Chris Love's Official ASP.NET Blog

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

Chris Love — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:17:12 GMT

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...(read more)

Testing E-Mail Functionality

Chris Love — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:29:19 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Chris Love — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:05:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Blocking Unwanted Web Sites to Improve You Life

Chris Love — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:03:19 GMT

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...(read more)

Displaying a Confirmation Dialog with the JQuery UI Dialog

Chris Love — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:30:30 GMT

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...(read more)

Control TextBox’s AutoComplete Action

Chris Love — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:49:08 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Chris Love — Sun, 24 May 2009 20:46:49 GMT

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...(read more)

I Love Code Generation – Why Don’t You?

Chris Love — Sat, 23 May 2009 15:33:00 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Chris Love — Mon, 18 May 2009 02:04:16 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Chris Love — Sat, 16 May 2009 21:53:21 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Chris Love — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:32:38 GMT

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....(read more)

Pragmatic vs Theoretical Development Practices

Chris Love — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:30:45 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Chris Love — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:34:35 GMT

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...(read more)

Internet Explorer 8 is Released – Diagnose Connection Problems!!

Chris Love — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:36:34 GMT

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...(read more)

Disabling a Web Page for a Long Running Operation

Chris Love — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 04:11:02 GMT

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...(read more)