Rick Strahl's Web Log

Recent Weblog Posts

Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Thursday @ 3:32 pm

Oil is under $40 as I write this, which is down from over $147 sometime in July. So isn’t it high time to go out and buy those bargain basement Hummers to start burning up this cheap oil? I’m kidding of course, but some people never learn apparently as they are falling for lower oil prices and incentives from auto-manufacturers to continue down gas guzzling alley. It’s not all that surprising...

33 comments

Understanding the jQuery Object returned from a jQuery Selector Query
December 29, 2008 @ 4:52 am

Cody Lindley has a great post that explains some of the innards of the jQuery object returned from selector queries. As you may know if you are using jQuery, the jQuery object returned from a jQuery selector expression is an object that acts like an array, but is in fact an object with numeric properties that masquerade as an array. If this sounds a little confusing you’re not alone. Even though...

5 comments

Online Video Streaming – Not quite there yet
December 27, 2008 @ 7:21 am

I've been experimenting with online streaming of movie and TV content recently and while the technology has improved quite a bit and it's quite cool to have on demand service, it's seems there are quite a few obstacles to overcome before we are 'there' yet.

5 comments

String Extraction
December 19, 2008 @ 2:51 am

One thing I do quite frequently in applications is parsing strings and a common scenario requires extracting a string from within another string with delimiters. Here's a small utility function out of my StringUtils library that provides this functionality easily.

16 comments

Problems with opening CHM Help files from Network or Internet
December 16, 2008 @ 4:48 pm

Opening CHM files from a non-local location is no longer supported. Conveniently there's no decent error information displayed for this error so your first thought goes that there's something wrong with your help file. Here's an overview of the issue and some solutions on how to deal with it.

5 comments

Removing the .SVC Extension from WCF REST URLs
December 15, 2008 @ 4:27 pm

One of the most frequent questions that come up when talking about WCF REST urls is how to remove the .SVC extension from the endpoint Url for a REST service. While it's not automatic, there are a couple of fairly simple solutions to this problem: Using the IIS 7 Rewrite Module or a small custom module.

8 comments

Quest for a Driver – or how to waste your Life Away
December 15, 2008 @ 3:02 pm

Last month I inherited an old laptop – an Averatec 2100 which was to be put on Craigslist and sold for a few bucks. Well, it didn’t work out that way. It’s been a journey and I think eventually this thing is bound for the dump after all rather than going to a needing home. It all started innocuous enough with a new computer being bought to replace this the Averatec. The Averatec is going on 3...

19 comments

Silverlight ListBox Selections or what’s with SelectionChanged Events?
December 11, 2008 @ 5:18 pm

I was musing today on Microsoft’s obsession with OnSelectionChanged events on list controls in general and particularily in Silverlight, which is what I’m working with at the moment.In one of the apps I’m mucking around with I have a ton of sidebar menu selections that get displayed and the easiest way to drive these is with ListBoxes. They look something like this: As you can see this...

10 comments

Monitoring Household Electricity
December 06, 2008 @ 8:36 pm

Here on Maui electricity is rather on the pricey side and as my household here is hitting the 10 year mark a lot of the household appliances are starting to limp or downright fail. It’s getting to be time for replacements. As I do so I started to pay attention a little more to energy usage of the components. So a week ago I picked up an electricity usage monitor as an exercise in better...

15 comments

jQuery and ASP.NET Article Part 2 Posted
December 03, 2008 @ 2:26 am

I've posted Part 2 of my jQuery with ASP.NET article series. Part 2 deals almost entirely with making AJAX callbacks to ASP.NET using several different mechanisms to retrieve data from the server for client side consumption. Covered are external content retrieval, same page callbacks, WCF/ASMX and a pluggable custom callback implementation that can be used with any application. Also covered is client side templating for managing HTML in one place.

39 comments

WCF REST Services and AJAX Callbacks
November 26, 2008 @ 2:10 pm

I've been getting a lot of questions in response to my WCF REST session in regards of whether I'd recommend switching to WCF from ASMX services for AJAX functionality recently. WCF provides a host of new REST features, but when it comes to AJAX functionality and especially ASP.NET AJAX compatible functionality there's really nothing compelling there to require changes. In this post I look at what WCF provides for AJAX and some of the things you might watch out for.

