Standards-based layout saved my day!

I can always count on my clients for some last minute urgent changes - I’ve come to expect it - in fact, I even plan for it (similarly to how I tell all my late friends that things start an hour earlier than they actually do.) I had a change come up on Thursday afternoon that needed to be completed for Monday morning if possible. It involved a color scheme update, new menu items and a few additional design elements. My first reaction was “great, this is going to take a few days…” but after opening up the project to take a look at what actually needed to be changed I was pleasantly surprised – it didn’t look like I needed to make any markup changes (with the exception of changing a few words – Fundraising to Fundraise, that kind of stuff).

Four hours later (most of it spent in Photoshop slicing images and testing in various browsers), the update was complete. No HTML changes, just a bunch of new images and about 20 lines of CSS to change, amazing!

One thing that really saved me was having an extra wrappre-DIV around the main content.

This allowed me to easily add the circles that appear in the bottom right corner.

Without the wrapper-DIV I likely would have to either added it to the markup or gotten really creative with the CSS on the mainbody DIV. Not to say that it wouldn’t be possible to do, just that having it there (it wasn’t really necessary for the original design) made my life that much easier.

The final results:

Before:



After:

To top everything off, the homepage comes down in about 3.7kb of HTML markup which means it loads wicked-fast even on my Blackberry. And of course it gracefully renders to down-level clients without CSS support.

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Unable to stop or use COM+ component

I just had a really bizzare issue on my home workstation. I was having trouble accessing a COM+ component that has always worked - the error was a standard issue Access Denied. All the permissions looked fine. I thought maybe it was having difficulty accessing a file or registry key so I pulled up Sysinternals ProcessExplorer and ProcessMonitor to take a look under the hood - and then I noticed something odd: The account it was running under was showing as . The only change I had made recently was to hide the account from the Windows login screen (HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current version\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList) - sure enough, after I removed this entry it worked as expected.

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Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is released

Microsoft has just released Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 (in all flavors - standard, pro, team suite, and TFS). It can be downloaded here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831.aspx

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MBC is a Microsoft Certified Partner!

MBC is now a Certified Member of the Microsoft Partner Program as of Tuesday July 3, 2007.

We have achieved our Networking Infrastructure Solutions Competency. By achieving this competency, MBC has proven that we have the ability to craft infrastructure solutions for small to midsize businesses that include Windows Server Solutions based on the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 Server operating system, or Microsoft Small Business Server 2000 and Windows Small Business Server 2003. These implementations may include crafting solutions that connect Windows-based servers, PC locations, and the Internet; installing a server farm; or building a Windows Small Business Server stand-alone solution that includes file/print capabilities.

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A simple way to handle data collection in email submission forms

Frequently I get asked to create a simple web-form that collects a few peices of information and either stores it or sends it to someone as an email - pretty straight forward... Where it gets annoying is when someone asks for a change and you end up messing with a bulk of string concatenation code.

A really simple solution to this problem is to place all of your controls in a panel, and then loop through the panel's controls collection and create a NameValueCollection with all of the questions/answers - which can then easily be stored or emailed off.

The code looks something like:

NameValueCollection answers = new NameValueCollection();

answers.Add("Date", DateTime.Now.ToString());

foreach(Control c in panelName.Controls)
{
 switch(c.GetType().Name)
 {
  case "TextBox":
   answers.Add(c.ID, ((TextBox)c).Text.Trim());
   break;
  case "DropDownList":
   answers.Add(c.ID, ((DropDownList)c).SelectedValue);
   break;
  case "RadioButton":
   answers.Add(c.ID, ((RadioButton)c).Checked.ToString());
   break;
  case "RadioButtonList":
   answers.Add(c.ID, ((RadioButtonList)c).SelectedValue);
   break;
 }
}

FormMailer.SendResponses(answers);

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New version of Nikhil Kothari's Web Development Helper

If you haven't already used Nikhil Kothari's Web Development Helper IE plug-in for debugging and tracing web applications, it’s an indispensible app to have in your toolbox. It has been further updated to support class browsing of classes registered within MS AJAX.

You can read the related blog entry at http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=168 or download it directly from http://projects.nikhilk.net/Projects/WebDevHelper.aspx

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JavaScript Support in Visual Studio 2008 looks like its shaping up

Two of the features I'm looking forward to the most in Visual Studio 2008/Orcas is JavaScript Intelli-sense and debugging support.

Scott Guthrie has a few posts worth checking out by the most recent shows off some of the debugging features - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/07/19/vs-2008-javascript-debugging.aspx

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