Rick Strahl's Web Log

Recent Weblog Posts

Moving my Site onto a 64 Bit Server
Today @ 10:39 am

I'm finally getting ready to install my new Server and after some back and forth and testing on Windows 2008 I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and go with the 64 bit version of Server. I've had mixed feelings about installing 64 bit given that I have had exactly zero experience running under 64 bit. I've not really seen a compelling reason on the desktop to run a 64 bit OS especially...

JSON Serializers in .NET - not there yet
Monday @ 4:00 pm

.NET Framework 3.5 provides a couple of choices for JSON Serialization and Deserialization. Find out how you can use them and also some of the problems that both of these tools impose.

16 comments

The Big 1000
Saturday @ 4:36 pm

Woo hoo. I rolled over the magic 1000 Weblog post mark last night and didn't even notice until today when I was about to post another entry. Looking at the site this morning I realized the big fat triple 0's showing up on the Post count. It's been a little unceremonious I suppose - it's pure luck that I noticed since I rarely look at the actual post or comment counts these day. Heck I don't even...

5 comments

Getting rid of the useless Windows Shutdown Tracker Dialog
Saturday @ 1:23 am

If you install and run or manage a Windows Server OS you've probably run into the annoying shut down dialog. Maybe you have even been hit by walking away after restarting and forgetting about the damn dialog hanging the system before rebooting/restarting. Well, just did that on an install thank you very much. It's not a secret how to get around this and it's easy to fix, but buried deep enough that it's easy to not find it immediately and so not fix it. Here's how.

8 comments

jQuery with ASP.NET Presentation at Portland .NET User Group on Tuesday
August 01, 2008 @ 8:42 am

I'll be doing my annual presentation at the Portland Area .NET User Group (PADNUG). The topic this time around is Using jQuery with ASP.NET which is a fun presentation that covers JavaScript and specifically jQuery use with ASP.NET without using ASP.NET Ajax. Here's the presentation abstract: Using jQuery with ASP.NET jQuery is a compact and powerful JavaScript library that is quickly becoming...

7 comments

Back in the US
July 31, 2008 @ 10:28 pm

It's been a long summer of fun out of the country for me. Some time off, some time away from the 'usual' and a time to go a bit lighter on work and time in front of the computer - just what the doctor ordered. Now it's back to reality and the catching up which invariably is left behind by 3 months of physical absence and putting off some work related stuff. The time off's been well spent. As I...

1 comment

Forcing Client Windows to pop up as Windows in Tabbed Browsers
July 22, 2008 @ 1:05 pm

By default if you open a new window in Tab based browsers like FireFox 3 or IE 7 new windows pop up in new tabs. In most situations this is the desirable behavior, but sometimes it's in fact required to get a new window to pop up on the desktop and get it activated immediately.

10 comments

DevMaven Ads on the Web Log
July 21, 2008 @ 1:56 am

If you've been visiting here for a while, you may have noted that the advertising on this Web log has been cut down quite a bit recently. At the beginning of the month I decided to switch off from the mish mash of advertising that I was running previously, which included Google Adsense, Steven Smith's Lake Quincy Network, James Avery's The Lounge Network network and some of my own ads....

6 comments

Buying a new Server
July 19, 2008 @ 2:07 pm

It's time to retire my existing Web Server which is going on 7 years now. The box that this site is running on currently is an old style 2ghz Pentium 4 box with 1 gig of memory and it's starting to creak at the edges pretty hard with a few off and on failures to power and the system board components (lthe clock seized to work a few weeks ago). As of late the box has been locking up on a few...

31 comments

West Wind Ajax Toolkit updated
July 15, 2008 @ 12:46 pm

I've finally had some time to update the West Wind Ajax Toolkit to version 1.90. A number of these changes I've written about and have updated previously, but this update finalizes a number of these updates into a full release. There are a number of enhancements to the existing functionality as well as a few new helper components that I'm finding very useful these days. As always you can grab the...

6 comments

Static Singletons for ASP.NET Controls
July 11, 2008 @ 12:19 am

When building generic ASP.NET Server controls that also provide a sort of API service to other custom controls or page level code, it's often necessary to ensure that only a single instance of a control exists, and that only that single instance of this control or component can be accessed in the context of an ASP.NET request. Using HttpContext and it's Item collection makes it easy to create reusable, cacheable instances and ensure you're only running a Singleton instance of it.

