Kevin Steffer Outloud – web, business and opinions

16Feb/060

IE Developer Toolbar – get if you haven’t already!

For years I've been bugging and specially debugging with a various kinds of plugins for IE, but it seems now that I found THE plugin for IE the, IE Developer Toolbar. 

It's still en beta though but I haven't discovered any bug yet. To mention a couple of really cool features you can resize your window for testing various screen resolutions, 800x600, 1024x768 and more, it's extremely handy when I develop on my laptop in 1680x1050 - no kinda standard yet :)
It can also show you the DOM of the page rendered, and you can disable features like, scripting, cookies, images - like you can with the developer toolbar for Firefox. You can Outline tables, cells, div- and spantags and you also get a funny ruler for measuring on the webpage.

All in all I found this tool the greatest IE invention since IE 3.0 :D

Get it @ microsoft

Happy debugging HTML!

Filed under: Web No Comments
5Feb/060

My move toward .NET 2.0

My first experience with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 was not so good, but since I've got my hands on the Visual Web Delveoper 2005 Express Edition and the Visual C# 2005 Express Edition I'm actualle getting more and more familiar with it.
First I think they made som minor improvements to the IDE with coding help. The Intellisense is now more intelligent when you write your lines.Another thing that I found very awesome is when you reference your own build class libraries you know get a "Update" in your context menu (right your referenced dll) in the Visual Web Developer 2005. Unfortunately th Visual C# 2005 version doesn't have that option, but it updates anyway somehow when you build again.

When it comes to new stuff in the Visual Web Developer 2005 I must admit I miss my namespace and my project DLL, it's simply gone. When you create a new webform with a "code behind" file it doesn't have the "namespace MyWebProject {}" surrounding your class - it's gone. You can make your own, but then you'd have to change all your aspx files to inherit from your page in the new namespace manually. So I think Microsoft won't recommend working with namespace declarations for your WebForms (aspx), UserControls (ascx).
But when you reference non-standard framework libraries it creates the Bin directory, but you'll only find your referenced dll files here, - weird, but it has one benefit.
You can now have C# "code behind" files along with VB.NET, C++.Net and J# "code behind" files in the same Web Project - that I think is another plus for team projects but taking all in consideration not something that benefits me working in a small business.

The Visual Web Developer 2005 has some new great features like special ASP.NET folders. You have App_LocalResources, App_GlobalResources, App_Code, App_Data, App_Theme, App_Browsers. I haven't been playing around with all of these, but the App_LocalResources has been taking under my wings. While playing around with some template web design I tried to place all my templates in the App_LocalResources and then load these files in my "code behind" files, that worked ofcause, but when you try to access these template files (they are simple xml files) from your client browser you get an 404 File Not Found error, that I think is pretty nice for a guy like me who also made my mistakes by place VBScript kode in .inc files in my early days of ASP programming. Well what I found out after the project was done was that if anyone guessed a .inc file name on the server the source code was printed to him - BAHHH and in worst case the datasource connection string with username AND password would be visible to him.
If you should happen to have made such a project I think we found a great solution without renaming and edit all your include statements. Simply add a .inc files to be executed by asp.dll in your IIS 5.0 Application configuration, and the files execute instead of being displayed as is.

One thing I also miss is the GridLayout for WebForms it's extremely fast to create some ok looking prototype stuff with the GridLayout - you don't have to setup your layout with tables or div's and the style the placing which often takes considerably a lot of time, and that's not spend well while prototyping.

Well I guess that will be all for know.
I might come back with some other new features of the .NET 2.0 in a while that are bugging or thrilling me.

Untill then - Happy Coding
Kevin Steffer

Filed under: ASP.NET No Comments