SEO and Keyword Research

Without proper keyword research, your SEO efforts will be mostly wasted.Keywords are the basis of all the rest of the search engine optimization you will implement, both on and off site. Spend plenty of time on this research – don’t rush through it.Using them you will build: Titles Meta descriptions Headers Content Alt attributes Bulleted lists Links Link textHow do you do this research? Below is a list of free tools you can use. There are many others that you can find online; some are free and some charge a fee.1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool 2. Microsoft Ad Intelligence 3. Google Webmaster Tools for your siteUsing one or all of these tools, determine which keyword phrases are searched for the most. These are your top tier keywords. chicago roofers . There’s usually a sharp decline in number of searches after them, and the following words are your 2nd tier keywords. The lesser searched for terms are the 3rd tier and long tail keywords.Top tier keywords are the most competitive. If you site is new or has few links, and competition is high, you need to focus more on the second tier (although don’t ignore the top tier keywords).Assign 3-5 different keywords to each page of your site. You should have at least 3 and really 5 (or more) pages of original, unique content on your site. A site with only one original page is pretty much doomed.Use these 3-5 keywords as a focus for your title, tags, and content on the chosen page. mo attorney . Don’t use them redundantly. Don’t make your title, header, and alt attributes the same. Mix it up, make it natural – you don’t want anything on your site to look or sound duplicated or spammy. Put the top tier keyword phrases in your content, but again, you may have to focus on 2nd tier for your main keywords until you gain some traction in the SERPs (search engine results pages).If you spend the time it takes on keyword research, carefully building your list, the rest of your SEO efforts will come together much more smoothly and your results will be immeasurably better.Watch some videos about keyword research.

6 Tools To Be An Effective Web Developer

Over the last few years Rails has helped Ruby’s popularity explode. One of the biggest reasons for this is the time that Rails can save you. By working within a well defined framework a lot of development decisions are simplified and it is easier to be more organized. Throw in some great tools like ORM, Unit Testing, Mocking, and more and you have a powerhouse of developer efficiency and quality.

There has always been and probably always will be feuds over what is the best platform but what I want to show you is that those arguments are mostly irrelevant. Regardless of what platform you choose to develop on there are most of the same tools available in one form or another. The common components, for me anyway, that help me produce high quality code faster and is easier to maintain are a good IDE, easy to use unit testing and mocking frameworks, an ORM, a MVC framework, and a good JavaScript library.

I am a .Net developer by trade and a PHP developer sometimes by choice. I enjoy both environments for different reasons. I am going to talk about each of these components in a bit of detail and explain why I think they are important and then at the end of the article I will provide a list of each of these components for various languages (.Net, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby). I have decided to only list free or open source tools because they are easy for someone to try out and we all like to save a few bucks.

The Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

To me this is the prime essential. Sure you can program in Notepad and compile with the command line but it will likely take longer and it will require more discipline to stay organized. With a good IDE you have easy project management (all you files grouped together with tabbed browsing), syntax highlighting, compilation (if applicable), and auto complete.

IDE are continuously getting more and more sophisticated and plugins allow for lots more functionality like svn and git management in the IDE.

For me my favorite IDE is Visual Studio. There are some other great programs out there like NetBeans and Eclipse but for whatever reason I have become partial to Visual Studio.

Unit Testing And Mocking

These two items go hand in hand. No application is complete without proper testing. There are plenty of people on both sides of the fence when it comes to testing. I know, I was a skeptic for a along time. It just felt weird to spend time writing code to test the real code I was going to write. Finally I just decided to give it a try and it has changed the way I program. When you are focusing on how to test your code you just write cleaner code and it’s nice to have a quick way to know if the change you just made broke anything.

Object Relational Mapper

If you have ever used an ORM you know that it can save you a huge amount of time. One of the concerns I had before jumping to an ORM was performance. I wanted to know if using an ORM would make my application slower but I was asking the wrong question. I should have been asking whether or not the small performance hit was worth the huge time savings. The answer to that is a definite YES! Rarely in an application will the ORM be the source of poor performance and if it is it can be refactored to improve or you can use straight SQL if need be.

It all comes down to not worrying about performance issues before you have any. Yes it is important to keep performance in mind but using an ORM shouldn’t be anything to worry about.

