Web Development
There are 26 entries for the tag
Web Development
Double submit prevention is one of those things that developers sometimes have a hard time “getting”. It has an obvious fix – JUST CLICK THE BUTTON ONCE! No matter how obvious that fix is for us developers, chances are that at some point you’re going to be asked to go a little further and add code to prevent people from clicking your submit buttons twice – as was the case for me recently, when I had to look at this issue in 2 separate legacy codebases that we were lucky enough to inherit from other dev teams. ...
This Mobile Frameworks Comparison Chart is currently in development, but it’s a quick and useful way to compare a large number of frameworks before starting on a project to find the one that’s most suited to your needs. Allowing you to select the platforms you’d like to support is obvious, but the chart goes deeper than that, allowing you to specify things such as which hardware features you need (i.e. Accelerometer, Camera, etc.), what languages you’d like to use, and even what sort of license you’re looking for. Tags: Web Development, iPhone, iPad
If you’re unlucky enough to need to test web applications or sites against older versions of Internet Explorer, then using virtual machines is the obvious way to go, with the only downside being they tend to eat a lot of disk space. If you’re a Mac/Linux user, or simply don’t want to create a VM just to install a legacy browser, then you can use these Microsoft VHDs (one for IE 7, 8 and 9), which run on VirtualBox. Of course there’s no IE6, because we’re not too concerned about how our websites look for people in China running...
The mobile boilerplates and templates keep on rolling in. Magazine Grid looks like a great starting point if you’re looking to present some text/images in a clear, easy to read way. It’s from the folks at Asidemag, which is a pretty impressive iPad tuned HTML5 magazine. My initial reaction is that it’d be even better if it had a bit of navigation/transition support built into it, but I guess the whole idea is that it’s nice and lightweight so you can combine it with whatever you like. Touchy Boilerplate (according to the website) “goes beyond just an...
This week has been less than satisfying from a developer’s point of view, and I’ve found myself stuck hanging out with my good buddies Outlook, Word and Excel a lot more than I’d have liked However despite that I’ve still managed to pick up a few useful bits of mobile development information. Allow me to share, if you will. jQuery mobile – resizing to landscape mode doesn’t work properly. Basically when rotating the device, the windows new size wasn’t quite correct. While it felt like a minor annoyance at first, it quickly became pretty clear it...
I’m not a huge fan of SSRS, but as far as reporting solutions goes it seems to do the job most of the time. Here’s a couple of useful links to fix issues I’ve run into recently – the first courtesy of the LavaBlast Software blog, and second courtesy of Doug. Gotcha: Reporting Services Viewer bugs on Google Chrome – The Report Viewer control has always had many cross compatibility issues. This post details adding some JavaScript hackery to fix a couple of specific issues with Google Chrome (Each button in the toolbar takes a separate line - you...
Gotcha: iPad versus ASP.NET - Your web app looks awesome on the iPad, until… You decide to save it to your home screen. Useful stuff to know. If you’re doing this with a web application you’ve developed, you probably want to make it appear a bit more like a native app, so you’ll add two meta tags to make the experience nicer (add an app icon and remove the navigation bar). Remember: Safari caches these tags when creating the shortcut, so you will need to delete/recreate the shortcut to force it to refresh. ...
IIS Express is great for web developers. Being able to test things using a “proper” Web Server rather than Cassini with it’s quirks but without needing the hassle of running a full IIS setup is a great timesaver, and plus it means you have the ability to use additional IIS modules locally, such as the IIS Rewrite modules. Today I accidentally left a production ‘non www to www’ redirection rule enabled locally on a site I was working on, and so of course when I ran it up I was redirected through to www.localhost – I went and disabled...
DepthJS allows any web page to interact with the Microsoft Kinect using Javascript. Tags: Microsoft, JavaScript, Web Development
There are many things that fall under the wide umbrella of SEO/SEM, and as a developer chances are high that you don’t really want to know about a large number of them. However like it or not if you’re creating web sites or applications there are some things you absolutely need to understand. All of what’s contained in this post is pretty simple stuff – but it’s absolutely essential. There are so many resources out there covering SEO, and yet I keep seeing sites which ignore some or all of the basic things I’m going to mention, and I...