9 comments

Silverlight and Data Communications
November 20, 2008 @ 4:09 pm

Silverlight sports a host of 'data access' mechanisms that allow consumption of data from the server. However, if the data is highly dynamic and changeable the combination of a lack of dynamic data retrieval mechanisms, plus use of a static language like C# has made me wonder how to best approach the data access for a very dynamic application.

20 comments

ASP.NET Connection Session Slides and Samples Posted
November 17, 2008 @ 12:45 am

I've published my session slides and samples from the Fall 2008 ASP.NET Connections conference. The sessions include: jQuery and ASP.NET, WCF REST and JSON with ASP.NET and Dealing with Long Running Requests in ASP.NET.

12 comments

Wipeout
November 15, 2008 @ 2:11 am

Just got a funny picture from the Gorge Hood River from last summer that I’d thought I’d share. It’s one heck of a wipeout: I remember this day and this wipeout on a backloop in particular – the board just got away from me as I slipped out of the footstraps. I went one way (down) and the board went another. There are a couple more pictures in this sequence as the board gets backwinded in...

10 comments

jQuery Intellisense Updates from Microsoft
November 09, 2008 @ 4:13 pm

With Microsoft's recent releases of the jQuery Intellisense file plus the hotfix released this week using jQuery in Visual Studio has become a lot easier and more convenient. Here is a little more detail on what you need and how it works.

11 comments

From ASP Stock Projects to Web Application Projects in VS 2008
November 06, 2008 @ 12:59 pm

Had to do a conversion of a stock ASP.NET project to Web Application projects after not having done so in quite some time and it looks that this process still is not any easier than it was when WAP was a separately installed project type. Here are steps to move a project from stock to WAP with a few hopefully helpful hints.

14 comments

Debugging a WCF REST/AJAX Serialization Problem
November 04, 2008 @ 12:06 am

Ran into a painful self-inflicted problem today with WCF Services for AJAX access where a service failed to serialize some data and simply returned no data of any sort. No error, no message - no HTTP content, not even headers. Here's what the problem was and the steps to debug the service to try and figure out what was wrong.

2 comments

My PDC 2008 Wrap up
November 02, 2008 @ 5:50 pm

Ugh, I’m finally back and settled from a long 3 week road trip. Ah, it feels good to sleep in my own bed again :-}. PDC last week was the last stop of the trip and as always it’s been an interesting experience. More than anything events like these are great to catch up with other developers and meeting people I’ve only seen virtually. I made face contact with a bunch of folks I only know through...

11 comments

Amazon Kindle – a few Things I would improve
October 29, 2008 @ 1:05 am

I love my Kindle and it's been a blessing for my recent long periods away from home and keeping me in plenty of reading material without lugging books around. Still there are a few things that could improve and Scott Watermasysk blog post kicked me into writing them down.

6 comments

Dealing with Complex Client Interfaces: Html or RIA?
October 25, 2008 @ 7:44 pm

I'm working with a client who has a new project that needs to be built that is based on a complex window based layout and the app needs to be built for the Web. We've had a bunch of back and forth over which tools to use: AJAX/HTML or a RIA solution like Silverlight or Flash. In this post I have a few thoughts and comments on this discussion and talk about what we ended up with.

21 comments

Using jQuery to search Content and creating custom Selector Filters
October 24, 2008 @ 12:57 am

jQuery makes it easy to search content of matched elements by using the :content filter which allows for some pretty cool search effects you can implement with a couple of lines of code. Unfortunately :contains is case sensitive though, but never fear jQuery allows creation of custom filters that allow you to provide a custom case insensitive version.

7 comments

Making Element Position Absolute with jQuery
October 21, 2008 @ 1:15 pm

It's common for me to create DOM elements that pop up ontop of existing content by making them absolutely positioned. Here's a quick plug-in that makes an element absolute.

5 comments

HTML Mangling with Literal Controls in the <head> tag
October 20, 2008 @ 2:28 am

Ran into an odd problem with Literal controls in the head tag of the document causing HTML to get corrupted today. It appears that literal controls - and only literal controls - are causing some odd designer manglage that can result in broken HTML.

12 comments

Client Templating with jQuery
October 13, 2008 @ 5:32 pm

Client templating in Javascript can be a great tool to reduce the amount of code you have to write to create markup content on the client. There are a number of different ways that templating can be accomplished from a purely manual approach.

