Archives
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VS 2008 - Crashing
For the past bit now I've been getting this when starting VS 2008:
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IE8 Passes the Acid2 test
As many web developers know, Internet Explorer has always been behind the times for Web Standards. Just last week IE8 (Which is still in development) passed the Acid2 test. The Acid2 Test's main website is here, and you can view the actual test here. The Acid2 test has correct CSS and incorrect CSS. The test is to determine how a browser handles CSS(correct and incorrect). The long list of standards that web browsers has to support (W3C is only one body of standards), you can imagine how great the IE team must feel.
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First look at VS 2008 - JavaScript intelisence.
Yesterday I downloaded and installed VS 2008 Professional (MSDN License). The process was mild and pretty easy... uninstall all the beta software, install the new software etc. The only problem I had was when I launched a 2005 application (under TFS Source control). VS 2008 (And Team Explorer 2008 by extension) didn't really like this. I got a lot of errors, so I went back to VS 2005, manually checked out the entire solution, then loaded it up in VS 2008. This worked like a charm.
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Ryan has become a Dad!
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Full Screen web pages and browser resizing - keeping it looking good
I've noticed one thing that really gets some web developers going (and not the good going): Keeping a full screen web site looking good with different browser sizes. Those that know CSS inside-out will also have this problem as sometimes you just can't cut it with pure CSS.A0 This is why many sites us a set width - they have clear control over everything with just CSS. However, those that like to employ full screen web pages need to do a bit more.
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Two ASP.NET features that are usually missed or misunderstood...T
Enter the Tilde (~)
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Fancy Button 2.0 (Not A Link button)
I got a shwack of feedback and comments from my recent post: Get rid of regular buttons, use Link Buttons.A0 I actually thought my solution was a great one, apparently I was a bit off base. That's not to say that my solution was totally wrong - Yes I'm stubborn... but I do admit that I am "occasionally" wrong... occasionally...
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Vista and the annoying French characters
Since I've installed MS Vista I've been plauged with getting characters like: É, >, ^^,`` when I wanted characters like ?,|,}," (note those are the exact same keys that did this, i just toggled my settings... keep reading).
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FireFox Add-on - ThumbStrips
I just noticed this amazing Add On for Firefox. Normally I would not blog about things like this, but this addon is very useful. How often have you been trying to find a site you went to yesterday, and you spend 10 minutes clicking through each entry in your browser history, trying to find the site you were on.
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Get rid of regular buttons, use link buttons
For the past 3 years I have been pushing my managers and especially the teams I work with that the web applications we make need to be visually appealing. The graphics designers I know can do amazing things. My friend Steve Sereda is an amazing graphics designer and he created some awesome skins for me for the time we worked together.
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A LinkButton, DefaultButton, UpdatePanel and FireFox
What are we going to do today Brain? Today Pinky? We are going to TAKE OVER THE... learn to use the stuff in the title...
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Updated BicNet Projects
I have updated my projects site. This section of my bicnet website is a place where I can throw working examples of blog posts, and other things I like to show. Sometimes at home I'll find something cool, and I'll throw it up there for my manager to see.
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Some common Gotchas in JavaScript
Over the past month I've been heavily involved in scripting. The application I'm writing is 80% JavaScript, 20% .NET. Because of this, my DOM, JavaScript, and CSS knowledge has been increasing steadily, and I've found some common errors that many Developers have encountered.
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A Table, some text and CSS Pseudo Classes
I really want to thank the IE7 team for building in more Support for CSS. It allows us web developers to do some pretty cool things with CSS without the use of javaScript. Unfortunately not all the goodies work with IE7 (:after :before) but a lot do.
This post is a quick glance at using CSS Pseudo Classes with Tables. In this example I will use a regular HTML table, however this will work with any ASP.NET control that outputs an html <table>.
First, if you have no idea what a Pseudo class is please look at this page by W3Schools.
Let's start with some CSS:
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UpdatePanel, FireFox and the DefaultButton
Recently I was pulling my hair out with this issue. Recently I blogged about using a Modal Login control instead of redirecting to a login page. I have had great success with this.
