Chris Love's Official ASP.NET Blog

Making Blenders for the Blind is Like Making Software for Normal People

2009-06-26T12:17:12Z

Brad Abrams recently posted tips he has for someone interviewing for a Program Manager position at Microsoft . In his post he references different questions and situations he likes to put candidates through. One section titled Design and Bahh Questions got me thinking not so much about the interview process, but how I might design a blender for a blind person. That train of thought caused me to jump tracks to designing software. First, let me describe some thoughts I had on my new blender. First...(read more)

Testing E-Mail Functionality

2009-06-25T00:29:19Z

One of the most common questions I see on ASP.NET forums relates to sending E-Mail. I have addressed many of those issues already, so I wont get into how to send E-Mail from an ASP.NET web site. This week I have been working on testing applications and had a chance to meet Donovan Brown of Notion Solutions . Donovan is all about testing and has some fantastic tools to test all aspects of applications and is a Team System freak!! This afternoon I was having a great conversation when he mentions he...(read more)

Making a Sharp Dressed Web Form – Thin ASP.NET 8

2009-06-23T01:05:00Z

The past few months I have been trying to learn more about user experience and design patterns. This has led me to learn more about how to use the tools available to me to provide better user experiences, namely CSS and JQuery. I have been writing quite a bit about JQuery stuff lately, so today I am going to shift gears a little and talk about leveraging some CSS layout goodness to lay out a web form. First though I want to talk quickly about form layout choices. I like an article written by Luke...(read more)

Blocking Unwanted Web Sites to Improve You Life

2009-06-03T12:03:19Z

Back in March I posted a quick announcement about the release of Internet Explorer 8 and a common problem I was having at the time. I think I finally determined what the issue was, and it was not really Internet Explorer 8, but rather sites that were down. I am not sure I like the way IE handled the issue, but it did force me to figure out a real problem. Today many web sites utilize contextual advertising for support. Google’s Adsense is the most popular service, but not the only one. There are...(read more)

Displaying a Confirmation Dialog with the JQuery UI Dialog

2009-06-02T21:30:30Z

Often users are required to ‘read’ or ‘acknowledge’ a terms of use, license agreement or some other form of legal disclaimer before they can either use the software, web site or tool online. Microsoft does it all over the place as a CYA measure when we download many patches, tools or other utilities that are hosted or promoted by Microsoft. For example when you download code from CodePlex.com . I have had several clients over the years require some sort of acknowledgement before allowing a user to...(read more)

Control TextBox’s AutoComplete Action

2009-06-01T16:49:08Z

Today I was working on a Web Form and noticed a property in the TextBox control called AutoCompleteType . I had never noticed it before and my interest was piqued. My first thought was it must be an injected property from an AutoComplete extender on the page, but no there was none available. Then I started to wonder if maybe there was some sort of crude AJAX auto complete facility built into the Web Form infrastructure that had not noticed before. Again no, and a big whew at the same time. Turns...(read more)

Setting the Default Input Focus and Default Button with JQuery: Thin ASP.NET 5

2009-05-24T20:46:49Z

Today I want to keep extending my series on Thin ASP.NET by adding some more user experience features, Default Focus and Default Button. Early in my windows experience (circa 1992) I learned a truth, that keyboarding through a form is so much faster than using the nifty little mouse I could now really leverage. That’s right, good old fashion TAB, or Ctrl+N, etc is much more efficient than using the mouse to move, point, click, move click, etc. Another truth of computer use I have also found universal...(read more)

I Love Code Generation – Why Don’t You?

2009-05-23T15:33:00Z

Several times over the past week I have had some conversations with folks about code generation, some pro (like me), some con and some that find it scary. My first real exposure to a serious code generation tool was at TechEd 2003 in Dallas. I remember an 8 AM session on the last day given by a Microsoft Engineer from Grenoble France. He showed a tool he called Oly Mars to a packed room. Right then and there I knew I was seeing something I wanted in my daily routine. The demonstration showed how...(read more)

Guiding User Input with the JQuery Masked Edit Plugin :Thin ASP.NET Part 4

2009-05-18T02:04:16Z

Yesterday I walked through applying the JQuery Validation plugin to an ASP.NET web page . Today I want to extend the concept of guiding user input as they complete an online form by demonstrating the JQuery Masked Edit plugin . The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit contains over 30 AJAX enable controls and web control extenders. One of those controls is the MaskEdit Control Extender . By adding it to your ASP.NET Web Form and pointing it to a TextBox control you can apply an input mask to the TextBox...(read more)

Adding Client-Side Form Validation with JQuery: Thin ASP.NET Part 3

2009-05-16T21:53:21Z

Now that I have demonstrated how to create a thin Contact form in ASP.NET using JQuery and some AJAX it is time to start making it even better. One of the first rules I learned back in my youth was users will enter anything in any field despite what logic should dictate. They will also not follow explicit instructions. Don’t believe me? Then put a form on a web site with no filtering what so ever and examine what data you catch, amazing isn’t it? To force, or help users enter valid information in...(read more)

The ASP.NET Diet Part 2 – Making a Thin Contact Form

2009-04-28T19:32:38Z

Back in January I wrote about making a thin contact form in an effort to demonstrate how to make ASP.NET forms lighter and much more user responsive. The key to making the form more responsive was to avoid using the WebForm and UpdatePanel conventions. I demonstrated how to leverage ASP.NET AJAX without the UpdatePanel to introduce some nice user interactions and reduce payloads. ASP.NET AJAX’s unique position is its ability to interact with ASP.NET Web Controls. To do this is produces a pretty heavy...(read more)

Pragmatic vs Theoretical Development Practices

2009-04-06T17:30:45Z

I tell a story about my very first assigned development task to my development friends because it really sets the development practice tone of reality to me. The first day I was on my first job after graduate school I was given a simple task of creating several reports for a plant manager to review over his morning cup of coffee. I really do not remember the content of those reports, but I do remember Sybase, Stored Procedures and PowerBuilder (I do not do Sybase, PowerBuilder or reports anymore)....(read more)

DSBL.org is Gone; The Battle Against SPAM Still Rages

2009-03-27T15:34:35Z

This morning I noticed some timeouts when checking against the DSBL.org servers for incoming SMTP traffic to my E-Mail server. So I checked the website to find the DSBL SPAM blacklilst have been taken offline . They explain that SPAMMERS have changed their targets from open relays to using "spam zombies" they can easily lure computer users into installing on their local machines. If you are wondering what DSBL is or was, it was a volunteer run organization that would check the source of...(read more)

Internet Explorer 8 is Released – Diagnose Connection Problems!!

2009-03-19T22:36:34Z

Today Microsoft released the Release version of Internet Explorer 8 (I would provide the link here but I am waiting for it to load in my browser.. ), which is great there are some cool new features surrounding microformat support, etc. I started used the Release Candidate of version 8 three months ago. Since ‘upgrading’ I get the following friendly screen greeting me about 10% of the time. At least another 5% I get only partial page loads. I have to say I am very frustrated because for the first...(read more)

Disabling a Web Page for a Long Running Operation

2009-03-17T04:11:02Z

I was trolling the ASP.NET forums tonight and found a very good question from ctrlctrl, . He wanted to know how to ‘grey’ out the page while he was waiting on a long running process on the server. The answer is pretty simple, it involves a little AJAX and CSS trickery. I am going to demonstrate this by calling a web service to simulate some server-side process and since I explained this a few posts back, Making a Thin Contact Form , I will not explain it here. The trick lies in displaying and hiding...(read more)