Archives
-
Getting absolute coordinates from a DOM element
For some reason, there is no standard API to get the pixel coordinates of a DOM element relative to the upper-left corner of the document. APIs only exist to get coordinates relative to the offset parent. Problem is, it's very important to get those coordinates for applications such as drag and drop, or whenever you need to compare coordinates of elements that may be in completely different parts of the document.
-
A honest recap of the IE8 meta-tag controversy
This will affect all Web developers, which is precisely why the debate is very heated. Anyway, here's a honest recap of the issue. I tend to agree with the author's conclusion although that is obvisouly not the position of Microsoft...
-
Improving PHP by running it in IIS
Mike Volodarsky wrote a fantastic article in the January 2008 issue of MSDN magazine in which he explains how you can take an existing PHP application (he uses QDig, a popular image gallery) and improve it without touching a line of its code. This is a great demonstration of the power of IIS 7's modular and pluggable architecture. Mike was able to add the following features to this PHP application using only managed code modules and configuration:
-
I'm now officially a slacker
Well, at least a Dot Net Slacker...
-
Off-topic: I have the best daughter in the whole world
My wife was trying to explain Martin Luther King day to my four year old daughter today. It's pretty difficult to explain seeing all the cultural ramifications and references that we take for granted but that she doesn't have, so my wife starts by explaining how she (my daughter) might have noticed how people have different skin pigmentations. Guess what she answered to that...
-
Dates and JSON
JSON is a great data format and it's taken the Internet by storm for a number of good reasons. But because of a strange oversight in the EcmaScript specs, there is no standard way of describing dates in JSON. There's been a lot of discussion on this topic and it still remains a problem today.
-
Immutability in C#
For some reason, there's been a lot of buzz lately around immutability in C#. If you're interested in algorithms and data structures, it's a fascinating subject. Immutable objects, according to Patrick Smacchia, have the following advantages:
-
Screencast: how to enable server-side history management in an ASP.NET Ajax application
I've recently recorded a screencast showing how to enable server-side history management (in other words, handling the back button) in an ASP.NET Ajax application. The whole video is less than 15 minutes total and I build the whole application from scratch in there (in VB).