ASP.NET Resources

December 2005

More Workflow Goodies

I’m keeping my eyes wide open for examples of Windows Workflow Foundation uses in ASP.NET. Back in November they ran a webcast, Using Workflow in Web Applications (Level 200), and it took me only a month to realize that I could download it recorded. Am I fast or what?

12/28/2005 |

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Prototype vs. Atlas

Prototype is an extremely helpful JavaScript library by Sam Stephenson. The amazing thing about Prototype is that, while most folks use JavaScript to write procedural code, Sam not only pushes it beyond mere DOM manipulation, but also heavily capitalizes on the object-orientedness of this language. I’ve spent hours digging through Prototype, and was surprised how poorly the OO nature of JavaScript was described in books and how well it was captured in Prototype.

12/26/2005 |

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How to Name Event Handlers in Global.asax

If you are not reading this in an aggregator, there’s a new article up, Session_Start or Session_OnStart? For quite some time I’ve wondered how to properly name event handlers in global.asax. It turns out the naming scheme is very lax. I know this question comes up in newsgroups quite often, and I’m hoping we can put this issue to rest now.

12/19/2005 |

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Typography Primer

Adobe has a nice introduction to typography, Typography Primer (744K pdf), for those who want to get their feet wet in this huge field. Learn about measuring type, word and letter spacing, typographic color, types with optical size variations, expert-set typefaces, Serif vs Sans Serif, etc. There’s also an overview of how to choose a typeface for body copy and headlines.

12/18/2005 |

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Mix 06 Announced

I came across Mix 06 via Erik Porter’s blog. It’s a conference for web designers and web developers put together by Microsoft. The site has little information at this time, but I’m really excited to see what’s up there already. I’m also happy to see Microsoft finally targeting people on the other side of the fence and trying to woo designers into their fold. Good, timely move considering the now-available VS 2005 and other upcoming tools (Acrylic, Sparkle, Quartz). This is definitely a site to keep an eye on.

12/16/2005 |

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A Quitter or Mismanaged Talent?

Today’s episode of apologetics is about folks who knock on your door with a resume in their hand. Suppose, your company is hiring and put out fliers announcing an opening. CVs pour in and a headhunt begins. You come across a resume whose owner has changed his/her job 5 times in the last 10 years (please note: I’m not talking about particular companies or individuals. This is only an exercise). Your reaction?

12/15/2005 |

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Passing Values Between ASP.NET Pages

In ASP.NET 1.x we’ve had very few ways to pass information from page to page. The idea was to declare public properties in a page, call Server.Transfer, and do a funky cast of Context.Handler to access properties of the calling page (for an in-depth discussion see the MSD article Passing Values Between Web Forms Pages).

12/14/2005 |

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Stock.XCHNG Relaunched

I noticed most of last week Stock.XCHNG was undergoing maintenance and upgrades. If you’re not familiar with this site, I highly recommend you check it out. They are a great alternative to sites of expensive stock imagery (*cough* Getty, *cough* Corbis) and an inspiration to the needs of your inner designer.

12/11/2005 |

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Fixing Visual Studio.NET Style Builder

Mad props go to Christopher Williams for pointing out a way to update the Visual Studio.NET 2003 style builder with CSS2.1. In my article Bringing CSS2 to Visual Studio.NET I only outlined how to get the VS.NET designer to include CSS2.1 properties in IntelliSense. Chris points out which DLL to update to get the style builder to do the same.

12/7/2005 |

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Cheers to SxSW For Listening

Folks at SxSW heard me bemoan their Interactive agenda and were quick to initiate a conversation. Not that they enjoyed the criticism, but I’m glad they were willing act on it. It’s a very diverse crowd they deal with, and it’s tough to please everyone. I may not like their panel line-up, but I do like their spirit. If you’ve got something to say, say it—they are listening (which is a rare thing these days).

12/7/2005 |

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Convergence Is Hawt!

I just noticed something. How many times do you see the meaningless word “convergence” in the list of SxSW 2006 panels?

12/6/2005 |

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SxSW 2006 Disappointment

My buddy Brent, who I met at this year’s SxSW, sent me a link to the next year’s line-up of panels, and I gotta say I’m very disappointed.

12/6/2005 |

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Taming MSN Search Web Service

I got so sick of messing with full-text search here, on this site, that I decided to give the MSN Search web service a try. I’d imagine the last thing hosting companies want is that you create a full-text catalog. They wouldn’t run SQL Server Agent for everyone to keep their catalogs fresh and allow incremental updates. Besides, full-text search results are nowhere close in accuracy to those of MSN and Google.

12/2/2005 |

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Windows Workflow Foundation and ASP.NET

I’m getting more and more excited about the Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) and the role it may (or will) play in streamlining user interface of web applications. There isn’t a whole written about WWF, but David Chappell’s “early-look” article at MSDN is an awesome introduction (some people just have a gift for explaining complex things in plain language).

12/1/2005 |

5 comments | No TrackBacks

Web talk

December 2005