MVC Framework

MVC has become very popular thanks in part to Rails and it’s revolution in the way we do Web Development. The key component to it’s popularity is that it separates the different concerns of your application into seperate pieces. This separation allows easier testing, better design, and makes your application more maintainable overall.

JavaScript Library

It seems there is a JavaScript library for just about everything these days. I remember not too long ago there were that many and JavaScript use hadn’t exploded yet. A JavaScript library is important to your productivity. The library shouldn’t compensate for poor JavaScript skills, you need a solid foundation, but should compliment a good understanding of it. The library will take care of browser compatibility issues and low level operations letting you focus on getting the job done.

ASP.Net
IDE: Visual Studio 2008 Express
Unit Testing: NUnit
Mocking: Rhino Mocks
ORM: NHibernate
MVC: ASP.NET MVC
JavaScript: jQuery

Java
IDE: NetBeans
Unit Testing: JUnit
Mocking: EasyMock
ORM: Hibernate
MVC: Struts
JavaScript: jQuery

PHP
IDE: PHPEclipse
Unit Testing: PHPUnit
Mocking: PHPMock
ORM: Propel
MVC: Symfony
JavaScript: jQuery

Python
IDE: PyDev
Unit Testing: PyUnit
Mocking: PythonMock
ORM: SQLObject
MVC: Django
JavaScript: jQuery

Ruby
IDE: RadRails
Unit Testing: Test::Unit
Mocking: Mocha
ORM: Sequel
MVC: Rails
JavaScript: jQuery

Be sure to grab the RSS feed, get updates by email, or follow me on Twitter to stay up to date and not miss any posts.

kick it on DotNetKicks.com Shout it

Keyword Research – Traffic and the Least Competition

Keyword research is something you’re going to have to pay attention to, if you want to have more than a few occasional wins with your internet marketing.Ideally you want to be able to find keywords and key phrases that meet 3 criteria. These are–SUBSTANTIAL TRAFFIC. If you find some obscure expression that only 22 people search for, you might not make a brilliant income from that market niche.MINIMAL COMPETITION. You don’t want to be competing against hordes of other advertisers and marketers.Few competitors = a brilliant keyword. Tons of competitors = a lousy keyword.BUYERS SPEND MONEY. Tons of people search for ‘free’ stuff everyday. But they are not your ideal customers.Okay, so now we have a broad description of what a “good looking” keyphrase looks like, the next obvious question is…How do you find these marvelous keywords? – because once you know that, you can find your ideal prospects.Here’s how you research to find profitable keywords:Step 1 — investigate TRAFFIC volumes. Go to freekeywords.wordtracker.com or any other similar site and type in a broad term such as golf. home equity loan . The site will give you a list of the top 100 search results for that word. Under golf, for example, you will find golf clubs, golf carts, golf buggies, etc. I’m sure you get the idea.Next to each phrase you will see the number of daily searches.From that list, select the results that have enough searches to be worth your while to target. Copy from Wordtracker to a spreadsheet. You want both keyphrases and search volume. You can get a very good spreadsheet program from OpenOffice for no cost.Step 2 — investigate the amount of COMPETITION.Go to Google.com and type in each of these potential keyphrases and make a note of how many competing sites there are in that market. See the number of results near the top right of your Google results page? – yes, that’s the number. For each keyphrase, copy it into a new column on your spreadsheet.Step 3 — check if there’s MONEY in this niche. Also make a new column for how many paid Google ads appear for each keyphrase you are investigating. If there aren’t any ads, this is not a niche worth targeting.BEATING THE BOREDOM FACTOR IN KEYWORD RESEARCHRight about now, you’re might be thinking… “This is too hard… colorado mountain express . too boring. I could never do this!” Learn how to do keyword research the easy way

4 Steps To Ensure You’re The Worst
Developer Ever!

4 Steps To Ensure You're The Worst Developer Ever!

Disclaimer: For those with no sense of humor at all; this is an exercise in extreme sarcasm.

There are lots of articles about improving your skills as a developer. Everyone likes to talk about how to strengthen their skills and produce really good software. But, what if you want to be the worst developer ever? Nobody seems to want to share those secrets.

In these tough economic times secure your financial future by milking your employer for as much as you can. They’re not really interested in saving money.

