What I’m Reading Lately Welcome back! Since I’ve recently found myself with a lot of time on my hands, it’s time to catch up with what’s been going on in the development world. This list is mainly for me, but if by some chance you’re reading this, then you can learn along with me! I’ve been reading up on node.js and npm, so there’s a lot of spots where ......

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Wow, I’m still alive! I installed the RTM of Windows 8 when it became available, and in the last few days have started taking a look at writing a windows 8 app using HTML/JS, which in and of itself is a weird thing. I don’t think that windows developers of 10 years ago would’ve thought something like this would have ever come about. As I was working ......

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Hey there! So recently I was struggling with something for the new job, and was able to figure it out, and thought I'd share it with you, dear readers. I have a generic class I use for parsing data. Inside that class, I ran across the need to create another instance of the generic class to parse more data, but I didn't know the type at compile time. ......

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*taptaptap* Is this thing on? I ran into an interesting bug recently, where you would get 2 identical requests to the page you were visiting. I wasn't sure where this was coming from, so I poked around a bit. It turns out that having an <img /> tag on a page with an empty src attribute (like so: <img src="" />) causes that image tag to point ......

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Recently I was trying to use StringBuilder.AppendFormat to build some javascript, and was hit with an exception when trying to do this: sb.AppendFormat("function {0}(args) { return false; }", someVariable); The problem is that you can't have { or } inside an input string for string.Format(). The solution is actually fairly straightforward: sb.AppendFormat("function ......

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In this post, I talked about enabling or disabling a validator client-side. Someone had commented asking how to change the status of a control from valid to invalid. The following javascript works at least for required field validators, I haven't tested it with anything else (but I imagine it should work just fine). Again, this is 2.0, I haven't tested ......

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One of the things I've been working on is how to use Atlas web services to verify actions on the server. So the client requests to perform a particular action on the server, and if they don't have access to perform that action or the action fails (because a database is down, or something along those lines), I don't want the method on the client to continue ......

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If you ever find yourself needing to selectively disable an asp.net validator through javascript, you can do the following (in 2.0, not sure if this exists in 1.x): function doSomething(){ var myVal = document.getElementById('my... ValidatorEnable(myVal, false); } Quick and easy! Sadly, not as easy to find through Google, so hopefully ......

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The problem: You want to have a web form with multiple checkboxes, and have some of them be enabled or disabled depending on whether a certain checkbox is checked (or radio button selected, or what have you). At first glance, this seems fairly simple; you can just do: <%=myCheckBox.ClientID%&... = false; in javascript. The problem comes ......

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In the helps for HtmlInputControl.Name (for .NET 2.0): Gets or sets the unique identifier name for the HtmlInputControl control. Later on, in that same help file: In this implementation, the get accessor returns the value of the Control.UniqueID property. However, the set accessor does not assign a value to this property. So then why say that it sets ......

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I was working on some sample stuff that I'll be posting later and ran into a problem. I had 2 different update panels; inside one was just a div, inside the other one was a repeater. Inside the repeater I had a bunch of checkboxes, and when I checked/unchecked them, I needed the first update panel to be updated. This posed a couple of problems: A checkbox ......

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Recently I had to retrieve some data from SQL that was tucked away inside XML. We have a “Settings” class inside our application that is a bunch of public properties, which we then serialize to XML to store inside the DB. This lets us easily add/remove fields to store without having to modify the database. This can be a problem if you need ......

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I just finished up some code that uses some other functionality of atlas. To sum up: Whoa! This may be available in AJAX.net or some of the other frameworks, but I was amazed at how easy this was: I have a web service that returns a class, like so: public class MyClass { public string MyString; public int MyInt; } [WebMethod(true)] public MyClass MyWebMethod() ......

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After struggling with Atlas for awhile, we finally released our latest feature on http://www.squeet.com. The new “Preview“ functionality uses the Atlas UpdatePanel to display the 5 latest entries for any blog you enter. It will by default show only a summary of the item, but you can click on the “expand“ link to show the full ......

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In my inaugural post, I described a problem I had with a WebMethod erroring out instantly on the client, accompanied by a puzzling message in the Event Log, regarding viewstate. On a whim, on that site, I decided to “publish” the website from within VS 2005 to a separate directory. I set up another virtual directory within IIS to point to ......

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