ASP.NET Resources

July 2007

Choosing a JavaScript Toolkit For Serious DOM Manipulation

It has finally become clear to me that you can’t get by solely with the MS AJAX Library for sophisticated DOM manipulation. The plumbing is impressive: classes, namespaces, interfaces, enums, etc. However, the Sys.UI.DomElement class doesn’t get you very far. Writing own code to traverse and manipulate DOM gets very boring very fast and is very unproductive.

7/29/2007 |

11 comments | No TrackBacks

Pimpin' Validation Summary With CSS

Without any styling applied, ValidationSummary renders as a boring list with error messages. However, it’s easy to pretty it up with some CSS since it’s nothing more than a div with an unordered list inside.

7/29/2007 |

4 comments | No TrackBacks

Remember to Strongly-Sign Assemblies You Distribute

This has bitten me in the rear a number of times: I download a free/open source/whatever source component, plug it in my project and… Visual Studio complains the assembly is not strongly signed. We always sign our assemblies, so compiling with unsigned ones becomes a problem. We’re lucky if the 3rd party component comes with source code so we can throw in a .snk file and recompile it.

7/24/2007 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Introducing New Site Sponsor: Znode

A few weeks ago I decided to take down all AdSense ads. Not only do they provide little value to the visitors of this site, they create tasteless visual clutter in general. I prefer to work with vendors who bring valuable products and services to the table. That said, I’d like to introduce a new sponsor of AspNetResources.com.

7/24/2007 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Book Review: Small Giants

If you’ve read Good to Great, Build to Last, or Mavericks at Work (my review), this book—Small Giants—is a natural continuation of the subject with a twist.

7/18/2007 |

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A Minimalistic Control Extender

Whenever I try to create a control extender with ASP.NET AJAX, I never get it right at first try even if I follow this tutorial to the letter. My script won’t register, or the client-side class would fail to create, etc. Poking around the latest build of the AJAX toolkit, I figured this much gets an extender going:

7/12/2007 |

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A Misfiring Postback and How to Fix It

Here’s a bug of a sorts that I’ve seen on a lot of sites (login screens in particular):

7/12/2007 |

11 comments | No TrackBacks

Context vs. Consistency

For as long as I can remember, consistency of user interface has been advocated as the Holy Grail of good usability. People have the same menus, the same visual cues. Nobody panics; everything is familiar.

7/8/2007 |

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When Is a Good Time To Do Business?

Lost productivity frustrates me. Productivity lost to excuses frustrates me even more. In summer months I hear, “The industry is dead. Everybody is on vacation. Business is dead.”

7/8/2007 |

4 comments | No TrackBacks

Safari Is Not The Fastest Brower. By Far.

When Steve Jobs announced that Safari was the fastest browser on PCs and Macs, I thought, “When exactly did this crappy browser become the fastest?”

7/8/2007 |

7 comments | No TrackBacks

Cancelling Event Bubble Interferes With MS AJAX On Postback

Yesterday, all of a sudden, the following JavaScript error started popping up on postback:

7/6/2007 |

5 comments | No TrackBacks

Extender/Script controls may not be registered before PreRender

If you receive an error similar to this, it’s time to look for a missing call to base.OnPreRender.

7/5/2007 |

16 comments | No TrackBacks

Gordon Segal's Advice to An Entrepreneur

The latest issue of the Inc. Magazine is chock-full of interesting entrepreneurial stories. Gordon Segal of Crate and Barrel recalls the early days of his business:

7/2/2007 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

Web talk

July 2007