Don’t Write Clean Code

Just think, if you write messy code that is hard to maintain then you are creating job security for yourself. The longer it takes to debug and make changes the more money you will be making.

Writing comments in your code, making the code clear and easy to understand just opens the door for someone to steal your job. If it can’t be understood then nobody else can do you job! You might want to keep a cheatsheet or decrypting key hidden somewhere in case you can’t figure out what you were thinking.

Don’t Write Unit Tests

Here is the excuse many of you have been looking for to justify not writing unit tests. Stop whining about unit tests being too hard to write or taking too much time. I’ve got a better reason.

Writing unit tests makes your code to modular and concise. Refer to the point about not writing clean code above. Besides, unit testing will only save you time in the long run. That is not our goal. We are trying to cash in on overtime pay here!

Don’t Read Development Blogs Or Programming Books!

Who needs to learn new skills? Why on earth would you want to do that? Everyone knows that VB6 is good enough and can do anything we need to do. You don’t want to work for those cheap skates that are trying to improve development performance and cut development costs. Nobody needs to use an ORM, you make more money if it takes you longer to write all that code by hand!

Don’t Waste Time Planning Your Application

Get off my back about planning my application. You don’t need to do that, it will just look like you aren’t getting anything done. The sooner you can get a working prototype up and running the happier your client will be. Don’t worry about the future. Your client won’t need new features or find any bugs.

There You Have It

Now that you are armed with this new liberating information, go out there and be the worst developer that you can be. It’s time to put some mystery back into software development!

By reading this post you agree to the following disclaimer and free Geek Daily from any consequences this information may have on your career.

The little ‘gotcha’ in LINQ to XML

Gotcha in LINQ to XMLI have been working with LINQ to XML for the last couple days working on importing some XML data into a database.I have used LINQ before with very little effort which is why I decided to give it another go for this project.I got my program all fleshed out and started writing the LINQ query. divorce attorney . The XML file was very simple just a root element with a collection of children.

<root><child /><child /><child /><child /></root>

So when my query kept returning 0 elements I started to get frustrated. Denver Towing . laser spine institute . Why wasn’t it working? I pulled up the past project I had done using LINQ and compared the queries. They were identical from a syntax standpoint except the new query wasn’t returning anything.After a few short Google searches I discovered it was because the new query was reading an XML file that was using namespaces.

<root xmlns="http://namespace.uri"><x:child xmlns:x="http://x.namespace.uri"/><x:child /><x:child /><x:child /></root>

In this case I was able to remove the namespaces as they were not needed and had been automatically add when I downloaded the file from SharePoint.After removing the namespaces the query worked beautifully as I had originally expected it to.The long and short of this is watch out for namespaces when you are writing queries for LINQ to XML.I didn’t take the time to find a solution that left the namespaces in place because I didn’t really have the time to waste if it wasn’t necessary. If anyone can provide some advice or a solution I would appreciate it. Thanks.

Importing Assemblies Into C#

Sometimes it is necessary to use an assembly that was not created in .Net. atlanta wedding florists . This usually involves doing some low level things that are not native to C# or .Net and require you to import an existing assembly, perhaps a Win32 assembly, or to write your code in C++ and then import that into C#.Let’s say for example you wanted to call the Win32 MessageBeep method to output an audible prompt to your user when they type something incorrectly. Yes, I know that would be annoying but this is just an example.First we need to call the Win32 assembly with P/Invoke like this.

[DllImport("User32.dll")]static extern Boolean MessageBeep(UInt32 beepType);

Now this imports the MessageBeep functionality so we can use it in C#. flooring companies . Now all you do is call it like a normal Method passing the beep type as a parameter.

MessageBeep(0);

It is that simple. maid . P/Invoke gives use some nice flexibility to leverage existing Win32 API functions that may be missing from C# or reuse unmanaged code we have written for other projects.

ReadOnly and EnableViewState don’t play nice

I ran into an interesting situation today. From what I read it an old issue as well. alabama . In ASP.Net 2.0 if you set EnableViewState equal to false and assign a text box as read only the value will be lost on post back.Rick Strahl posted a nice article on this back in late 2005 which helped me get around this issue.2005? What? Okay I have to admit that until today I have not been developing my web applications with view state turned completely off. lower back pain . I have turn individual controls on and off as performance required but view state has never been a real issue for me. Today I decided to bite the bullet and just get used to having view state off and it took less than an hour to run into this so here is how to get around it. Yeah I know you probably already know but on the off chance you don’t…then here it is.Just place the following code in the Page_Load method.

