June 2004 Entries

Milan Negovan has started a series of posts on his blog where he is analyzing and redesigning the microsoft.com start page. If you've ever had a peek at the microsoft.com site in Firefox, Opera, etc, then you will have noticed that it looks quite a bit different than in IE. But it's not just about cross-browser compatibility. Milan takes the time to walk you through how to design the site right using current web standards. It really is, as he puts it, a web standards showcase. It's not just talk

Just caught that the monthly MSDN magazines are downloadable in CHM format. Who knew? Well not me, but how cool of an idea is that?! Just go to view the issue on the MSDN Magazine site and you'll see the link to download it in the upper-right corner. Cool.

One of the cool new things introduced in ASP.NET 2.0 is Master Pages. Master Pages give you the ability to define a master page layout and look that is used throughout a site to give a consistent look & feel to all pages. Any updates or changes to the look & feel of the site is done in only one place - the Master Page. Something that might be useful is the ability to dynamically load a master page at runtime, for example based on user preferences or to implement a simple skinning ability for a s

Often with web applications you want to track traffic statistics to get a general idea of the number of visitors viewing a resource. Whether it be a web page, an RSS feed, an e-mail or whatever, you might want an inconspicuous way to determine that it has been "viewed". A common tactic for tracking visitors is the use of what is known as web bugs. Web bugs are small 1x1 pixel images that will be put on a web page or e-mail that will log information about the requestor each time it is requested o

Over the last year or so I've been trying to make by web UIs more CSS driven and not use tables as often as I do. But it is an ongoing battle. Who ever said that old-habits die hard wasn't kidding. The use of tables comes out so natually when I write my markup that it is second nature. It is the way I have always done web UI layout. Problem is that tables are inflexible, have a tendency to get messy fast as you get deeper and deeper embedded tables, but worst of all they are slow for the browser

I just read an awesome article from Brad Wilson (posted to his DotNetDevs site) about implementing the Visitor pattern using Reflection. Man, that was some truly great stuff. A must read. I've been working on something similar in C# 2.0, but going the route of using generics instead. The Reflection route is very interesting but as Brad mentioned, you'd have to use some sort of caching scheme to offset the performance penalties.

There are some really cool changes coming in ASP.NET's web.config files that I am really excited about. I'll just point out a few that I've used (I hate going back to 1.1 because I can't use them). The web.config file in ASP.NET 2.0 allows you to set a lot of things that will apply everywhere in your site.

OK. So I don't really want to jump on the VB bashing train, I mean, isn't it just too easy of a target? Not that I care for VB or anything, but this was just too funny to not pass along!

Scott Hanselman posted a good reminder on multi-layered/tiered design. If you have already read it, read it again and live it. If you haven't read it yet, then shame on you for not subscribing to Scott - and you call yourself a .NET developer?! Go read it.