Man it has been crazy busy as of late…lots of projects…not enough time. Sorry for the lack of articles!!

Ok…so one of my latest projects has been a bit different. They have an old Access database that they have been using for years as an admin tool to keep track of their clients. A lot of work has been put into this system so they didn’t want to throw it away, but at the same time they wanted to ease the load of the admins by allowing the clients to update their own information over the web.

So basically what they needed was a website that talked to their server and updated their info behind the scenes. Sounds like a job for web service right? Yup, but times are changing with the whole MS web service thing…with .NET 3 and 3.5 the new concept of WCF has been introduced. Now WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) can do A LOT of different stuff, but today I am going to give a quick lesson on how to setup and use WCF services in place of a traditional web service.

Its not all that tricky, and once you get it, you can really expand what a website can do…so lets get started. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I was working with a client who wanted to display a product catalog with an accordion. I have worked with accordions on several other projects in the past so I said “No problem!”. Once I got to work I noticed that there was a big difference between the accordions I had worked with before and this beast…this one was going to be dynamic. Worse yet…each level of the accordion depended on the one above it (known as hierarchical data). Yuck.

Early on I was still optimistic about the whole thing, but as the hours rolled on and my solution still didn’t work, I began to get frustrated. What started as a tale of woe ends on a happy note because I did get it all working. In order to spare you the pain I will explain how I got it working with a pretty easy solution.

Off we go. Read the rest of this entry »

So the last few weeks have been crazy busy. I have been completely swamped with client work, and while that is a good problem to have, it does take away time to do other stuff (like blogging!).

One of the things I have been working on deals with handling large blobs of data. Its a bit of a tangent since it has absolutely nothing to do with UI, but I figured that since there are a lot of developers reading this site, it might be helpful.

So what do I mean by large amounts of data? Well, for the app I am building we were testing our theoretical limits for performance reasons. Imagine a grid or an Excel spreadsheet that has 700 columns (Excel itself only allows 256) and 30,000 rows. That basically equates to 1.65 million cells in the grid. Now if you compare that lump of data to what, say, Google throws around, its pretty insignificant; however, when it comes to keeping it in memory and accessing it quickly it is a bit beefy.

Most of the time you would get around this problem by paging through the data somehow, or having some sort of filter. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t have this luxury. The application needed the whole kit and caboodle accessible to it at all times. With that as the challenge we went to work.

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Earlier this week I started a series on the old workhorse, .Net Membership that was introduced with ASP.NET 2.0 waaay back in 2005. Why drudge it up? Well, simply put, it is really useful and can save you a lot of development time. Also, it isn’t sexy so it doesn’t get a whole lotta press (like say…Ajax) so I figured this series could serve as a nice “reintroduction”.

The first part of the series introduced the functionality and explained how to set it up for your site. Today I am going to go deep and explain the LoginView control. This is definitely one of the more useful controls developed by Microsoft when it comes to user management and it bears a bit of time to look at it.

In addition to the basics of the control, I will also get into some of its “quirks” so you don’t beat your head against the wall in frustration the first time you use it.

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So with my little CMS client I am building, I have decided to use the .NET Membership functionality that has been a part of .NET since 2.0 (it is also being used in 3.0 in case you were wondering like I was). This isn’t some new fangled javascript library. This is an old workhorse that has been around a while (since 2005) but a lot of developers don’t know much about it. As I worked with it I noticed that it is pretty nice, but it has some funkiness that needs to be worked around. In the end I figured it would be helpful for new and old devs to get the lowdown on this functionality.

So what is Membership? Basically it is MS’s way of getting rid of the tedious stuff that is part of every functional website. Stuff like creating and managing users, logging in and out, user roles, etc. How do they get rid of it? Basically they have built a system of database goodies and server controls that do most of the heavy lifting for you. Notice I said most…

Over the next few days I will go over what it is, why I chose to use it, and how to get it to be useful for your app. Today’s goal is to give you an overview of the functionality and explain how to get it up and running on your site. Read the rest of this entry »

So my most recent client needs a CMS system. There are a million out there, but the problem is my client is a complete Microsoft shop so I had to write the page in ASP.NET. That changes the game a lot. Unless you want to pay some serious cash, the choices for a CMS system are slim.

That isn’t to say there aren’t some free ones out there because there are. I uncovered two during my search (AxCMS and umbraco). I didn’t delve very far into either of these because it was shortly my client and I discussed the CMS system that we decided to make the page have a side scrolling page effect.

When you create a page that has a slick effect you basically throw out any packaged software because inevitably it won’t fit in with the effect. So that is how I came to build my own CMS system. Now I use that term lightly because compared to something like Wordpress, mine is rather weak.

However, it does what it was designed to do…save pages. It could easily be enhanced to allow things such as creating completely new pages, deleting pages, etc, but my client didn’t need that functionality so I didn’t build it for this version, but perhaps I will in the future.

So the point of this article is to go through the steps I took to make it work (here is the final result).
It turned out to be a lot more difficult than I originally anticipated. Part of that was just the learning curve, and part of it was wrestling ASP.NET Ajax to the ground. In the end though, I am pretty proud of my first version of my CMS.

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Over the past few days I have been going over how to build a side scrolling page effect using various frameworks.

The first day I went over the basics of the effect and how to implement it using ASP.NET Ajax.
Yesterday I went over how to create the effect using scriptaculous.

Today the goal is to tackle MooTools and see how it stacks up in comparison to the other frameworks. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I began a series on creating a Side Scrolling Page. If you missed it feel free to check out part one to get a feel for what we are building, and how it works with the ASP.NET Ajax framework.

Today the goal is to tackle the same effect using the script.aculo.us framework. If you have never heard of this one, it is basically a friendly implementation of the Prototype framework (confused yet?). It has a lot of neat effects and AJAX features and is pretty darn easy to use. Good stuff.

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When I was building my portfolio page a few weeks ago, I came up with an idea for a side-scrolling page. The idea is basically, you click on an arrow and the content slides to the left or right. Cool idea, but I couldn’t wrap my head around how to get the CSS to work.

Shortly after I figured out how to get it all to work I learned that my unique idea wasn’t all that unique after all. Its still a great effect, and over the last few days I have seen a lot of people asking how to do it on various forums so it makes for a good tutorial.

When I originally started this article I was planning on using just the ASP.NET Ajax framework because that is what I was using for my latest project. However, once I got it up and running I was a bit disappointed in the performance of the animation. That is when I began hunting for another way to do it. By the end of my search I had delved in and created a side scroller using 3 different frameworks: ASP.NET Ajax, scriptaculous, and MooTools. All of them “get the job done”, but I learned that each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Over the next few days I will be going over these different frameworks and explaining what I liked and didn’t like about each one. Each will have their own demo so you can see how the finished app looks and feels, and in the end I will include a link on where you can download all the pages I made for the demos. Read the rest of this entry »

So on the site I am working on, I need some popups. I have used Lightbox before and it works wonderfully, but I wanted to try something new this time. Since I was already knee-deep in the ASP.NET Ajax framework, I figured I might as well try their ModalPopupExtender and see how that works.

Its pretty simple to get a popup to show up, but I wanted something a little prettier than the standard format of a big rectangle. Maybe some rounded corners? As it just so happens…there is a RoundedCornersExtender in the toolkit. So I figured if I put those two together I would get one sexy popup. It wasn’t quite that simple…

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