DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by rstrahl

No Empty Selector in jQuery

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:42:52 GMT

One thing that bugs me about jQuery selectors is that empty or null selectors return the HTML document object, rather than an empty jQuery object. This has bitten me on a number of occasions and requires some

Avoid this tricky conflict between ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:31:03 GMT

One example of how ASP.NET AJAX can conflict with jQuery's plugins, due to its modification of some JavaScript base types, and how to fix the problem in this particular case.

Introduction to jQuery Article posted

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:46:05 GMT

I've posted Part 1 in a 2 part series on jQuery today. Part 1 covers the client side features of jQuery from the basics all the way through creating simple plugins and extending jQuery. This is a long article that discusses a host of the really useful features that jQuery brings to the table for client side Javascript development. Part 2 will then follow up with server side ASP.NET integration.

jQuery.position() on Invisible Elements fails

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 08:41:20 GMT

Rick has found a solution how to get object position when it is hidden

jQuery CSS Property Monitoring Plug-in updated

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:31:41 GMT

I've revisited a jQuery plug-in that can be used to monitor changes in CSS properties and be notified when a specific property changes providing an Observer style callback. This can be a handy feature when building behavior components that attach functionality to other elements and need to keep these behaviors in sync with the original object. This update utilizes a more efficient approach and allows monitoring many properties at once.

Client Script Resources in ASP.NET Controls revisited

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:06:15 GMT

Embedding script resources as part of ASP.NET Control development is tricky business and requires a bunch of options to ensure that script code loads correctly and maybe more importantly allows the page developer to decide whether the resources should be used at all. Here are a few thoughts and some work in progress on how I deal with script resources in my controls.

Retrieving Web Resources and Content Types in Code

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:44:36 GMT

One of my components requires to serve specific Web Resources directly and optionally compress them optionally. While serving resources is straight forward, also grabbing the content type to know what type of resource you're dealing with is a little more work. Here's how.

jQuery Form Serialization without ASP.NET ViewState

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:31:10 GMT

When building AJAX applications that send client form content to the server, ViewState and EventValidation fields can get in the way. Using jQuery you can make short work skipping over these fields and send only the raw POST data to the server.

Watch out for Date Kind in JSON Deserialization

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:23:39 GMT

If you're working with dates in JSON serialization make sure you carefully normally dates returned from JSON deserialization. Reason is that especially the Microsoft Serializers return dates as Utc dates which can produce some unexpected and often missed results.

FireFox 3 and Static File Caching Problems

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:51:20 GMT

FireFox 3.0 apparently is much more aggressive in caching content than previous versions of FireFox. While this is good for performance in many situations I've noticed that this is seriously becoming a problem in some of my applications where support files like scripts and CSS files get updated in applications and FireFox doesn't recognize those changes. Looks like last-modified headers are not respected by FF3.

Accessing a SafeArray Result from a COM Call in C#

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:02:47 GMT

I'm calling a COM object from managed code that's returning a binary response, which is returned as a SafeArray of bytes from the COM server. The problem is the SafeArray is not exactly easily accessed in .NET and the debugger provides some misleading information for the returned COM type. Here's how to access the SafeArray from C# code.

A simple jQuery Client Centering Plugin

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:31:12 GMT

Centering content is a useful client side UI feature especially when working with pop ups or popup windows when displayed for the first time. Here's a little jQuery plug in that handles centering in the window and in other container elements easily.

Monitoring Html Element CSS Changes in JavaScript

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:18:52 GMT

I have the need to monitor movement of elements in an HTML document via JavaScript. Unfortunatey there are no events that fire if HTML elements are moved around the document either via dragging or by programmatic location changes. As a workaround I created a jQuery CSS monitoring plugin that fires event when a given CSS property changes.

JSON Serializers in .NET - not there yet

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:01:02 GMT

.NET Framework 3.5 provides a couple of choices for JSON Serialization and Deserialization. Find out how you can use them and also some of the problems that both of these tools impose.

Static Singletons for ASP.NET Controls

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:23:09 GMT

When building generic ASP.NET Server controls that also provide a sort of API service to other custom controls or page level code, it's often necessary to ensure that only a single instance of a control exists, and that only that single instance of this control or component can be accessed in the context of an ASP.NET request. Using HttpContext and it's Item collection makes it easy to create reusable, cacheable instances and ensure you're only running a Singleton instance of it.

Use jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX to build a client side Repeater

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:16:04 GMT

An example of one way of using ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery to implement client-side Repeater functionality. Using this technique on one of my own sites, I realized an over 400% performance gain.

Crashing WCF 3.5 JSON Services with DateTime.MinValue

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:01:37 GMT

Ran into some odd issues with WCF 3.5 and HTTP JSON services hanging up an ASP.NET application. It appears that there are a couple of problems with null serialization and DateTime.MinValue serialization that are causing this problem.

A jQuery Client Status Bar

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:46:03 GMT

Status bars are very useful in client applications to display well status information and having a reusable and easily callable and configured status component to display messages is extremely handy. Here's an implementation that uses jQuery plus a bit of CSS to make short work of displaying status content.

jQuery Books Review

Fri, 30 May 2008 21:31:08 GMT

Here's a review of three jQuery books I've read over the last few months as well as links to a couple of cheat sheets.

Ending a Response without Response.End() Exceptions?

Mon, 26 May 2008 07:40:43 GMT

There's not really a clean way to end the current Response output and then keep on processing an ASP.NET request. Here's a scenario and a few observations on Response closing behaviors.

Non ASPX Extensions and Authentication in IIS 7 Integrated Pipeline

Fri, 23 May 2008 11:33:17 GMT

Ran into an issue where IIS 7's integrated pipeline exhibits different behavior authenticating non ASPX extensions. Looks like IIS 7 only authenticates mainline files resulting in Context.User==null or Context.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated==false on all other extensions. For example hitting CustomHit.axd doesn't provide user credentials where an CustomHit.aspx does.

ASP.NET Connections Slides and Samples Posted

Mon, 05 May 2008 15:31:02 GMT

I've posted my session slides and samples from my ASP.NET Connections sessions last week in Orlando. I did three sessions at the conference and you can check out the slides and samples here.

jQuery.ui Sortable

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:46:04 GMT

Sortable lists are a common thing to work on and jQuery.ui's Sortable plug in makes it super easy to create very nice looking sortable lists that work consistently even in complex layouts.

Variable Scoping in Anonymous Delegates in C#

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 03:31:02 GMT

On a few occasions anonymous methods still throw me for a conceptual loop. Anonymous methods work like closures and so variable scoping can be extended into these anonymous methods from the calling method scope which is pretty damn useful and the basis for what makes Lambda expressions work in the first place.

Writing Code 39 Barcodes with Javascript

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:31:03 GMT

Lou previously showed how easy it is to generate Code 39 Barcodes using the imaging toolkit, DotImage, now he shows how to do it in pure JavaScript. "I wanted to make it easy to deploy so I don't use images. Luckily, 1D barcodes are easy to make with just colored table cells, so I just generate a one row table with a column for each bar. I set the width of the column to be the width of the bar and then color it either black or white."