ASP.NET Resources

September 2004

Jeffrey Richter Did Come To Town

Told ya he was coming. Yesterday I had an opportunity to meet Jeffrey Richter who I regard as the ultimate geek (in a good way). His one day training in advanced .NET topics was a hit! Over the past couple of years I've been to a lot of Microsoft events, but only once or twice did they delve into advanced topics. Jeffrey's presentation beat the pants off them all.

9/30/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

.IR: Image Replacement With ASP.NET (Beta)

I'm not sure who came up with image replacement (probably Todd Fahrner), but I first read about it on Doug Bowman's site, and then saw a post by Dave Shea with a collection of image replacement variations.

9/27/2004 |

16 comments | No TrackBacks

Jeffrey Richter Coming to Town

The venerable Jeffrey Richter is coming to NYC with a one day training course on Tue, Sept. 28. I admire this guy. Remarkable about Jeffrey as an author is that he is very thorough in his writings. He doesn't publish that many books, but if he does his books become essential companions. That was the case with Programming Server-Side Applications for Microsoft Windows 2000 as well as Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming—this one being the best book for .NET developers hands down!

9/26/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

Understanding Session State Modes + FAQ

I'd like to point out a very helpful session state FAQ by Patrick Y. Ng (I wonder how to pronounce his name correctly) he posted at the ASP.NET Forums. This FAQ answers about 90% of all questions that come up in the State Management discussions.

9/26/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

ASP.NET Cure: Custom DTD for XHTML

The ASP.NET validator controls tend to produce tags with proprietary attributes which are "not in the book" and therefore will always cause HTML validation errors. Is this a dead-end for ASP.NET or can we accommodate this?

9/23/2004 |

17 comments | No TrackBacks

Back To Basics: (X)HTML Specs Made Easy

Now that y'all have read my sermon Back To Basics: HTML some of you might be scratching your heads, "Where do I start?" Well, you can head to a book store and pick up a 990-page HTML Bible or something like that. Make it two: two big thick "ultimate guides" that unleash and debunk HTML. I'm sure you can ditch that BBQ party or a trip to the mountains and spent your time mastering HTML. Or...

9/19/2004 |

No comments yet | 1 TrackBack

Your Site Through Users' Eyes

Via WaSP came an interesting link about a study of how people perceive and interact with web sites. Researchers at Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism and New Media, and Eyetools Inc. took 46 internet users and analyzed their browsing patterns and eye movements as they were presented with various site designs. The results of this research have a great educational value to anyone involved with web development. Can user testing get any better than seeing everything through users' eyes?

9/16/2004 |

No comments yet | No TrackBacks

Flash of Unstyled Content

Sometimes it's a good idea to hide your CSS rules from older browsers. Why? Because older browsers, version 4.0 of Netscape and Internet Explorer/Win, had flaky support of CSS. You can move basic CSS rules into one external style sheet and <link> it, while advanced CSS rules go into another style sheet which you @import.

9/14/2004 |

No comments yet | No TrackBacks

Poll: Describe Your Job

How would you describe your job? Does it bore you to tears and makes you feel insignificant? Is it 50/50: gives you some vocational growth but is still boring? Or is it the best job you ever had, one you would not trade for anything? The one that makes you feel you make in impact, a contribution? Cast your vote anonymously on the home page. The poll is open until the end of September.

9/13/2004 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Validation Easter Egg

When asked to list some really cool, "selling" features of ASP.NET one of the first things that come to mind are validation controls. I am a huge believer in validating everything a user enters. At my previous job we had a monster web app developed in "classic" ASP, and about 50% of all bugs were related to invalid data that was never validated in the first place.

9/11/2004 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Microsoft Goes a Long Way to Fix Games

In our everyday quest to bash Microsoft as an evil empire we tend to overlook some little-known stories of Microsoft folks going "the second mile" to accommodate deficiencies of third-party software and their buggy behavior. If you feel nostalgic about the ol' DOS times, or a low-level geek still lives in you Raymond Chen's blog is an outstanding read.

9/11/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

A CMS Plugin Wanted

We're developing a mini CMS for a client, and as long as the code is in our hands, it validates at XHTML 1.0 Strict. I know for sure that once we fork the project over people will be pasting chunks of text from MS Word with its horrendous HTML. We can't really tell them, Learn proper HTML and don't use Word. Won't happen. It's like telling me to fix my car on my own. So here's what I'm looking for...

9/7/2004 |

25 comments | No TrackBacks

A Weekend Well Spent

Last week my home desktop PC, which I built myself 4.5 years ago, showed some final signs of aging—its motherboard quit detecting IDE drives. My first impulse was to check out the latest and greatest from Dell, but to my surprise, Dell is unto something funky with a whole new line of gaming computers priced over $1,000. I don't know what's wrong with Dell and what happened to "affordable computers" but I was badly disappointed. Another problem with Dell is that you have to call "outsourced" help desk should trouble seek you. No offense meant, but everyone I know who called Dell for help has been pretty upset about it. Including myself.

9/7/2004 |

11 comments | No TrackBacks

Server Controls Are a Blessing

I wanted to clarify a thing or two in a follow-up to my recent post, Back To Basics: HTML. A reader sent me an email asking if it was all right to use server controls despite their somewhat messy output. I appreciate the question, and I think it'll come up more than once which is why I'd like to dispel any misunderstanding: server controls are a blessing compared to include files and COM objects from the ASP days. In ASP.NET we can't live without server controls, because even the Page class all web forms ultimately derive from, is one big control, too.

9/5/2004 |

6 comments | No TrackBacks

Table Manners

Via Ryan Farley came a hysterical snip of T-SQL code which shows severe abuse of tempdb. A dB developer at my previous job introduced me to table variables a while ago as an eggcellent alternative to tempdb. I think table variables are badly overlooked which is why I decided to post this.

9/3/2004 |

No comments yet | No TrackBacks

Back To Basics: HTML

In this installment of Back To Basics I wanted to talk about HTML as we know it, or don't know it. Browsing around sites developed in ASP.NET I couldn't help noticing that most developers don't even code proper HTML. Why is ASP.NET development plagued with this? Let's analyze.

9/2/2004 |

10 comments | No TrackBacks

Web talk

September 2004