ASP.NET Resources

January 2005

Inclement Conditions at Weather.com

I’ve noticed some oddities with the weather.com site. Ever since they rolled out what seems to be ver. 3 of their site, it’s been serving 404s on a random basis. I’ve noticed this because my weather control sends me error alerts. Instead of an XML feed with a weather forecast, weather.com sends an HTML page-not-found. Naturally, it can’t be parsed in a meaningful way, which is why an exception occurs.

1/31/2005 |

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A Note To Control Vendors: Upgrading Controls Should Be Easy

The last 3 days—and I kid you not—we’ve been trying to upgrade a third party HTML rich edit control with a newer one. I was quite surprised by the amount of tweaking we had to do and the time we spent tweaking things into place.

1/26/2005 |

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Weather Control ver 1.8.1 and Two Skins

I have slightly updated my weather control. I don’t know since when wind information was being displayed in a somewhat weird way, e.g. “18 mph from 340”. I don’t know if weather.com changed anything or whether it never bothered anyone.

1/26/2005 |

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.NET Collection Madness - Part I

Ever since I began to code for .NET I’ve been confused by the host of collections available in the .NET Framework. On the one hand, there are so many of them in the System.Collections and System.Collections.Specialized namespaces. On the other hand, it’s a pity there’s so little “prescriptive guidance” as to when to use which collection and why.

1/24/2005 |

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The Developer's Browser

Few people realize that, aside from being searching gizmos with themes and cool extensions, Mozilla browsers come with a couple of tools which ease pains of client-side development.

1/23/2005 |

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Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

My car is in there… somewhere.

1/23/2005 |

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Apostrophe In RowFilter

When you filter a DataView by setting its RowFilter property to a string watch out for apostrophes or you’ll get an exception. What you need to do is double each apostrophe, not escape it as MSDN suggests.

1/18/2005 |

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Silent Force by Within Temptation

This week-end I made an exciting discovery. Within Temptation, a metal band from Netherlands, released a new album back in November. Being up the wazoo in code I haven’t had a chance to keep pace with latest releases on this front.

1/16/2005 |

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Refactoring Web User Interface

When developing a web application you create a design roadmap first and then write code. A good system always evolves, a bad one get shelved. As you add more and more code you inevitably deviate from the original design guidelines and practices. You, as a team or a solo developer, introduce that unhealthy build-up which had better be removed at some point. That’s the circle of life, and it’s ok that it happens as long as you come back and refactor your code.

1/16/2005 |

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CSS Challenge: Styling Definition Lists

Building data entry forms on the web is a pain. To be more precise, formatting them is a pain. When you develop a desktop app you have numerous visual tools to aid you with pixel-perfect design of dialog boxes, wizards, forms. Things aren’t as simple on the web.

1/11/2005 |

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Solicitor Excuses

There’s something about the state of New York that makes solicitors particularly obnoxious. Having a humble No soliciting sign on the door is as effective as not having one at all. They simply invite themselves in and totally violate this now-conventional request to leave people alone.

1/10/2005 |

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Crash...Boom... Bang

A couple of days ago I ran into a weird problem. I figured I’d describe it and explain how I fixed it in case one of you runs into it, too.

1/8/2005 |

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Weather Control ver 1.8

Shannon Hager pointed out that my weather control was vulnerable to exceptions thrown as a result of DNS resolution and other network errors. Up until now the control would throw an exception from its template constructor and you would have no chance to handle it. Granted, you should always use custom error pages, but the weather control would take down the entire page.

1/5/2005 |

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Farewell to Modals

At first sight, modal windows are great. In contrast to normal windows modals guarantee undivided user attention—the user has to dismiss this window to work with a web page. For this exact reason we’ve used modals heavily in our product to build dialog windows since day one. Not those obnoxious “buy meds online” popups, but rich, bona fide dialog windows.

1/3/2005 |

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New Year, New License

Having read John’s comments on the Markdown licensing I decided to change my own licensing too. I publish quite a bit of code here and have no illusions of becoming “rich and famous” doing it, so why prevent its use in grass-roots and commercial projects alike? I’m going with the BSD license which, although very liberal, still is a license, so please take a minute and read it.

1/2/2005 |

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Markdown.NET 1.0.1 Released

After a couple of betas John Gruber, the author of Markdown, released ver 1.0.1. John decided to switch from a GPL license to the BSD one, therefore Markdown for .NET now comes with the BSD license as well.

1/2/2005 |

4 comments | 1 TrackBack

Web talk

January 2005