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 »

Ok so you have all seen them: “8 million tools for web development”, “5 gagillion tools that if you don’t use you are stupid”.

So of course you click on them (after all that is why people write them) and you find out that the tools are for Mac lovers, Ubuntu gurus, or some other niche that you are not a part of. You find a couple of doodads worth looking into, but overall you find yourself disappointed…again. As a .net developer it can be frustrating because it seems the blogiverse thinks you are “eat the paste special” because you don’t use Ruby.

I am here to tell you…you don’t eat glue. You may have chosen to develop .net web apps because your employer is a Microsoft shop and you don’t have a choice, or you chose it because you want an IDE that is actually useful. Either way there are a lot of tools out there for you whether you are a .net novice or ninja.

So here is your list of tools that if you don’t use them as a .net developer then you obviously are a contributor to the “Baby Seal Clubbing Foundation”.

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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 »

Picture this…

Its 1:45 am. You have the shakes from too much coffee, but you are smiling because you have just finishing putting the final touches on your tableless, buzz-word compliant magnum opus. Just before you crash you decide to see how it looks in the new Safari for Windows you just downloaded. Suddenly, your masterpiece looks like some other kinda piece and you begin to weep.

We have all been there, and I am pretty sure that I have invented a few new four letter words over the years because of it. CSS is great, but it can be a bear to get working across the various browsers.

Enter the concept of CSS standards and framework libraries…

These are basically CSS files designed to make the browsers treat CSS elements the same way. Today I am gonna take a look at a couple of them (Blueprint and Tripoli) and give you peek into what is possible with each.

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For a while now I have been writing about how to create a Side Scrolling Page Effect similar to the one that is seen on Panic’s Coda site. I have built the effect using 3 different frameworks and I have found that each framework has its own pluses and minuses, but in the end I decided to build a more robust solution using Scriptaculous (you can see why in the conclusion section of the MooTools article).

Today I am rounding out the series with the posting of that robust solution. Basically this is my take on that effect and what I implemented for my client. How the basic effect is achieved is covered in the other articles, so today’s goal is to explain what takes it from a simple demo to a fully functioning, cross-browser compatible website. At the end of the article I will, as usual, have a link to where you can download all the code used in the demo.

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I have always been fascinated by online start pages. In fact, some of the earliest articles on this blog were about them.

I have been a member of too many of them to count over the last couple of years. Before they called them that, I had some on places like Yahoo! and even old-school AOL (man that brings back some bad memories). There is just something about being able to bring all the information that is important to you together in a single place. Nowadays its almost required if you are an avid blog reader.

I have always been fascinated by the different approaches, technologies, and ui styles so a while back I contacted a couple of the older start pages out there: Netvibes and Pageflakes. Unfortunately, the Netvibes guys are too swamped right now to finish the interview we started, but I am happy to announce that Ole Brandenburg, one of the co-founders of PageFlakes agreed to “sit down” with me and answer some questions.

So without further ado… 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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