TextBox1.Text = Request[TextBox1.UniqueID];

Adventures in creating controls – Know your application lifecycle

kick it on DotNetKicks.comI have been developing Composite Controls lately for ASP.Net. I am trying to focus on clean separation of code and adhering to DRY principles whenever possible. This has lead me to using controls in an attempt to make my application modules more “pluggable” with the application core.So far this has been working quite well but I am being forced to investigate the lifecycle of the different components of my application when I encounter results that I wasn’t expecting.

Simple Example

We’ll look at a simple example in a moment. I approached control development the same way that I approach, what I would call normal, OOP concepts in C#. I initialize the objects, load necessary data, yada yada yada. What I found is that controls throw a whole new twist on the lifecycle of my application.MyControl.cs

namespace MyCustomControls {public class MyControl : CompositeControl {//private membersprivate string myProperty;// constructorpublic MyControl() {this.Initialize();}//some propertypublic string MyProperty {get { return myProperty; }set { myProperty = value; }}// Removes <span></span> from around controlprotected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) {RenderContents(writer);}// creates the controlsprotected override void CreateChildControls() {//create my controls here}//initialize the controlprivate void Initialize() {HttpContext.Current.Response.Write(myProperty);}}}

Default.aspx

...<%@ Register TagPrefix="custom" Namespace="MyCustomControls" Assembly="MyCustomControls" %>...<custom:MyControl ID="MyControl1" runat="server" MyProperty="Some property"/>...

The above example illustrates how I first approached developing controls. Some of you may cringe at this code, I don’t know. I don’t claim to be a .Net or Patterns guru so feel free to call me out on bad code.

So what’s the problem?

So what’s the problem? Well the Initialize method will write a null string to the screen. Why? Because properties are not set until after the constructor is called so I am trying to write the property before it has be instantiated .

How I made it work

What I did to achieve the results I needed I removed the call to the Initialize method from the constructor and placed it at the top of the CreateChildControls method.

// creates the controlsprotected override void CreateChildControls() {this.Initialize();//create my controls here}

Conclusion

Again I am not sure if this is the best approach, since I am fairly new to creating controls, but this is what works for me. child custody attorney . I would welcome your opinions and views on this.

Chaining the C# ?? Operator

Rick Strahl has a great post on the C# ?? operator and how to chain the functionality to write tigher code.

C# 2.0 has a nice ?? operator that works as a shortcut for:
string value1 = null;string value2 = "Test1";string result = value1 != null ? value1 : value2;

which causes result containing Test1 or the second value.In C# you can shortcut this special null comparison case with the new ??:

string result = value1 ?? value2;

which is a little easier to write. Things To Do In New York . This is probably not news to you, but what’s really useful is that you can chain these operators together so you can do a whole bunch of null comparisons in a single stroke. home repair services . For example, I frequently look for a few different querystring variables in a page:

string partner = Request.QueryString["GoogleId"] ??                  Request.QueryString["PartnerId"] ??                  Request.QueryString["UserKey"] ??                  string.Empty;

which still yields a valid result for the first non-null querystring or if nothing is found returning “”.Note that this also works with the longhand syntax in the first example if you use brackets, but more than one level gets pretty unreadable quickly. Comcast Deals . The ?? syntax on the other is easily readable. This can certainly save you from writing a bunch of nested IF statements to check for multiple conditions.Reminds me a bit of JavaScript code using || syntax for null checking, and maybe that’s why I just ran into the chaining aspect now

C# – To seal or not to seal

CodeBetter.com writes a nice post on why you should seal your classes whenever possible.

