December 2006 - Posts
Last week after adding Eric Duncan's PostIcon mod, I decided to do some other UI mods to my site. Most of the changes were done to give it a cleaner look: changing the home page to show excerpts only, removing some of the left side content, adding some background color to the post footers to create a little more contrast, etc. The Edit CSS tool in Firefox's Web Developer Toolbar extension was supremely useful in planning/testing those updates. I also decided that I wanted to use a custom image in...
"Because newer is not always better" There is an FTP program that I have been using for years (since about 1997) and therefore I have become very comfortable with it. It is one of the first things that gets installed on each new computer that I own or borrow. I like one particular older version (about five years old) of that software - the one that fell right in the sweet spot of all the right features without all the bloat. After that version they began messing with the UI and really fouled up the...
I have used a couple of controls from the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit , namely the Animation Extender and the Drop Shadow for the AJAX Showcase . But today I spent some time with the new Validator Callout Extender. I have to tell you that I believe that this is currently the most useful, user-friendly, and easiest to implement control in the toolkit. Simply awesome. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | kick it! | live it!
Jim's post and picture explain it all. He looks like a happy man, doesn't he? I'll write some more about the book a bit later - like where you can go to meet a large bunch of people who contributed to it as well as the two authors. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | kick it! | live it!
If you're reading this post from my site rather than through RSS and you happened to come via the home page or some other post listing page then you may have seen the new post icons listed beside some of the post titles. How easy was it to do that? Eric A. Duncan's MiXX PostIcon package rocks! Really, something so simple to setup and deploy should not be able to deliver such visual deliciousness to a page. Now of course my out-of-the-box site design is nowhere near as good looking as Eric's site...
I've been getting cards and letters from people I don't even know asking, "Hey, how about a status update on WIWM!". Being beholden (a recent addition to my vocab thanks to the illustrious Clark Marx) to you, my dear audience, I cannot refuse such requests. After we last spoke , I had a generated a bunch of code with the help of CodeSmith and .netTiers . However, I had no idea how it worked, what to do with it, or where to begin. After a bit of staring at the screen with my finger in my nostril,...
Dear Santa, Is there an age limit on getting a pony for Christmas? A man in his mid-thirties has as much right to a Christmas pony as a 8 year old girl, right? My wife says there is an age limit and I am well past it, but she doesn't know anything. I just wanted to get it from the horse's mouth. Ha, ha, ha - "from the horse's mouth". Horse, pony. You got that didn't you, Santa? If you tell me there is an age limit and I am past it then I will quit asking... eventually. While I'm on the subject, is...
The quote of the day on my Google homepage is: "My Grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle." - Henny Youngman This reminds me of my great-grandmother that lived to 100+ and passed away a few years ago. She always said that the secret to her long life was that she had one smoke and one drink every night. She smoked one cigarette (or cigar in her earlier years) and drank one beer every evening well into her nineties. I gave up cigarettes years ago,...
In my last post I took a first pass at designing the database for WhatIWantMost.com. The next step is to use CodeSmith and .netTiers to generate... well, um... the .NET Tiers. Using .netTiers in as easy as they say it is on the site. Really, all you have to do is open up the NetTiers template file in CodeSmith and execute it. Those of you familiar with CodeSmith already know what I'm talking about, those of you not familiar with it will know once you try CodeSmith the first time. After that the only...
After reading Scott's post about Virtual Desktop Manager , one of Microsoft's XP PowerToys, I decided to give it a try. Like everyone else I have about a gazillion applications open at once and this little tools sounded like a good way to keep everything better organized. First off I'll say that it plays well with UltraMon , which is a great. After using it for the last 30 minutes I think it is very nice productivity and organization enhancing tool. I may come to depend on this one. Like Scott, I...
In my last post in the WhatIWantMost series I further defined the basic entities for the project by adding attributes I think they need. The next step is to make a first pass at designing/implementing a database to support those entities. I simply added some tables to a SQL Server database - one for each entity described earlier, added a field in each table that roughly matches to the attributes described before and then defined my relationships by adding primary and foreign keys to the schema. Following...
Friday night I tried to update the machineKey section of a web.config file of a site so that it could share logins with another couple of sites. I have done this before a couple of times with those sites. The site currently has the machine keys specified in the web.config so I assumed it would be a pretty simple procedure to swap it out with the new one shared by the other two sites. However, after saving the web.config changes the site basically stopped performing. I could get a page to come up...
In my last post I defined what I believe to be the basic set of entities needed for the site. I may need to add more later, but for now they will suffice. The goal is to make a decision and keep moving. I don't want to spend too much time over analyzing, I want to get to writing some code. Call it agile development or whatever you would like. I know that I will learn more about how the application needs to work once I get the application working. I spent a few minutes looking at that list over the...
I found an additional tool that I would like to include in the WhatIWantMost project: EViL , Dave Donaldson's Entity Validation Library. I saw Dave give a presentation on using custom attributes for entity validation at CINNUG a few months ago and I thought it was a very slick idea and neat implementation. Friday Dave posted that he had added the library to CodePlex - I knew it was a sign. A friend pointed me to a pretty cool Wishlist site that he used before put together by Jeremy Beker using PHP...
Based on quickly reviewing the user stories I have come up with a short list of entities the system should support: User - which will be subclassed as Member, Guest, and Admin Wishlist WishlistItem Category Manufacturer (probably jumping the gun on this one a bit, I will not implement it until I need it, but I wanted to bring it to my attention) Vendor Reviewer (sites) FeaturedItem Doesn't look too bad. User stuff (membership, roles, profiles) will be handled by the built-in providers for the most...
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