Sasha Sydoruk

Just to vent some of my frustration. Infragistics is a real piece of crap. If you even think about using it for your web project please stop right now. Get yourself Telerik controls and meet your deadlines, go home happy and proud of your work, kiss your wife and hug your kids.

But, if you enjoy debugging weird errors in somebody else’s code, horrible documentation, emailing to a non-existent support and reading support forums devoid of any helpful answers, go ahead and get Infragistics. And you know, while you are at it, sign up for an AOL account as well.

Just to make sure my message is clear – I hate Infragistics with passion. Infragistics is the Visual Source Safe of web controls for asp.net.

UPDATE:

Downgraded the ranting level to YELLOW.

If you have a Windows Mobile device, please do yourself a favor and throw away the piece of junk that Pocket IE is and get a real mobile browser instead.

Here it is – Opera Mobile

I have been using it for a couple of weeks now and cannot be happier. In my before-Opera-Mobile days, I didn’t see much point in mobile browsing because the experience was pretty bad. But everything is different now with OM. Even the sites that were not designed for mobile browsing, still look great. I can read my blog and my friends’ Live Spaces as well; none of this was possible with Pocket PC IE.

On a somewhat related note – Mobile Live (http://mobile.live.com) is awesome. Mobile Live Local is my favorite.

If you have a Windows Mobile device, please get a copy of Opera Mobile and you will not regret it.

Here is a really good article on creating cross browser graphics with dojo.gfx.

I really like how they do charting; something like this might be quite helpful sometime.

Well, it looks like the journey is over.

Mike Gunderloy of Larkware fame is trying to remove Microsoft and everything Microsoft related from his life.

Choosing to use Microsoft software as the basis for my work, whatever else it may do, contributes to the growth and health of Microsoft. It supplies funds for Microsoft’s continued initiatives in the area of intellectual property and DRM. And it seems to me that the ultimate consequence of these initiatives will be to limit my own freedom of action, both as a software user and a software developer.

This is taken from A Fresh Cup - Mike’s new blog that details his exploration of non-Microsoft technologies as a way to earn a living. So far it looks very intriguing and I am already subscribed to the feed. Currently Mike is evaluating Ubuntu and Ruby on Rails.

This reminds me somewhat of Softies On Rails. The guys from Softies On Rails were originally ASP.NET developers that later completely switched to Ruby On Rails and never looked back. Here is the post - Rails is (officially) life-changing. And here is some more - Why Rails? Part 1: Microsoft pisses me off, Why Rails? Part 2: All the Cool Kids Are Doing It, Why Rails? Part 3: Ruby, Why Rails? Part 4: Because It’s Free and Why Rails? Part 5: Because I Can Test It.

A Fresh Cup looks like it is going to be a great blog and I can’t wait for more posts. Good luck Mike on your journey and make sure you blog the details.

No wonder people are switching from Typo. For at least a month I have been getting the following message:

Bad Gateway

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.

What the hell is going on? Is this the end of Typo? I hope they get their stuff together.

While working on an ASP.NET page I had to read and write some hidden variables in my code behind.

I figured I could use the following:

Page.RegisterHiddenField(”test”, “testvalue”);

This would create a hidden variable in my HTML which I should be able to access with JavaScript like this:

document.getElementById(’test’).value

The task seemed easy, and I figured it would take around 10 minutes to get everything working. Only there was one problem. The hidden field was rendered like this:

<input type=”hidden” value=”testvalue” />

What is the problem here? Id and/or name are missing! And because of it, I cannot access this variable in my JavaScript.

What is the solution? Use HtmlInputHidden. Here is how to use it.

<input type=”hidden” id=”test” runat=”server” />

And in your code-behind you can assign correct values:

test.Value = “testvalue”

Make sure that the HtmlInputHidden is registered.

protected HtmlInputHidden test;

Now, I encountered this problem in ASP.NET 1.1; In ASP.NET 2.0 this problem has been resolved. Using Page.RegisterHiddenField will produce something similar to this:

<input id=”test” name=”test” type=”hidden” value=”testvalue” />

But, Page.RegisterHiddenField is marked as obsolete, so you can still use it, but it is not recommended. What is the recommended solution?

ClientScriptManager.RegisterHiddenField(string hiddenFieldName, string hiddenFieldInitialValue)

This is the recommended way to work with hidden variables in ASP.NET 2.0. To find out more information - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.clientscriptmanager.registerhiddenfield.aspx

Another great post from Scott Guthrie about IIS 7.0.

I can’t wait for this thing to come out; but it will be a while. IIS 7.0 will be available with Vista Client for development, but the Vista Server will come out in a year. And that means you can play with it, but you cannot really deploy on it. It seems though that discountasp offers some hosting on IIS 7.0.

Anyways, the good news is that you can create more than one site in Vista Client and you can also have more than 10 connections.

There was a lot of talk recently about microformats. Things like these really intrigue me, so I had to learn more about them.

What is a microformat? It is way to markup certain types of information with the help of HTML attributes, so it is understandable to computers.

Ok, so it is just like XML? Well, not quite. It is very loosely coupled and marked with HTML attributes like these: class, rel and rev.

Aha, I see what you mean… What kind of data can I mark with microformats? I am glad you asked. You can really format any kind of data that is specific to you. Certain types of information are applicable to different industries, so they already have markup defined for them. For example: events, contact information, relationships to other people and others.

Very interesting microformat is rel=”nofollow”. This format tells search engines whether to use this link in determining PageRank or not. There is a really good post that describes how Google works with this format.

All these examples are only beginning of the massive adoption of microformats. I can see how it will be used to markup source code, stock quotes, opinions about certain sites (think trackbacks on steroids), photos, geo location and of course geo tagging.

Ok, all this theoretical stuff is very interesting, but how do I really use this stuff? Here is an example of my contact information marked up with a microformat:

   1:  <div class="vcard">

   2:      <a class="url fn n" href="http://www.sashasydoruk.com/">

   3:          <span class="given-name">Sasha</span>

   4:          <span class="family-name">Sydoruk</span>

   5:      </a>

   6:      <div class="org"><span class="organization-name">ACME Corp.</span></div>

   7:  </div>

and in html it will look like this:

Scott Hanselman has a good post describing implementation of microsummaries and how it is implemented in dasBlog. In his post he mentions that Firefox 2.0 uses microsummary as a description for all the pages that you add to your Favorites. Another example of tools using microformats is Firefox extension Tails. Tails is a microformat reader; everytime it detects a microformat on a page an icon in the traybar lights up and gives you a nice visual view of all detected entities.

Opportunities for microformats are unlimited and I am really interested to see how they evolve.

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As Kevin C mentioned in my comments, there is a way to enable Intellisense for skin files in Visual Studio 2005. This is a great comment and deserves to become a post:

Vladimir Bychkov shows us how to enable Intellisense for skin files in Visual Studio 2005.

Do you need to build a website, but cannot come with a decent design? Are you more of a developer than a designer?

Don’t panic! Just following these links

1. Free design templates at MS ASP.NET Developer Center – link
2. A collection of 40 layouts - ready to be downloaded. Every layout is valid CSS and HTML and works in major browsers – link
3. Still don’t understand what is the big deal with CSS? Just go here for inspiration – link. Just be careful - it might blow your socks off.
4. Do you want a fancy design but don’t know where to start? Just go here. Open Web Design is a community of designers that is making Internet a prettier place. 1700+ designs just waiting for you…
5. Web Design From Scratch – is wonderful source of everything you might possibly want to know about web design.