I resisted ASP.NET MVC for quite some time. Not intentionally, and not for for any real compelling reason, but for a while WebForms coupled with my version of an MVP implementation was doing its thing pretty nicely, and a few of the WebForms projects I was working on had customers who really had no reason to shift technologies. Whether you’re charging by the hour or working in a fixed price scenario it can be a little hard to justify jumping into new technologies (although at this point you could hardly call MVC ‘new’) without good reason. Having said that,...
Best Practices for form design is a slideshow on the topic of… form design! Boom! Hopefully not a surprise, however I did find a few things in the slides a little surprising. Vertical labels often lead to the fastest form completion times – I like vertical labels because they usually require simpler HTML, so I’m happy now to have another reason to recommend them. The pros and cons for the other layout options also make for interesting reading. Avoid optional fields – when you read this as a best practise recommendation you stop and pause for a moment...
While working with radio buttons in MVC2 I’m seeing some strange behaviour. I suspect I’m overlooking something obvious here, so please jump in dear reader and laugh at my expense. The scenario involves radio buttons, and wanting to set one of the options as being selected (“checked” for a radio button). According to logic and many Stackoverflow posts, you should be able to do something with the checked property, however this seems broken for me – consider the following, where none of these three attempts at setting check should be valid, however all three of them result in the...
Here’s a couple of browser inconsistencies I’ve come across lately – can anyone tell me.. Why Internet Explorer shows the resulting JavaScript of ASP.NET’s (nasty and horrible) RegisterStartupScript calls in the page’s source, whereas Chrome does not? Why placing an img tag on a page with height=”0” and width=”0” absolutely kills the page performance in IE8, turning it into a slugging non-performing mess, however Chrome and Firefox handle it without a problem? Finally, does IE9 hide the JavaScript and fix the image? That’d be kind of funny/sad/ironic. Tags: Web Development
This timespan parser is a handy addition to your tablesorter toolbox, useful for calendaring / scheduling applications. Tags: jQuery, Web Development
Apparently the ASP.NET GridView is the most commonly used data control in the ASP.NET control toolkit! I’d also wager a bet that it’s one of the most abused controls, and I know that it’s certainly responsible for generating some of the worst excuses for ASP.NET code I’ve seen. My personal nemesis is the overuse of FindControl - in my ever so humble opinion, if you have to use FindControl at all then you’ve probably failed. Sure there are exceptions, but as a general rule that’s a good one to go by. However the ASP.NET GridView Tips and Tricks...
Even though some people debate the effectiveness of the request validation that comes built into ASP.NET, you get it for free so it makes sense to use it. So when working with a HTML editor which is going to be posting back “potentially dangerous HTML” you’ll probably want to use an editor which lets you encode its content, like TinyMCE does via its XML encoding. If you’re interested and haven’t used its XML encoding before then you can read more about it here) in order to avoid disabling request validation. Normally this all works well, however it seems that...
I’ve had a few posts on the topic of Microsoft.Data.dll sitting open in my browser for a few days, and I keep coming back to them trying to work out what I think of it. In some ways it doesn’t matter, because I’m never going to use it – which is fine, because I’m not the intended demographic. If you’ve not seen it already and want to get enraged/interested (pick one!), then basically the syntax is a simplification of ADO.NET and LINQ allowing queries such as the following:
using (var db = Database.OpenFile("Northwind")) {
...
I’ve recently been using a lot of the jQuery tablesorter plugin across many tables containing many different types of data. It’s a great plugin, but occasionally its documentation can be a little lacking in parts. One of the first useful things you might want is the list of inbuilt data types that it handles. Most of the time these will be auto detected, however sometimes you’ll need to specify them manually (either in your jQuery, or by adding some markup to your table header, i.e. <th class="{sorter: false}"> ). Here’s the list of built in data types: ...
Firebug Lite 1.3.0 beta for Google Chrome is making it easier for me to live without Firefox. It’s still missing a few features, but it’s a start! Firebug Lite is not a substitute for Firebug, or Chrome Developer Tools. It is a tool to be used in conjunction with these tools. Firebug Lite provides the rich visual representation we are used to see in Firebug when it comes to HTML elements, DOM elements, and Box Model shading. It provides also some cool features like inspecting HTML elemements with your mouse, and live editing CSS properties....
