Problem: I created a custom control with a dynamic button and attached an event handler to that button. When I run the control, clicking the button causes a postback but the event is not fired.
Solution: Changed the class inheritance from WebControl to CompositeControl. Re-compiled and it worked like a charm.
Since I’m not a designer (an obvious conclusion anyone will reach after taking one look at the design of this site), I’ve never had much use for the Flash development environment, nor any real desire to learn it.
Adobe FlexBuilder 3 provides an integrated development environment (Eclipse, actually) that allows programmers to build Flash applications. I was pleasantly surprised to discover this software, and found its brand of MXML to be very familiar coming from an ASP.NET background.
Stay tuned for updates as I learn more about this software. Have you had any experience with it? I welcome comments and suggestions – what should we watch for when working with this software?
One day last year my client decided we needed to incorporate AJAX into their web site. AJAX was considered the big thing, and by not having “it” we were going to fall behind some of our competitors.
“What do you want to enhance using AJAX?”
“What do you mean? Just install AJAX.”
Ok. I’ve been doing a lot of work with JavaScript for years, including DOM manipulation and other Web 2.0-ish type trickery, but AJAX as a concept was something I had yet to explore. After reading resources available online, I decided to jump ahead a bit and buy a book on the topic.
I picked JavaScript & Ajax, Visual Quickstart Guide for a number of reasons.
I will admit this book is not the most comprehensive resource out there, for JavaScript or for AJAX. If I had wanted a more solid reference manual I would likely have sought out a book that focused solely on AJAX or solely on JavaScript. My trusty old tome Mastering JavaScript has always been a great reference, and I won’t get rid of it any time soon.
Although the title of the book is JavaScript & AJAX, the truth is this is a book about JavaScript. Right in the introduction the authors admit they simply added Ajax in this (6th) edition. Beginning the chapter on Ajax, we learn that the name of the book was changed to include Ajax in order to cash in on the success of the methodology. I won’t fault the authors for making that move – in fact I would consider a book about JavaScript to be incomplete nowadays if it did not include a discussion on Ajax.
I bought this book because of its practical discussion. The authors describe generic tricks such as adding dynamic dates and form validation to your site, something older books don’t always consider in much detail. Although the language itself hasn’t really changed since the 90s, the way we use it has. For that reason alone I like to upgrade my bookshelf to keep up with the current trends.
This book features a full colour reference chart for DOM properties. This may not be useful to people who like to use syntax-highlight and code completion software, but I still tend to write JavaScript in plain text editors, so any attribute I don’t know off the top of my head is handy to have at my fingertips.
In all, the authors have done a good job of bringing together a thorough primer for JavaScript. The book identifies itself as targeting beginner to intermediate programmers, an assessment I would tend to agree with. If you’re looking for a decent reference, easy to access, without a lot of jargon, this is the book for you.
This error is caused by the presence of HTML in the fields returned by a form post. In many cases, for example page management tools, you may want to allow your users to enter text formatted with HTML. By default, ASP.NET doesn’t like this.
To turn it off, add ValidateRequest=”false” to the top of your aspx file. This turns off validation of form results.
Honestly, I would rather if this property were available for individual form controls, because in my mind validation is still desirable overall even if one or two fields should allow HTML. But there you have it.
The GridView is a powerful control for quickly and easily displaying tables of data. However, a raw dump of information is not always good – when displayed by a web browser, normal line breaks are simply rendered as spaces.
For long blocks of text, it may be desirable to have your GridView insert HTML line breaks into your data. This can be accomplished either programatically or declaratively.
As a programmer, my first instinct is to try to solve the problem using code behind. I add a RowDataBound event handler to my GridView and create the command this way:
protected void gvMessageList_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{
GridViewRow row = e.Row;
if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
{
row.Cells[2].Text = row.Cells[2].Text.Replace(“\n”, “”);
}
}
Although it works, it has several drawbacks:
By far, the better solution is to simply declare the formatting changes in the same place as the GridView. Using a Template field, I can add line breaks to my message by adding this:
<%# Eval(“Message”).ToString().Replace(“\n”, “<br />”) %>
This solution assumes the contents of “Message” are not null. For more information about this technique (including how to deal with null values), I recommend the ASP.NET message boards: http://forums.asp.net/p/1027728/1403884.aspx
Kudos to this article for acknowledging MUDs as the source of the term “SPAM”: A very unhappy birthday to spam, age 30
Now that spam has been with us for 30 memorable years, let’s take a moment to think of all the great things spam does for us:
Not to mention it has become Nigeria’s chief export.