7 comments

Inclusion of JavaScript Files
July 07, 2008 @ 4:05 am

I find myself struggling with effectively managing JavaScript scripts across multiple projects. Between version changes and updates to my own components I spend a lot of time comparing versions and trying to sync up files. There are a number of different ways to load and manage script resources, and in this post I show a few with their pro's and con's, but none of them seem ultimately satisfying. What are you using to manage 'Script File Hell?'

25 comments

Permissions Denied to get Property location.toString in FireFox 3
July 02, 2008 @ 1:31 pm

Since installing FireFox 3 I've been getting errors showing up on a host of sites - including until recently my own. While the errors seem harmless engough and don't actually cause any problems on pages they do show up in Firebug as shown in the following screen shot: The above screen shot is from Yahoo's news page to a linked item and is clearly related to Flash components. Until recently I've...

3 comments

Customers and POs from Hell
June 29, 2008 @ 2:42 am

I do most of my business with credit cards and while I realize that the CC companies and merchant banks are making a killing off my sales with merchant percentages, the convenience of having credit card processing fully automated to the point that I often have to do absolutely nothing other than review orders is well worth the extra expense.Credit card processing (or PayPal processing for that...

14 comments

Updated jQuery and WCF 3.5 JSON Samples posted
June 25, 2008 @ 5:58 am

I've updated my slides and samples for last spring's Devconnection's sessions to reflect some of the recent updates in jQuery and jQuery.ui, which now have been updated to release versions. In addition there have been a few bug fixes and better configuration documentation for the samples.

Crashing WCF 3.5 JSON Services with DateTime.MinValue
June 23, 2008 @ 5:53 am

Ran into some odd issues with WCF 3.5 and HTTP JSON services hanging up an ASP.NET application. It appears that there are a couple of problems with null serialization and small date value serialization that are causing this problem.

2 comments

What makes a Guru?
June 20, 2008 @ 2:19 am

Somebody called me a 'Guru' in recent conversation and I was well a bit embarrassed. What the heck is a guru or what makes one think of somebody else as a Guru?

21 comments

A jQuery Client Status Bar
June 13, 2008 @ 2:29 am

Status bars are very useful in client applications to display well status information and having a reusable and easily callable and configured status component to display messages is extremely handy. Here's an implementation that uses jQuery plus a bit of CSS to make short work of displaying status content.

9 comments

jQuery Code Magazine Editorial Posted
June 09, 2008 @ 4:45 pm

My jQuery editorial for the Code Magazine Newsletter went live today. It turned into a rather lengthy affair (what else is new?) even though it's a high level editorial and so doesn't show code. The piece discusses jQuery's functionality, benefits and some considerations for ASP.NET integration, but keep in mind that this is an editorial discussion rather than a 'how to article' (which will...

14 comments

Unwanted Padding in IE Image Rendering in div Tag
June 05, 2008 @ 7:17 am

I've repeatedly run into an issue where putting an image inside of a div tag as its only content causes IE to render a bit of padding that shouldn't be there. No problem in other browsers, but definitely an issue in IE.

15 comments

Levels of Enthusiasm
June 03, 2008 @ 4:15 am

I tend to go through various levels or stages of excitement when doing development and they tend to have fairly drastic effects on the quality and quantity of development work that I do. Here's a personal view of these levels and how they affect me.

30 comments

jQuery Books Review
May 27, 2008 @ 2:10 am

Here's a review of three jQuery books I've read over the last few months.

9 comments

Ending a Response without Response.End() Exceptions?
May 26, 2008 @ 12:36 am

There's not really a clean way to end the current Response output and then keep on processing an ASP.NET request. Here's a scenario and a few observations on Response closing behaviors.

20 comments

Non ASPX Extensions and Authentication in the IIS 7 Integrated Pipeline
May 23, 2008 @ 3:54 am

Ran into an issue where IIS 7's integrated pipeline exhibits different behavior authenticating non ASPX extensions. Looks like IIS 7 only authenticates mainline files resulting in Context.User==null or Context.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated==false. For example hitting CustomHit.axd doesn't provide user credentials where an ASPX url does.

8 comments

My first DotNetRocks Interview
May 19, 2008 @ 9:58 pm

I did my first interview on DotNetRocks today with the topic of jQuery and Client Web Development. It went well, but I was a little nervous - eek, don't know why. I should be used to talking - but if I get nervous all that does is get me talking MORE which is NOT always a good thing, he he. I've been reluctant to do an interview actually. Richard's been been bugging me for a while, but I've been...

