Elliott OHara's blog

Great Site for Web Based UI developers

Elliott OHara — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:25:49 -0500

If you work on web based UI much, and you're a standards junkie...

Great GREAT articles there. He just recently posted http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5

Got me all excited about HTML 5!

ASI Css Decoded

Elliott OHara — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:29:07 -0500

With all the ranting and raving by people (me), about CSS, and simple Html markup. I’ve had quite a few questions similar to “what exactly does that mean?” I’m going to take a few minutes and “decode” where we’re heading with our Html markup and CSS, and what the big drive was for our Frio release.

Another Control for consistent HTML generation

Elliott OHara — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:38:38 -0400

Always a stickler for UI patterns and consistency, I’ve found another pattern that seems to be repeating a lot…

An object that has a title, a description and optionally a Thumbnail Image and (optionally again) a HighRes image.

Cross Browser More Info Control

Elliott OHara — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:04:41 -0400

So, I had quite a few senarios where I needed to display information that took up a whole lot of real estate, but was only needed for a short period of time. Sort of a "hover help" kinda thing. I googled it for a while, and really wanted a "pure css" solution, but after realizing how much "fussing" with it that was needed for it to actually work in IE6 (even IE7 requires a strict doctype to get the hover pseudo element to work properly on non anchor elements), I decided to just go with a JS solution.

IE Dev Toolbar

Elliott OHara — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 16:15:17 -0500

So.. Since MS released IE 7 as a urgent update, I'm thinking it's about time to go ahead and install. I did a little googling to see how bad this would make life, and found http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/

Here's a quote

Develop high-performance web applications: For web developers, two tools are absolutely invaluable: Fiddler and the IE Developer Toolbar. Fiddler is a general purpose debugging proxy, giving developers complete control of all the HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. The IE Developer Toolbar enables DOM exploration and modification, viewing of DOM element details, and has built in HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS validators.

Note on effective use of disconnected data

Elliott OHara — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 16:24:25 -0500

So, Stacey and I where chasing down this bug where when you added a PackageItem to a SourceCode's Package, only the first got added. Well... Until someone came back to the page and found that they had been added, they just never showed up in the list. It reaked of disconnected data caching issues.

Turns out, the issue was adding a PackageItem object that points to a Supplement Object that did not exist in the container. Once the SourceCode.GetSupplements() method was called it (correctly) set the ChildLoaded for Supplements to true, so subsequent calls to the Method would never check the DB for the underlying Supplement Object, and wouldn't hit the db to find it (since ChildLoaded was set to true for supplements), but it would add the PackageItem object since that only needed the key. In other words,

#1 SourceCode.GetPackageItems();
#2 SourceCode.AddPackageItem(key);
#3 SourceCode.GetPackageItems();

#3 DID NOT end up returning the PackageItem added on #2.

Another Cool Googlism...

Elliott OHara — Mon, 08 May 2006 15:03:04 -0400

Another cool web 2.0 app from google.

Check out www.google.com/ig.

It's just a person hompage, but it accepts any rss, atom or module, so you can drag and drop panels and arrange them how you see fit.

Yes Asp.Net 2.0 makes apps like this pretty simple (atlas has drag and drop controls)...

This should be required viewing.

Elliott OHara — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 18:19:39 -0400

If you are a .Net developer, UI or Backend, you should take 18 minutes and check out this presentation by Scott Gunthrie.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/5/8/85803fdd-fe9a-4783-ab37-e0c565172ffd/asp_net_atlas.wmv

Shoot... If your not a developer, but care about where the web is going and how web based applications behave, you should check it out too!

Simple but Slick AJAX page

Elliott OHara — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 11:59:28 -0400

So, my wife's website has a calendar of a calendar of all the dance classes she offers. It's not really a calendar, it's just a list of classes by day...Well she just added a requirement in her ever so gentle way that she have multiple "seasons"... So in Fall she has one set of classes, and during the summer a different set.

Since I already had my hands dirty on the page, and I'm a sucker for wiz bang... I decided to play with some AJAX...

Ajax and Atlas conversation with Jeremy

Elliott OHara — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 09:12:40 -0500

Links of interest

ICallBackEventHandler (MS AJAX implimentation) article (how it works)
http://www.simple-talk.com/2005/08/10/asynchronous-client-script-callbacks

MS Atlas article (THIS ROCKS)
http://www.topxml.com/Biztalk-Adapters/re-21196_Making-a-List-Checking-it-Twice-Cool-Ajax-Sample-App-with-ASP-NET-2-0-and-Atlas.aspx