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A Quick refresher on List<T>
I'm a big fan of .NET Generics. In fact, I can't believe I lived without them in .NET 1.1. Generics are pretty much the most powerful feature for C# 2.0. They allow you to define type safe data structures. They give a huge boost in performance, and they allow us to move away from DataTables and DataSets when it comes to collections of standard data.
Microsoft's MSDN has a great article that explains more about generics. You can find it here.
What I intend to give you in this short blog is a quick refresher on the List<T>. I've always loved this strongly typed list, and I cannot work without it.
Let's take the class Ninja (Now remember there's a whole lot more to Ninjas than just their age and name):
*Note this isn't the best made class, so please don't quote me on this one :P -
Tools I cannot work without.
I posted an article about Sites, References and Articls that I cannot work without awhile back. I decided I'd follow up on it on tools I cannot work without.
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Why redirect? Why not use a Modal Login?
Since the conception of secure pages on the internet, there has been the <pause><chimes> "Login Page" </chimes>. When a user authenticates on this "Login Page" they usually get some sort of a Session set for them, and they're forwarded to a new page. When the authentication times out, or the user logs out, they get redirected to the "Login Page" (yea yea some of us might have a logout page).
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My new blog has arrived...
For the past year I've been writing blogs on my website using an old outdated version of Community Server. A few weeks ago I was about ready to just write my own for the heck of it.. but we all know how that turns out when you:
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MS is releasing the source code for the .NET Framework libraries
I'm not in the habbit of doing a blog post that refers to a blog post that someone else has blogged on their blog... however this is awesome news! Scott Guthrie posted this today.
Microsoft is releasing their source code for the .NET Libraries. This is huge for control developers, heck all developers. However, after reading this a bit on the net I noticed a few people were really weary of this and some were almost down right un-happy. I still believe this is a good thing, and great things will come from it.
Microsoft's development teams have been bending over backwards the past couple years!
Awesome job MS! -
The best Onesie for those programming dads out there
I'm a soon to be dad.... I'm also a geek. Which is probably why I am so buying this for my kid (approx. 5 weeks remaining now).
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The spoiled boy, the treeview and the self referencing table
8 <asp:TreeView ID="tvWorkGroups" EnableClientScript="false" runat="server" ExpandDepth="FullyExpand" OnSelectedNodeChanged="tvWorkGroups_SelectedNodeChanged" />
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Web Services, Sessions and the Windows Service
For those that didn’t know, my beautiful wife is pregnant with our first child. The due date is the first week of November. Because of this news I had to change jobs to make more money for my family. It was one of the hardest decisions I had to make as I loved working where I was. However, I’m having a blast working at my new job. I have always been a web developer. It was very rare when I needed to do any Windows Forms development.
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Quickies vs. Performance - Part 1
One thing I've noticed of the past few years is the amount of developers/programmers/ninjas that do take the easy and quick way to do certain tasks.
With each release of .NET things get easier for us. Things are bundled together, we have to do fewer checks, and it's all nice. But, as much as we're being spoiled by all these cool encapsulated functions, we're forgetting some very basic coding practices.
C# has garbage collection, so why should we have to destroy objects? There are timeouts on SQL Connections, so why should we close DataReaders? Servers these days are so powerful it's ok if I make every ASP.NET object global... it makes my code easier...
What's happened to us? Now some of you might think: "That can't be so Ryan. No one would do that." Unfortunately it's true. With many new developers hitting the main stage this is becoming more and more of an epidemic. -
Master Pages, buttons, Login Control, and the default button
<asp:Panel ID="pnlLogin" runat="server" DefaultButton="LoginButton">
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The Woes of Windows XP... one website? or more?
Recently I was forced to reinstall XP on my lappy. First off the wireless card hated Vista, and well... I'm not a fan of having a laptop in a stationary place... I like to "roam".
So, rather than go through the plain ol' WinXp install, I decided to try LastXP. I already own XP, Office 2007, VS 2005 etc. so I have no qualms whatsoever in installing LastXP. (One thing nice about LastXP is that you can have the Vista Sidebar, task switching, etc. all with it).