When defining a new type, compilers should make the class sealed by default so that the class cannot be used as a base class. LTL Shipping . Instead, many compilers, including C#, default to unsealed classes and allow the programmer to explicitly mark a class as sealed by using the sealed keyword. Obviously, it is too late now, but I think that todays compilers have chosen the wrong default and it would be nice if it could change with future compilers. lacrosse charm . There are three reasons why a sealed class is better than an unsealed class:* Versioning: When a class is originally sealed, it can change to unsealed in the future without breaking compatibility. ()* Performance: () if the JIT compiler sees a call to a virtual method using a sealed types, the JIT compiler can produce more efficient code by calling the method non-virtually.()* Security and Predictability: A class must protect its own state and not allow itself to ever become corrupted. When a class is unsealed, a derived class can access and manipulate the base classs state if any data fields or methods that internally manipulate fields are accessible and not private.()


Basic GDI+ tutorial

When I was studying GDI+ I found it very hard to find good informative tutorials that took the time to explain what was happening as they went along.This tutorial by Handy Chang is great for any experience level.

In this article, I will explain about GDI+ in .NET Framework. If you haven’t heard about GDI+, then GDI+ is a set of classes in .NET framework that deal with graphics. You can use GDI+ to draw custom drawing on the screen. sdm . hvac installers . GDI provides a layer of abstraction, hiding the differences between different video cards.You simply need to call the Windows API function to do the specific task, and internally the GDI figures out how to get to the client’s particular video card to do whatever that you want.Although GDI exposes a relatively high level API to developers, it is still an API that based on the old Windows API with C style functions. GDI+ sits as a layer between GDI and your application providing more intuitive and inheritance based object model.GDI+ is generally considered a Windows technology. However, some of the new GDI+ features make this technology an excellent choice for Web applications, enabling developers to generate images, graphs, diagrams, and much more.

Taking an ASP.NET 2.0 Application Offline

Scott Mitchell has written a great article on ways to take your application offline when you need to do maintenance to your site.

n a perfect world, once a web application has been deployed and is live on the Internet or intranet, it will never experience any downtime. However, this is not very realistic in the real world because most applications grow and change and get updated over time. For example, as users interface with the application they may unearth bugs, or they may provide suggestions for new features or ways to enhance the user experience. After squashing those bugs and implementing the requested enhancements, the updated code base needs to be deployed to the production environment. This may involve updating ASP.NET pages, configuration files, making database modifications, and so on.When updating a web application that’s currently in production, it is best to take the application offline so that users understand that the application is being worked on. Wholesale Diamonds New York . This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, from simply stopping the web server software to displaying a web page that informs the user that the site is offline for maintenance. What you don’t want to do is have the application appear to work, only to have some error pop up later because you are in the middle of updating the production server. This is a sure-fired way to frustrate your users.In this article we will discuss options for taking a web application offline. Read on to learn more…

LINQ provider for Flickr

I came an article by someone who has created a LINQ provider for Flickr. house painters . This will allow you to easily leverage Flickr in your applications using the power of LINQ.

LINQ provider for Flickr gives an easy way to query , add and delete Flickr photos. Build A Website . lawsuit settlements . Here, I will give some sneak preview about how to use the provider to do different operations on Flickr, as if doing queries with SQL objects.

ASP.NET MVC Framework

ScottGu has announced Microsoft’s upcoming MVC framework. This is great news for ASP.Net. This will give developers a choice besides WebForms. I can wait for MVC. Handling my own postbacks is a fair tradeoff to get rid of __VIEWSTATE. This will also help developers who work with Ruby on Rails as well (RoR also uses a MVC style architecture).

