Integration of the blog with my site.

Heh, easy ;) and clean results. Now if you will not look at the address bar you will not even see differences.

Asp.Net 2.0 refresh-less wizard

In Asp.Net 2.0 Microsoft was release Wizard Web Server Control, also you can find Wizard Web Server Control Overview. However if you will try this you will see that for every page it need postback. Even for quick connections this will cause flickering and so on. Good news that we have clear solution for this...

We will use another Microsoft’s product called Atlas, this is cool AJAX framework. We will use UpdatePanel. You may simply wrap wizard control with update panel. This is mostly all ;)).

To avoid misunderstandings you may be familiar with all this stuff. For example if you will click finish button and change something on the page, this will not show on client. I mean that update panel can only change something that is inner it. However in most cases this is not a problem. For example when clicking on the Finish button in my application code will save something in database and then redirect to another page.

Great news for applications that can use Source Safe, now thay can do this with Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server.

Microsoft was published Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider, tool that give ability to connect your Dreamweaver or another application that support SourceSafe aka MSSCCI to the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server. Now I am downloading Trial Team Foundation Server Software so in few days I will write results of my experiments.

DSL tools. New paradigm of the programming?

Firstly short intro. DSL tools provide functionality to build languages that can completely replace UML languages. But DSL can do many more. One of the keyed features is Code Generation. Theoretically this is great idea.

For example in the DSL tools you can find sample of the Wizard DSL Language. With this language you can draw diagram of the wizard pages and then generate many code. Okay templating and code generation is great. But what we have. With standard development process we use base class that has most functionality and then we derive custom classes and add functionality we need. Possible that someone will think that this is easier to add code from the base class to the template and then generate all. Hope you are not from this "someone". This is wrong way. And you may understand that in most cases you will not be able to regenerate all code. So if in your code will be issue you will not be able to fix this in one place.

Other thing that I think that this is great way to automate database developing. Somebody may create language for the database. Possible that Microsoft will do this or someone else. However I will try this in nearest future.

Microsoft Office 2007 Look

Some minutes ago I was finish installation of the Microsoft Office 2007 ("Office 2007"). This is great. Of course I am not thinking that this is revolution version, it have too many things from old versions. However Ribbon Toolbars and how they use title space - this is great-great ideas.

Okay, all is great. However as always something wrong. Now this wrong is that Office 2007 has too many interfaces. Word, Excel, PowerPoint have new Ribbon toolbars, Outlook have new colored but still old toolbars, and other application have old toolbars at all. Of course possible that this is only because it is beta. Hope Microsoft will have new interface in all their applications.

P.S. Tomorrow I will try to install proofing tools from Office 2003 and post result here.

Asp.Net 2.0 XML back-end

In most cases developers use databases for the site back-end. However for small sites or sites where most content is not needed database you can use XML.

In Asp.Net 2.0 you can use XmlDataSource with many databound controls like FormView or . This provides easy way to show various data.

For example I can describe one of the strategies what I use. This is the Sources folder of my site. On the start page it have list of all sources. They have title, description, screen url, details url and download url. For details page I need the same list of the data plus long description (article). This means that many of the identical data stored in the different places of the site. Of course I want to have one place for this information. How I was resolving this? I was added sources.xml file in the App_Data directory that has all this data. Now for the start page I use DataList binded to the XmlDataSource that retrieve information from the sources.xml. For details page I use FormView with XmlDataSource that retrieve information from the same xml file, however I use XPath that filters this file to show only appropriate information. Clear?

I think this technology is useful for many places. However it has big issue... XmlDataSource is read-only.

P.S. Possible that in few days I will post UpdatableXmlDataSource. But of course I can not promise something.

Asp.Net Meta Control - Easy way to control your meta data.

Something like in response to the previous post I was develop Asp.Net Meta Control. This control provides easy, high-level access to the edit HTML Meta Tag information. It has full design time support in face of the editors for different meta tag types.

Be sure it has full support of the databinding :).

Meta tags in the asp.net

Meta tags in the asp.net is rendered by HtmlMeta control. Just in the OnPageLoad add this control to the Header.Controls collection.

IE7 and standards

As you know Internet Explorer 7("IE7") is new version of the Microsoft's browser. One of the keyed features of it is support of the standards. Okay this is great, however it still does not have even full CSS2 support (I am not say about CSS3 at all). What this mean for developers? Yes you are right. This means that in the list of the browsers like Gecko, Opera and IE we need to add... IE7! Now IE7 does not properly renders sites that was designed for IE6 and it still does not properly renders standard compliance sites. Great!

But let take view in the nearest future. What Microsoft can add in the IE8? Of course more security, but we do not talk about security; they adding it in the every version. Other features are already here (I mean tabs, png, rss). I think they will add more standard compliance. And what we will have? Yes! We will have to add additional browser in our developer list.

Hope at least IE8 will have standard compliance rendering.