So now I'm back on XP. I go and refresh my Development folders, and bring over the few websites I'm working with and then it hits me: "ONLY ONE WEBSITE ON XP!?!?!"... Yea, that bummed me out. However, I did find a beautiful script that allows me to bypass this "one website" crap that was forced onto me.
So, How do you get mulitple sites? Well it's quite easy actually, all you need to do is run one simple script. -
Working with VS 2008 in a team environment...
Scott Guthrie has a great post about Multi-Targeting in VS 2008. It's a great feature of this new IDE, however it falls short of what I'd like. Rick Strahl has a good post explaining the differences in solution / project files here, which I build this post on.
One thing I really wanted to try was to open up our new project into the new dev. environment and see how it works in a real world application. Our main solution involves 30+ code projects, and 8 web application projects, and that would be a very good test case for VS 2008.
However, I wanted to do this while the rest of my team works in VS 2005. Unfortunately, I cannot do this because of the changes this does to the Solution file. The only "solution" to this would be for me to disconnect my Solution file from Team Foundaion Server, and add new projects manually... one thing I might consider to test this.
Most companies would never let any beta software be used on their major applications, however I know and my bosses know that if no one used beta software for real world applications, they might not be fully ready upon release.
Hopefully some new tidbits of information come up soon so I can try this out. -
Disable pages until they're fully loaded?
I deal mainly with large scale online applications. Each page that is loaded on a clients computer is littered with JavaSciprt and AJAX functionality.
One problem we've encountered is users clicking buttons before the page is fully loaded. They might load one page, just to find the link to another, and as soon as they can click the link they do.
Some of our older pages in our application were not fixed to load scripts first, and then the content. As well as sometimes a link/button is also dependent on another control that isn't loaded yet.
One thing we've thought of doing was disableing all buttons until the page was fully loaded, however I'm not sure how this will affect our customers, and our testers, will like this though. -
Today is the day for VS .Net 2008 Beta 2
Visual Studio .NET 2008 Beta 2 is apparently getting released today. This release has all .NET developer salivating... waiting eagerly to download it.
There are so many featuers in this release, so many new idea's and new concepts. There was a great post by Marc Schweigert on "What's New for Web Developers in Visual Studio 2008 & the Microsoft ASP.NET Futures". There are also many posts on Scott Guthrie's blog on Visual Studio 2008.
I think the biggest feature of this product is the JavaScript debugging and inteli-sense, and aslo the new rich CSS and style features.
Harry Potter, move away. Bring on VS 2008! -
Some interesting links I found
Every morning I take some time to visit http://weblogs.asp.net before I get into the nitty-gritty of my daily life at work.
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Ryan's going to be a Father!
In other news, besides the rambling of some coding monkey, it has been told to me by my beautiful wife that I will be a father this November (year is 2007 for those that don't get out much...). I am SO excited. We're not going to find out if it's a boy or a girl; we like surprises. Also, oh man I'm going to be a dad! Sorry cats... you've been demoted.
My dreams of creating an army of little ninjas has finally come... -
Update Panels not working with IIS7.. but they'll work on the production servers...
We had a case awhile ago where all our update panels (<asp:UpdatePanel .. />) stopped working. It took me awhile to figure out what was going wrong with it.
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The Trogdor song gets a facelift.
We all know about this character. Strong Bad drew him a long time ago, and since then he's been all over the internet.
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How to install .msi files on Vista.
I've been running Vista for about two months now. One thing I've noticed is installing msi files (install files) is a pain. One way around this is to create a small bach file that uses the msiexec.exe executable to launch the msi. When referencing the file names, you must fully qualify them.
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The Day Vista turned on me
Yesterday (tuesday) started out fine. Got up, kissed my wife good-bye and left to work all happy and all that jazz.
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Sites, References and articles that I can not work without. #1
Scott Guthrie’s Blog – Scott Guthrie runs the teams that build IIS, ASP.NET, AJAX, CLR, Windows Forms, Commerce Server, Visual Web Developer, and Visual Studio tools for WPF. His blog is update regularly and has great articles that pertain to ASP.NET