admit I hate declarative programming. It's the lazy way of doing things properly; drag few controls, drag one datasource on your page, type few SQL commands, and hop your site is ready.
No sorry but for me that's not enough. I like to learn, I like to know what's going on in my project from A to Z. OK maybe not to Z, I let the framework doing the last goo by itself.
Take the Gridview control. It's great stuff, but if you want to learn properly all the possibilities you have on offer, exception of googling, can you use one of the dozen existing books on ASP.NET 2.0?
Not really! Unless I didn't buy the right book, they are falling in the declarative programming trap.
In ASP.NET 1.x, it was so easy to declare a datakey. It took me a while to understand the new way. Not that I think I am stupid but in all the books I have, they declare the datakey field on the Gridview tag.
Yes now it's there, but some reason they change the method name. Well of course this is only one little view on the issue.
You can see dozens of examples all built in one page, mixing the client side script, the user controls, the ASP.NET controls, and the sql datasource, and worst for most of them the code behind is written in the ASP.NET page itself!
Where are the layers separation? I don't want to sound like a war veteran, but I find more easy to go through my code if everything is done as a two or three layers project.
So my message to Microsoft, is to get more balanced in the next version of Visual Studio and give more on the code behind, and to the technical writers please less declarative programming (or in in proper english "spaghetti code").
Fredrik Fahlstad give some good tips if you find VS 2005 a bit sluggish.
Any other tips?
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I am debugging regularly my Ajax code with Firefox and Firebug and I have constantly Firebug stopping on the same portion of ajax client script.
OK I can still click continue but it's kind of boring and annoying thing to do so all the time.
Anyone knows about this?
This is the method Firebug don't like:
function Sys$CultureInfo$_getAbbrMonthIndex(value) {
if (!this._upperAbbrMonths) {
this._upperAbbrMonths = this._toUpperArray(this.dateTimeFormat.AbbreviatedMonthNames);
}
BlogEngine.NET is an open source .NET blogging project that was born out of desire for a better blog platform. A blog platform with less complexity, easy customization, and one that takes advantage of the latest .NET features.
BlogEngine.NET was designed using the current .NET framework and focused on simplicity, ease of extendibility, and innovative features. With BlogEngine.NET, we hope to create the natural blog of choice for all .NET developers world wide.
If any reader use this blog engine, can you give me some feedback (positive or negative)?
Introduction
Displaying data in ASP.NET verison 1.x required writing code to programmatically retrieve the data and then more code to bind the data to a data Web control, such as the DataGrid. ASP.NET 2.0 simplifies the process of working with data through its data source controls, which allow data to be retrieved and even modified through declarative means. In short, ASP.NET 2.0's data source controls permit developers to work with and display data without having to write a line of code. For a more thorough look at working with data in ASP.NET 2.0, be sure to check out my Accessing and Updating Data in ASP.NET 2.0 article series.
Different data source controls are designed to work with different types of data. The XmlDataSource control, as its name implies, is designed for working with XML data. By setting a few properties, it is possible to retrieve XML data from a remote URL or local file, transform it using XSLT, and filter it using an XPath expression, all without writing a line of code. This data can then be displayed by binding it to a data Web control and XPath databinding statements can be used to bind specific chunks of the resulting XML to other Web controls.
In this article we will see just how easy it is to display XML data in an ASP.NET 2.0 page. In particular, we will build a User Control that will display the contents of an RSS feed. Once created, this User Control can be dragged onto the Design surface of any ASP.NET page in your project and configured to display the contents of a particular RSS feed by simply setting the control's Url property to the URL of the RSS feed.
Read on to learn more!
This article explains about the Asp.Net AjaxControlToolkit's ModalPopup with Postback and Focus setting methodology.
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I am using in different projects the nice Quantizer class, a blessing if you need to render clear GIF images dynamically.
However, the class was not written as a manage code, a small pronlem in some cases.
Thanks to Brendan Tompkins to propose a new managed version of this very useful class.
Read more from Brendan himself.
So, get the new improved, safe version of the image quantizer here, and the source code here.
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