What is a Model View Controller (MVC) Framework?MVC is a framework methodology that divides an application’s implementation into three component roles: models, views, and controllers. interstate roofing . * “Models” in a MVC based application are the components of the application that are responsible for maintaining state. Often this state is persisted inside a database (for example: we might have a Product class that is used to represent order data from the Products table inside SQL). * “Views” in a MVC based application are the components responsible for displaying the application’s user interface. Typically this UI is created off of the model data (for example: we might create an Product “Edit” view that surfaces textboxes, dropdowns and checkboxes based on the current state of a Product object). * “Controllers” in a MVC based application are the components responsible for handling end user interaction, manipulating the model, and ultimately choosing a view to render to display UI. In a MVC application the view is only about displaying information – it is the controller that handles and responds to user input and interaction.One of the benefits of using a MVC methodology is that it helps enforce a clean separation of concerns between the models, views and controllers within an application. Maintaining a clean separation of concerns makes the testing of applications much easier, since the contract between different application components are more clearly defined and articulated.The MVC pattern can also help enable red/green test driven development (TDD) – where you implement automated unit tests, which define and verify the requirements of new code, first before you actually write the code itself.A few quick details about the ASP.NET MVC FrameworkI’ll be doing some in-depth tutorial posts about the new ASP.NET MVC framework in a few weeks once the bits are available for download (in the meantime the best way to learn more is to watch the video of my Alt.net presentation).A few quick details to share in the meantime about the ASP.NET MVC framework: * It enables clean separation of concerns, testability, and TDD by default. All core contracts within the MVC framework are interface based and easily mockable (it includes interface based IHttpRequest/IHttpResponse intrinsics). You can unit test the application without having to run the Controllers within an ASP.NET process (making unit testing fast). You can use any unit testing framework you want to-do this testing (including NUnit, MBUnit, MS Test, etc). * It is highly extensible and pluggable. Everything in the MVC framework is designed so that it can be easily replaced/customized (for example: you can optionally plug-in your own view engine, routing policy, parameter serialization, etc). It also supports using existing dependency injection and IOC container models (Windsor, Spring.Net, NHibernate, etc). * It includes a very powerful URL mapping component that enables you to build applications with clean URLs. cheap self storage . URLs do not need to have extensions within them, and are designed to easily support SEO and REST-friendly naming patterns. For example, I could easily map the /products/edit/4 URL to the “Edit” action of the ProductsController class in my project above, or map the /Blogs/scottgu/10-10-2007/SomeTopic/ URL to a “DisplayPost” action of a BlogEngineController class. * The MVC framework supports using the existing ASP.NET .ASPX, .ASCX, and .Master markup files as “view templates” (meaning you can easily use existing ASP.NET features like nested master pages, snippets, declarative server controls, templates, data-binding, localization, etc). It does not, however, use the existing post-back model for interactions back to the server. Instead, you’ll route all end-user interactions to a Controller class instead – which helps ensure clean separation of concerns and testability (it also means no viewstate or page lifecycle with MVC based views). * The ASP.NET MVC framework fully supports existing ASP.NET features like forms/windows authentication, URL authorization, membership/roles, output and data caching, session/profile state management, health monitoring, configuration system, the provider architecture, etc.

Database Drivers not provided by Microsoft

arizona self storage . tampa storage units . Joseph Guadagno has kindly brought together some database drivers not included by Microsoft.

I wanted save some people some time looking for providers for their non-Microsoft databases to use with .NET. Please keep in mine I have not tried or used all of these providers / tools but have found them from searching and asking around.

Introduction to Web Services with C#

PhycoCoder has posted a great tutorial on getting started with Web Services using C#.

Here are the main differences between a Web Service and a Web Site: * Web Site has an interface – Web Service has no interface * Web Site is designed to interact with people – Web Service is designed to interact with other applications * Web Site is designed to work with web browser clients – Web Service is designed to work with any type of client or deviceo as you can see, a Web Service and a Web Application have almost the same role, they just go about fulfilling that role in vastly different ways. gmc.com . phoenix homes . A Web Service uses HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to transfer data to and from the clients. Data sent to and from the Web Service is rendered into XML so the Web Service can read it, then it is sent back to the slient, which then renders the returned XML into the format it was expecting.

Visual Studio 2008 – Master Pages Oddity

Miguel Castro points out a problem he found in VS2008 beta that could save others some time in finding hte problem.

I started using nested Master Pages in Orcas last week and ran into a small snag. diamond rings . Things To Do In New York . I could not get a break point to fire on the Page_Load in the child Master Page’s code-behind class. In fact I noticed that the code wasn’t running at all. After 30 minutes of beating my head against the wall, I tried changing the Page_Load method to an override of OnLoad and that worked perfectly. denver wedding venue . Then it ocurred to me to check the AutoEventWireup value in the Page directive and sure enough it was set to False. This is the first situation I’ve seen where it does not default to True so if you come across this, jump straight there and you should find the problem.

Add Google Maps to your .Net site in 10 minutes

pet grooming tampa fl .

