DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by zigamorph

Developer training, a real (non)success story

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:31:09 GMT

Helping new Developers catch-up

Which .NET Blogger Do Girls Like Better?

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:46:09 GMT

Find out which .NET blogger is more popular with the ladies. Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Jeff Atwood, or Joel Spolsky I received an invite to Google Ad Planner. As I was playing around with this new tool, I was really blown away by how much information Google has collected on specific websites. So much so that I wanted to share this tool with my readers, but I couldn't come up with an interesting way to demonstrate the capabilities. Until I started looking up some of my favorite bloggers and saw the almost embarrassing balance between females and males.

MVC CAPTCHA for Preview Release 3

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:19:37 GMT

Since my last release of the MVC toolkit some major changes have taken place in the MVC Framework. I am going to do a quick run through of how they changed the MVC CAPTCHA for the better. And what ActionParameters are and how they can benefit you.

How to get Cross Browser Compatibility Every Time

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:31:10 GMT

Cross-browser compatibility is one of the most time consuming tasks for any web designer. We've seen many different articles over the net describing common problems and fixes. I've collated all the information I could find to create some coding conventions for ensuring that your site will work first time in every browser. There are some things you should consider for Safari and Firefox also, and IE isn't always the culprit for your CSS woes.

Firefox 3.0 Released

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:14:00 GMT

Firefox 3.0 is going to be released today at 1:00 PM EST and 10:00 AM PST, other times can be found here. This is going to be a huge release where the Mozilla team is going for the Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in one day.

Chris van de Steeg's blog - » jQuery for Asp.net MVC preview 3

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:31:10 GMT

So, quite some things have changed in preview 3, which made me decide to change a lot in the jQuery for Asp.net mvc (jqmvc) too. To start with most radical one: I ditched the ajax.master. This little 'framework' does not rely on a special masterpage in your website from now on. Since things have radically changed, I'll start all over again on how to use this project.

Turn Google App Engine into your own Personal Content Delivery Network

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:01:03 GMT

As anybody who has run a growing website or blog knows, response time is going to get worse with the more users you have visiting your site. The users come from all angles, RSS feeds, homepage visits, search engine visits, people sealing your static files that you host, and pretty much anything else that can be served over HTTP. The solution to this problem is to off load your static content on to a Content Delivery Network or CDN. CDN providers cost a lot of money though, so it is nothing for us mere mortals with one server can afford. But thanks to Google anyone can now run their own CDN for free on Googles servers. Lucky for you and me Google has made the process really painless and you can even have the CDN under you own domain name. In my case static.coderjournal.com.

Getting rid of strings (2): use lambda expressions

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:31:02 GMT

In the first article of this series I talked about the problems with strings in code. This article will show you how you can use lambda expressions and expression trees as another tool to avoid strings

MVC Facebook == Wonderful Development Platform

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:08:05 GMT

ust recently I started experimenting with the ASP.NET MVC Framework and the Facebook Development Platform, it has been a very bumpy road, but I have ironed out some major issues that I would like to share with you today. I will start with a little history of what I am trying to do. For about a month and a half I have had one of my IdeaPipe interns, Dimitry, experimenting with creating a FBML (Facebook Meta Language) Application with MVC. MVC is an ideal platform for FBML because with MVC you have total control over your markup which is needed to have a lean FBML application. I am not going to go in to the differences of developing an FBML vs IFrame Facebook Application, because that information is easily found with a Google Search. What I am going to talk about is the hurdles I overcame and the custom software I had to develop to get MVC working smoothly with Facebook. One of the problems I ran into was creating a Facebook Session from my Action Method. To remedy this issue I created a FacebookAttribute that is an ActionFilterAttribute and a FacebookWebSession based off of the work done on Facebook.NET.

Give Your ASP.NET Applications Velocity

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:16:03 GMT

Scaling ASP.NET Application just got easier with a new technology that Microsoft has just released that they have dubbed codename "Velocity". This product is still in the early stages of development, but it is meant as a direct competitor against memcache.

Zune for Developers (Part 1)

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:11:48 GMT

Learn to program the Zune.

Create MessageBox user control using ASP.NET and CSS

Wed, 28 May 2008 17:01:02 GMT

This article shows how to create MessageBox user control using ASP.NET and CSS. It have the ability to render different message types. It also have a close button in order to enable users to hide the message after reading. The article will guide you through the basics of making a simple and functional user control.

ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Release

Tue, 27 May 2008 22:16:07 GMT

From ScottGu's weblog - "This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework. I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release. Today's build includes some additional features not in last month's drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation."

ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Released

Tue, 27 May 2008 17:40:53 GMT

Get the latest MVC Source Code while it is hot.