7 comments

A Kindle Story
May 14, 2008 @ 2:11 pm

Ok, I'm afraid to take out my Amazon Kindle in public now. I just got back from dinner here in Geneva and I was literally swamped by the entire staff of the Italian restaurant trying to get a look at the thing. First there were a few shy glances, then one of the waiters came over and practically demanded to look at it. I even got a free beer out of it for letting him play with it for a minute...

8 comments

:hover behavior in IE 7
May 13, 2008 @ 2:35 pm

Ran into an odd problem today with :hover CSS styling that wouldn't work in IE 7. It turns out that I accidentally wiped out my doctype, but even after restoring the doc type I still ended up with problems in large lists.

7 comments

Twitter this, Twitter that...
May 10, 2008 @ 9:53 am

So I recently started using Twitter (I'm RickStrahl in case you want to follow me). Late I know - Twitter's been around forever, but when I first heard and thought about Twitter the first thing that popped into my mind was "So what?". The concept of getting blasted with small disconnected messages detailing the minutiae of life of other people didn't sound terribly appealing to me. I'm still not...

14 comments

jQuery puts the fun back into Client Scripting
May 10, 2008 @ 3:18 am

jQuery is a small, yet very powerful and extremely addictive JavaScript library, that's rescued me from my JavaScript phobia I've had for many years. Although I've dabbled for years off and on with JavaScript I've not really had any joy with it until I started using jQuery. Here is my take on why this library is such a kick ass tool to have in your Web development toolkit.

1 comment

Amazon Kindle on the Road
May 07, 2008 @ 4:08 pm

So I broke down and got myself an Amazon Kindle reader last week before I left for an extended trip to Europe. I've been reluctant to spend this kind of money ($399) on an electronic reader, but since I'll be spending a good deal of time on the road this year in Europe I thought it'd be a good idea to stock up on reading material before I hit the road and not have to deal with keeping stacks of...

4 comments

ASP.NET Connections Slides and Samples Posted
May 02, 2008 @ 3:22 am

I've posted my session slides and samples from my ASP.NET Connections sessions last week in Orlando. I did three sessions at the conference and you can check out the slides and samples here. All three sessions had extensive samples (and I didn't even get to them all) so if you attended my sessions be sure to take a look at the samples as there's lots of extra stuff that didn't get covered in...

11 comments

Reusing old Laptop SATA Drives via USB
May 01, 2008 @ 1:32 pm

Since I travel around with a spare SATA drive all the time anyway (one too many 'surprise' drive failures) I finally decided to put that spare drive to use as a backup device by using a USB to SATA cable. Handy and maybe enough for me to ditch the shitty process of DVD backups.

2 comments

jQuery.ui Sortable
April 28, 2008 @ 12:59 am

Sortable lists are a common thing to work on and jQuery.ui's Sortable plug in makes it super easy to create very nice looking sortable lists that work consistently even in complex layouts.

20 comments

Customized Loading... Images
April 27, 2008 @ 4:13 pm

Here's a cool site that provides a number of different Ajax loading images that you can use in your apps: http://www.ajaxload.info/ What's cool about this thing versus some other sites that have many of these same images is that this is actually a dynamic app that lets you completely customize foreground and background colors including background colors which is great if you need to stick...

5 comments

Variable Scoping in Anonymous Delegates in C#
April 26, 2008 @ 6:24 pm

On a few occasions anonymous methods still throw me for a conceptual loop. I'm comfortable with them in JavaScript, but in C# the behavior is a bit foreign and makes for some interesting compiler gymnastics. Anonymous methods work like closures and so variable scoping can be extended into these anonymous methods from the calling method scope which is pretty damn useful and the basis for what makes Lambda expressions work in the first place.

5 comments

Visual Studio's JavaScript Editor Really needs a Function/Class Viewer!
April 25, 2008 @ 1:17 pm

One thing I really would like to see in Visual Studio's JavaScript support is the ability to see all the functions/classes defined in the code. Right now there's no mechanism for navigating code in the JavaScript editor and while that's not a problem for small bits of code, for more complex code like libraries or truly client driven Web applications the VS editor becomes problematic with its CTRL-F or scroll wheel based search navigation.

9 comments