It's coming up to the 2 year mark since I resigned from my full time job and went into freelancing / owning my own businesses. After many years of working as an employee, a contractor and doing small bits of freelancing on the side I probably thought that switching to freelancing would be a bit easier than it ended up being, which is part of why I wanted to write a little about my experiences. There's plenty of material out there offering freelancers helpful tips or things to avoid - this post is similar to many of those, but it's...
“'WebForm_PostBackOptions' is undefined” is one of those errors which can have a variety of causes. Here’s another one to add to that list – it’s pretty obvious, but easy to overlook if you’re in a rush. Firstly, check your httpModules, as custom modules can often cause this issue. However in my case I didn’t have any custom modules, in fact I’d just removed a couple – ripping out Intelligica’s ReWriter to replace it with the stock functionality provided by System.Web.Routing.. which of course was where the problem lies. I’d forgotten to add the StopRoutingHandler for all *.axd calls....
In an interesting move, Internet Explorer 7 is now available to users not running a genuine copy of Windows. Previously IE7 required the Windows Genuine Advantage validation process be completed before download. This could easily be a strategy tactic in the ongoing browser wars. Having a single (larger) number for one browser is going to look a lot healthier than having 2 smaller numbers. It could also be something that Microsoft are doing for the general good of the Internet community, which is certainly the tone that the blog post tries to convey - however you can make your...
I've had a load of tabs open in my browser for the last week, all of which are useful and interesting, but none of which justify a full post. Here they are: Scott Guthrie talking about the asp:Listiew Control which is coming in ASP.NET 3.5 - I've been working with GridViews and Repeaters over the past couple of weeks, and doing so is making me really look forward to the ListView! As welcome as the control will be, you have to think that it's been a loooong time in coming (thanks for the link Doug, even if I did forget...
"Fun"!
This weekend I was working on some basic ASP.NET input forms inside an existing application. The forms can be opened for read mode, or for edit mode - as you might expect from a form! There was some C# code which was setting the textboxes to be enabled or disabled (but still visible) depending on the appropriate edit mode, and I naievely figured it'd be pretty easy to throw in some css to simply remove the textbox borders when the form was being viewed, which would make the data look like labels.
Labels being what should have been used in this...
Recently I had a need to add some simple tooltip text to a header of a Gridview. Nothing fancy, just a quick sentence explaining the column headers as they all contained abbreviated text. My searches all turned up overly complex dhtml samples, involving large chunks of JavaScript. These were all fine, but I was really after something a lot more simple than that. It's easy to achieve using some basic HTML with the GridView, so here it is for anyone who wants to do something similar.
After the simple example, I'll show you how you can make things...
About me
My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a developer, consultant, business owner and writer based in Auckland,
New Zealand (pictured below!). My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, jQuery, Ajax,
SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies.
I also have about 15 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies. While Notes/Domino
is no longer my primary focus I still like to dabble and keep my skills up to date.
I own and run 2 businesses - Hawkins Consulting Services,
and Ignition Development.
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Popular Content
Troubleshooting WebResource.axd
The .NET 2.0 framework changed the way clientside JavaScript is
delivered to the browser. Previously, ASP.NET 1.1 used the
aspnet_client directory whereas now 2.0 uses WebResource.axd.
Published on October 8, 2006
Microsoft AJAX Extensions: Sys.Debug is null or not an object
One of the breaking changes which was made with
the 1.0 release of the Microsoft Ajax Extensions was the renaming
of the 'Debug' class to 'Sys.Debug' for reasons of compatiability
with other frameworks. Breaking changes like this can often be a source of frustration..
Published on May 22, 2007
Simple ASP.NET Character Counter
A textbox character counter is a pretty simple piece of functionality, and there's a lot of different ways to apply one to your application. The following method is nice and simple, and can be done using only clientside JavaScript if required, or combined with server side code in order to create a more dynamic effect
Published on December 4, 2006
Adding Tooltips to Gridview Headers
As the title says, this is a very simple but dynamic way of achieving tooltip text on a header column. It's not overly flash, but it's lightweight and quick to implement.
Published on April 15, 2007
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