Microsoft Source Analysis Still Needs Work

Sat, 24 May 2008 01:50:44 GMT

However, I am one of those strange developers, according to Microsoft, that likes to use tabs and have my declartion of using statements outside of my namespace. If I were to take this tool seriously I would have to be shunned from the Microsoft Campus and shammed in to never coding again. I guess I should start including the Rob Conery SupressMessage on my code: [System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis.SuppressMessage("Microsoft.Design", "1000:YouShouldntBeCoding", MessageId = "1#", Justification="That's not very nice... but I'm used to it :p")]

Creating a non-Native jQuery event that returns a value

Fri, 23 May 2008 19:16:15 GMT

Today I had the need to create a custom event using jQuery, in order to launch a customized form validation event from a global submit event. I did this so I could focus in on the first form field that had an error. But I needed something more than the standard bind() and trigger() that jQuery offers because I needed the validation event to return true or false based on if the form validated or not. So this is what I came up with...

CSS Message Boxes for different message types

Thu, 22 May 2008 17:01:04 GMT

Can you believe this: Few days ago I went to my bank to check my credit score with the Credit Bureau. The bank official typed in my personal data and sent a request. Web application responded by displaying a yellow message box with an exclamation icon saying that data processing is still in progress. He checked several more times, but he didn't notice that at one moment the message changed to "Account available". But the message box hasn't changed. He continued to check a few more times and eventually he realized that the request was successful. I don't know what was in the minds of developers and designers who created this application, but it certainly wasn't the user. This poor bank official was really frustrated. I can't imagine what the rest of the application looks like.

Microsoft Research's DOLOTO Makes AJAX Twice as Fast

Thu, 22 May 2008 14:01:15 GMT

Microsoft Research has released some exciting information about a new tool being worked on by Ben Livshits and Emre Kiciman. DOLOTO promises to greatly speed the loading of web applications. It does this by automatically making parts of the application load in the background or lazy load when they are needed. The results look extremely impressive. They tried it on a bunch of websites and saw around a fifty percent improvement in loading time on all of them. These included such content rich sites as Live.com, Live Maps and Google Spreadsheets.

World Of HTTP/1.1 Status Codes

Tue, 20 May 2008 13:55:55 GMT

Most developers are familiar with the HTTP 1.0 Status Codes, that have been recently popularized by the SEO guys. We have all heard that you should use 301 Moved Permanently instead of 302 Temporary Redirect. What many of the SEO guys won't tell you, because they don't know any better, is that they are using the RFC 1945 HTTP/1.0 Standard that was released in May 1996, that is right it is about 12 years old. The newest HTTP/1.1 Standard, RFC 2616, was released in June 1999, and made some pretty drastic changes the the 3xx Redirect Status Codes. The goal of this post is to inform and familiarize developers with the HTTP/1.1 Standard, specifically the 3xx Redirect Status Code changes. This can have drastic effect on how you handle requests on your website and optimize your site for search engines.

How to create a YUI Compressor MSBuild Task

Mon, 19 May 2008 01:30:26 GMT

The YUI Compressor yielded exceptional results, however it was missing one thing. Integration in to my build and deployment process. In IdeaPipe I use a MSBuild script to compile, manipulate, and prepare for publishing. So naturally I built a MSBuild Task to minimize my JavaScript and CSS files.

What I learned about SEO from Celebrity Jeopardy!

Thu, 15 May 2008 14:23:41 GMT

As you can see Norm MacDonald playing the character of Burt Reynolds transforms the category in Celebrity Jeopordy!, on purpose for comedy reasons. In my analogy Google is going to be the Burt Reynolds of your search, however instead of finding the wrong words on purpose it is going to do it because it is a dumb machine that does what it is asked even if the results are not contextually accurate. If you don't control your URL, which is one of the highest ranking keywords on your site. You could end up decreasing the effectiveness of your keywords, as an almost duplicate keyword penalty. Granted I don't know if something like this exists as a penalty, but when you are dealing with SEO it never hurts to be as careful and precise as possible.

Choosing the Right Garbage Collector Settings for Your Application

Thu, 15 May 2008 14:46:04 GMT

In this post I discuss the gcConcurrent and gcServer settings which allow you to exercise some control how the Garbage Collector operates. Tuning the garbage collector to the specific context of the particular application can significantly improve the performance of both non-threaded and multi-threaded applications.

Software Developers Never Change

Wed, 14 May 2008 15:31:24 GMT

So if you are to take anything away from this rant, take this, do what you love, and become the best at it. And if what you love isn't your 9-5 job, deeply understand this and get out of the way of people who's 9-5 job is what they love.

2 Easy Steps To Turn Your Blog Into An OpenID Gateway

Thu, 15 May 2008 14:01:14 GMT

Many of you probably have heard of OpenID, but have never had a chance to use it. However, I predict that most of you reading this will have used it by the end of the year. I can make this prediction with an almost 100% certainty because there is a growing movement behind it that has many big players actively buying developing and integrating their platforms with the OpenID protocol. To facilitate my prediction, of most of you using OpenID by the end of the year, I am going to give you 2 easy steps to turn your blog, or any website, in to a OpenID gateway. That will work for OpenID 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 versions of the protocol.

How to Capitalize the First Letter of All Words in a string in C#

Sat, 10 May 2008 14:01:02 GMT

Often we need to capitalize the first letters of some word or some text (for example when we want to display users name or city name etc). Since string class does not have a method to do this we could think that there is no built-in solution in C# for this problem, but...