Contents tagged with Science Unleashed

  • Soft launch today

    4 Comments

    I finally have a soft launch for different projects today. Interesting period of time now where I am going to chase the bug, and check the browser compatibilities of my new babies ;-)
    And all in .Net !

    Apart a bad DNS issue this morning everything is going well and smoothly. The three first site are part of a common project with RTE (Irish television) and are launched as a pilot.
    The idea is to implement learning videos and in the future some form of digital tv and interactivity.

    Read more...

  • Events + Web = hell

    3 Comments

    This title is there to reflect the hell I live when you push the boundaries of event management, web and a little bit of client-side scripting.

    I will launch in few days a new website about science in Irish schools for Secondary pupils, ScienceUnleashed.

    Check yourself if you want to have a look, but be aware the site is still in debugging mode, and I can say it's hard, very hard to debug a web application with so many things happening on a screen.

    I curse actually the Postback system, and I wish Whidbey improve the system.

    An example. I build a dynamic Quiz working well alone. But I also have a popup control triggering a Postback, so I have to redraw the Quiz after the window show up, otherwise my Quiz controls will be empty.

    But I have 4 different states for the Quiz, so every time a postback happen, I have to test which state I am before redrawing the Quiz. Pain in the ass!
    Also reading the values from a form is basic stuff, but because you can have another event somewhere on the page I have to store (State bag) each value of my form. Pain in the ass!

    And I have at least 10 cases happening like that !

    I don't want to be too negative, the overall .Net experience is good for me, but I dream about some future improvements in a .Net web application like:

    - Truly multithread events including Postback. Doing so,  each event will have his own execution without the necessity to worry about refreshing the page.
    - Better implementation (well surely in VB) of the events themselves. I would like to see something like a button click from my code. Maybe I am wrong but I couldn't find something simple to fire a button through my code.
    - Less bloated viewstate. The source of the default page on my site look like the Champollion tablet, overloaded with strange hieroglyphs.

    Read more...