13 comments

LINQ to SQL DBML fails to build or open
October 10, 2008 @ 3:50 am

Arrgh. Today I got back to a LINQ to SQL app that’s been sitting idle for some time. It’s a demo app and as I started the app up and compiled the solution I got: Error 1 Build failed due to validation errors in C:\projects2008\TimeTrakker\TimeTrakkerBusiness\model\TimeTrakker.dbml. Open the file and resolve the issues in the Error List, then try rebuilding the project....

5 comments

No Empty Selector in jQuery
October 03, 2008 @ 12:41 am

One thing that bugs me about jQuery selectors is that empty or null selectors return the HTML document object, rather than an empty jQuery object. This has bitten me on a number of occasions and requires some

7 comments

Introduction to jQuery Article posted
September 28, 2008 @ 2:04 pm

I've posted Part 1 in a two part series on jQuery today. Part 1 covers the client side features of jQuery from the basics all the way through creating simple plugins and extending jQuery. This is a long article that discusses a host of the really useful features that jQuery brings to the table for client side Javascript development. Part 2 will then follow up with server side ASP.NET integration.

25 comments

Calling JavaScript functions in the Web Browser Control
September 27, 2008 @ 4:37 pm

If you're using the Web Browser Control or the Internet.Application Shell object, you might need to call Javacript t code inside the pages loaded in the browser to manipulate the page from say a WinForms app that interacts with the Web Browser control. Some things are just much easier to do with client side script code and being able to initiate this code from .NET can be very useful. This entry describes how you can access the DOM to call script functions both in .NET and FoxPro.

11 comments

Browser Rendering Differences and Browser Resets
September 24, 2008 @ 5:31 pm

As ASP.NET develoers it can be really easy to not pay attention to good CSS style layout practices. But CSS is vitally important especially when dealing with different browsers and consistent formatting. Using browser resets in particular is a big help in taking some of the pain out of cross browser rendering differences.

13 comments

jQuery.position() on Invisible Elements fails
September 20, 2008 @ 4:02 am

Ran into a little issue today with jQuery.position() failing when elements are not visible. Apparently when elements are hidden jQuery is unable to retrieve the computed styles necessary to get the positioning information and bombs. Making the element visible first fixes the problem.

4 comments

ASP.NET Designer Control Problem in VS 2008 SP1
September 18, 2008 @ 4:55 am

I've been running into problems with VS 2008 SP1 where controls appear to be failing frequently with property assignment errors that seem completely unwarranted. Controls work fine on a page, and next thing I know they fail for no apparent reason.

23 comments

Running VisualSVN Server for Subversion Source Control
September 14, 2008 @ 3:39 am

I've been running Subversion for some time, but only recently did I switch over to using HTTP as the protocol to transfer files. I checked out Visual SVN Server and it makes the process of setting up Subversion and Apache for serving over HTTP super easy.

15 comments

jQuery CSS Property Monitoring Plug-in updated
September 12, 2008 @ 3:30 am

I've revisited a jQuery plug-in that can be used to monitor changes in CSS properties and be notified when a specific property changes providing an Observer style callback. This can be a handy feature when building behavior components that attach functionality to other elements and need to keep these behaviors in sync with the original object. This update utilizes a more efficient approach and allows monitoring many properties at once.

2 comments

Client Script Resources in ASP.NET Controls revisited
September 09, 2008 @ 4:05 am

Embedding script resources as part of ASP.NET Control development is tricky business and requires a bunch of options to ensure that script code loads correctly and maybe more importantly allows the page developer to decide whether the resources should be used at all. Here are a few thoughts and some work in progress on how I deal with script resources in my controls.

6 comments

Retrieving Web Resources and Content Types in Code
September 08, 2008 @ 1:39 am

One of my components requires to serve specific Web Resources directly and optionally compress them optionally. While serving resources is straight forward, also grabbing the content type to know what type of resource you're dealing with is a little more work. Here's how.

17 comments

Mousing Around: Mobile Mouse with Desktop Mouse Radio
September 07, 2008 @ 8:14 pm

I travel a fair bit and use my machine on the road a lot when I do, so portability is reasonably important to me. One thing is that in the process I got really used to the small 'mobile' mice that Microsoft makes - the small Soap bar kind. I've really grown attached to this mouse and I really can't get comfortable with the monster desktop mice any more. So the small mouse works great but one of...

10 comments