Archives
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Jersey and .Net – Perfect Together
I’m borrowing a line from a famous New Jersey Tourism Campaign, but it definitely fits. For such a small state, and so far from the Silicon Valley or Redmond, New Jersey has a thriving .Net User Group community. Besides the opportunity to go to User Groups in New York City, the residents of New Jersey 2 established .Net User Groups (one in North Jersey, and one at the local MS office), there are a couple new User Groups starting up. NJIT has created a group dedicated to the college crowd, there’s a FoxPro/.Net Group for the FoxPro crowd, and it looks like a Central New Jersey group will be joining the ranks soon. With all of these User Groups, it looks like the future is bright for .Net in New Jersey.
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SVG Open 2003 – July 13th – 18th – Vancouver, Canada
The SharpVectors project will be represented at the SVG Open the following presentations:
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Visual GDI+ Question From WindowsForms Site
The following question was asked on the WinForms Discussion Group:
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ASP.Net TextBox Bug
Not sure if this is fixed in .Net 1.1, (got to check) but if you use an ASP.Net TextBox control and set the textmode to MultiLine, it will generate a textarea tag. The bug is that if you set the size thru height and width attributes, it will convert them to a style attribute, but only for IE, not Netscape or Mozilla.
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Flash Does Not Grok XML
Jumping in on Jesse’s Flash based RIA thread, my personal take on the Flash RIA issue boils down to one thing, Flash does not grok XML and paradigm change that XML brings once you do grok it. Don’t get me wrong, Flash is a very good tool for what it does, static (not data driven) vector graphics. Used in its traditional niche, it is a great tool, but to try to expand its role to building full fledged UIs, will only tarnish its reputation. I have the same problem with people that try to build SVG only web sites (and I love SVG).
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re: Custom Server Controls via XHTML with Visual Studio
From ScottW
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INETA Software Legends Night - May 28th
The North New Jersey .Net User Group (N3UG) and INETA are sponsoring a Software Legends night, May 28th, at the Morris Plains, NJ Barnes & Noble.
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asp.netPRO Cover Article and SmartNavigation
Has anyone seen the current issue of asp.netPRO, and the cover article - 10 Rock-Solid UI Tips? Here’s the link to the article, but you need to have a subscription to see it. I’ve got a couple problems with the article, but my main complaint is Tip 1, Use SmartNavigation. SmartNavigation is supposed to eliminate the repainting of web pages between posts on uplevel browsers using a hidden iframe. If you have ever tried using SmartNavigation in your pages, you would find that it does not work if you are using a more traditional HTML/CSS page model (apposed to the VB-like model VS.Net tries to force you to use). Just do a search of the MS newsgroups on SmartNavigation, and you will see hundreds of problems with this technology, and a lot of recommendations that it should not be used (especially with external CSS). My problem with the article is that nowhere is it acknowledged that SmartNavigation is known to cause problems. As the author you have a responsibility to alert your readers to any known issues of the technology you are using, and this tip is very misleading. IMHO. use SmartNavigation in only the most basic WebForms, and becareful using it with any advanced browser technologies (i.e. Element Behaviors, CSS, Scripting).
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re: Great Intro To SVG Article
Steven Livingstone commented (sorry not a blog entry):
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Name Confusion
It has come to my attention that there are some folks out there that are confusing me with another Don (Don Box). Yes the name Don is not a very common one (but it is not rare), and what’s the odds the both are into XML? Well, it doesn’t really matter, because it did happen.
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Great Intro To SVG Article
I just found this new Intro to SVG article by Kurt Cagle on TopXML, and had to pass it along. It looks like it was written last year, but for anyone that needs a good intro to SVG, stop by and check it out. And if you like what you see, go out and buy Kurt's SVG Programming book (I'm bias to this one, because I was the tech reviewer).
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From The What Were They Thinking Department
I got an email yesterday from the folks at Fawcette Conferneces for an Enterprise Architect Summit. It caught my eye, and I decided to give it a look, until I saw that it was to be held in Palm Springs, CA from October 12-14. Not all that bright considering the Microsoft PDC will be held in LA two weeks later. Can’t see many MS’ers going to this one. They are having a hard enough time getting folks to conferences these days, no less going up against the PDC.
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Kurt Cagle's Take On XML Web Services Edge, Boston 2003
For those of you that don’t subscribe to Kurt Cagle’s Metaphorical Web Blog/Articles you are missing some really good XML related stuff. Couldn’t agree more with his take on the current direction of web services:
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Pet Peeve – Using HTML Tables to Control Web Page Layout
I haven’t seen much on this topic in the .Net world, but I thought I’d throw it out there. A while back I finally moved from the Table camp to the CSS camp for controlling the layout of web pages. Seems like most of the .Net world still lives in the Table camp, and it bugs me that VS.Net encourages it. Does anyone else have a problem with this? Create an HTML using Tables to control the layout (or pull it down from here), and then view it in the Design window. Now do the same using Divs with CSS (or get it from here). Looks terrible, and is impossible to edit in the design window (not that I do that, but for newbies I can see them using it). Now look at the actual code for each example. Isn’t the CSS version much easier to read and create? It does a much better job separating the look and feel of the web page from the process that created it. Plus it lets the browser decide what the natural flow for the device that the page is displayed on.
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Old School Metal
Being a fan of the old school NYC metal scene, getting 2 new CDs from bands of the era is like having Christmas in April. If you are into that stuff, I’d highly recommend going out and picking the following up:
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Article on the SharpVectorGraphics Project
I found this article by
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Producing HTML tables with XSLT
Since it was requested, and it’s one of my favorite topics, I figured that I should hit this topic. For those of you that have seen some of my posts on GDN, you may have seen this before.
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Conference XP
Haven’t seen advertised, but thought the .Net enthusiasts might enjoy it. Microsoft Research is working on a Web Conferencing project called ConferenceXP
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The First of Many
Here’s the first of what should be a steady stream of blog entries. I’d like to thank ScottW for getting me off my rear and starting something I should have been doing for years. Thanks for space and the resources.