Jon Galloway

SharpZipLib provides best free .NET compression library, but what if you can't use it due to the GPL license? I'll look at a few options, ending with my favorite - System.IO.Packaging.

I'm very happy to announce I was selected as an ASP.NET MVP. Most software developers I've told about this, after congratulating me, confess that they don't really know what an MVP is. I wasn't 100% sure myself. Here's what the MVP site says:

I'm told that there are still a few people who don't read CodingHorror.com and Haacked.com. These people call themselves the Amish.

One underused feature in ASP.NET 2.0 is the ability to set a default button for a form. In the past, this often required some extra JavaScript, and was just enough of a pain that it didn't get done until someone asked for it. The ASP.NET form element has DefaultButton and DefaultFocus properties which do exactly what you'd think. For instance, a site I'm working on has a search bar in the header, so I added the following to the form control. Default focus goes to the search textbox, and pressing the enter key submits the form.

I know that's a dumb title. I just couldn't help myself. This post wraps up my Gravatar trilogy:

My previous post dug into using the Gravatar service to add avatar images to your community website. Afterwards, I realized that I didn't really make the case for why you should care about avatars. Yeah, the word avatar may make you think of fantasy gamers jabbering about Yoda's lineage on some forum.