Ever wanted to add a Google Map to your site but only had 15 minutes to spare? Now you can add a map and still have time to brag to your mates and bask in the worship that (inevitably) comes afterward.Basically, the guys over at subgurim.net have already done all the hard work in writing the .Net wrapper for Google Maps. air conditioning repair . Problem is, the examples on their site are mostly in spanish & its a bit difficult to find out exactly what is needed to get everything working.

Read more…

Does Classic ASP Still Have A Place In A .Net World?

Ever since making the transition from ASP to .Net 3 years ago I haven’t given Classic ASP much thought since. If fact, I have recommend many new developers focus their time on more productive things than bothering to learn ASP. I was an ASP programmer for 2 years before moving to ASP.Net. I coded 100% in VBScript and that was a major reason I disliked ASP. I am not a VB fan. Hot Shot Trucking . I know many people like it and that is fine but I like C# much better.If I did not like VB then why did I use VBScript well, at the time, and still, 99% of examples and code on the net for ASP are in VBScript and it just made things easier then. In the last 3 years though I have fallen in love with JavaScript and it’s insnaley easy way of extending native objects.I also heard someone not too long ago comment on being able to do the same in ASP/JavaScript. At that time I thought, hmmm, makes sense, why did I think of that before? Although not much became of the idea after.Today the though crossed my mind again as I was writing some JavaScript code so I decided to give it a go. I threw together this simple example.

<%String.prototype.write = function(){  Response.Write(this);}function Animal(){  this.kind = "";  this.food = "";  this.eat = function()  {    if(this.kind.length < 1)      "No animal defined!".write();    else if(this.food.length < 1)      "No food defined!".write();    else      (this.kind + "'s like " + this.food + ". Yum!").write();  };}var cat = new Animal();cat.kind = "cat";cat.food = "fish";cat.eat();%>

Pretty nice. kwik kar . No VB and some decent OOP happening in ASP. It is however limited to this page but if I were to write a small framework or use something like Dean Edwards base and include it on each page of the project it is a, to me anyways, an exceptable compromise.I am not going to jump back into ASP but it is certainly fun to play with and with the possibility of a government ASP job looming I am all the more happy to have stumbled upon this.Cheers

Asp.net Ajax UpdatePanel Simultaneous Update – A Remedy

I found this great article in the Geeks With Blogs feed this morning. It talks about an issue with running simultaneous UpdatePanels. richard maize . Coverking . The first update gets canceled by the second. They explain how to get around this.

If you ever try to do more than one simultaneous partial update with Asp.net Ajax Update Panel, I guess you already found that Asp.net Ajax Framework cancel the current update request and start the new one. You think I am kidding? Okay lets try the following code:

Read the full article

.NET 3.5 blues

Be aware of this issue if you are using or thinking of using the .Net 3.5 beta.

If you have tried Orcas or any of the Express Editions for 3.5, I am sure you must have been impressed. So was I. However, upon uninstalling .NET 3.5, my .NET 2.0 Framework Configuration Tool (mscorcfg) got corrupt. I was getting the “snap-in failed to initialize” error.MS does tell you specifically that you are supposed to repair the VS 2005 installation after uninstalling any of these Beta versions. honda of houston . I did that and since that didn’t help, I googled a bit and found this which helps fix this error. You can read about it more from here.

Facebook.Net

This article by Nikhil caught my attention because it hits close to home. Wholesale Jewellery . I have been debating on creating a Facebook application but was wishing for a nice clean (prefereably C# based) .Net framework to use. I’ll be keeping an eye on this as it develops.

In the couple of months since Facebook opened itself up to application developers, it has transformed itself into a platform. There is a mind-boggling momentum at play, not only in terms of user signups, but in the excitement around developing for the platform as well. A lot of web startups are adding a Facebook experience, and at the same time, a number of new applications are popping up (every day… literally!) that are leveraging the power of the social network in creative ways. It will be interesting to see how Facebook holds up over time compared to other networks such as MySpace which seems to be dying in its own noise and chaos.I’ve been hooked on Facebook for couple of weeks, and am super-impressed with it. It has spurred me into experimenting with some ideas. laguardia airport . Along the way (in classic developer-style), I’ve put together a small framework, Facebook.NET, for developing Facebook apps using ASP.NET. In the spirit of experimenting, I’ve also shared it out on CodePlex in its early form. This post contains a very brief intro on using it along with links to key Facebook developer material.