Categories
Design & UI

Islands of Richness with Silverlight on an ASP.NET page

I stumbled across this great tutorial by Brad Adams, titled ‘Islands of Richness with Silverlight on an ASP.NET page‘. Step by step it walks you through using and customising the ASP.NET MediaPlayer control and shows your how video can be added to an ASP.NET website.

Addendum: On the subject of Silverlight, this is an interesting development from Microsoft.

Categories
Design & UI

How to Destory the Web 2.0 Look

A nice blog entry from Snap2Objects, titled  How to Destory the Web 2.0 Look, takes a look at the ‘Web 2.0’ style that many websites have adopted and how others are fighting against it.

Categories
Design & UI

Flip-able Pages (continued)

Back in August I asked several designers and developers for their opinions of presenting content within a flip-able, page-turning environment. At the time I wasn’t really sold on the idea, but a new service from Cubedesigners, called Fluidbook, does seem to be a step in the right direction. It seems much easier to view and browse than the previous examples I’ve seen.

FluidBook

Addendum: Additional sources for future reference.

Categories
Coding

Converting URLs into Hyperlinks

This is a essential peice of Classic ASP code I’ve used time after time for my websites – originally taken from 4GuysFromRolla.com, I’m pasting it here for future reference.

'----------------------------------------------
' InsertHyperlinks(inText)
' Returns a inText with "<a target="_BLANK" href="URL" mce_href="URL">URL</a>"
' inserted where there is URL found.
'
' URL can start with "www" or "http"
' or
' URL can be a email address "*@*"
'----------------------------------------------
Function InsertHyperlinks(inText)
Dim objRegExp, strBuf
Dim objMatches, objMatch
Dim Value, ReplaceValue, iStart, iEnd
strBuf = ""
  iStart = 1
  iEnd = 1
  Set objRegExp = New RegExp
objRegExp.Pattern = "\b(www|http|\S+@)\S+\b" ' Match URLs and emails
  objRegExp.IgnoreCase = True ' Set case insensitivity.
  objRegExp.Global = True ' Set global applicability.
  Set objMatches = objRegExp.Execute(inText)
  For Each objMatch in objMatches
  iEnd = objMatch.FirstIndex
  strBuf = strBuf & Mid(inText, iStart, iEnd-iStart+1)
  If InStr(1, objMatch.Value, "@") Then
  strBuf = strBuf & GetHref(objMatch.Value, "EMAIL", "_BLANK")
  Else
  strBuf = strBuf & GetHref(objMatch.Value, "WEB", "_BLANK")
  End If
  iStart = iEnd+objMatch.Length+1
  Next
  strBuf = strBuf & Mid(inText, iStart)
  InsertHyperlinks = strBuf
End Function

Function GetHref(url, urlType, Target)
Dim strBuf
strBuf = "<a href="""
If UCase(urlType) = "WEB" Then
If LCase(Left(url, 3)) = "www" Then
strBuf = "<a href=""http://" & url & """ Target=""" & _
Target & """>" & url & "</a>"
Else
strBuf = "<a href=""" & url & """ Target=""" & _
Target & """>" & url & "</a>"
End If
ElseIf UCase(urlType) = "EMAIL" Then
strBuf = "<a href=""mailto:" & url & """ Target=""" & _
Target & """>" & url & "</a>"
End If
GetHref = strBuf
End Function

Categories
Coding

Accessing the Html Header in ASP.NET 2.0

Posting this for future reference:

Dim header As Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlHead
header = TryCast(Me.Page.Header, Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlHead)
If (header IsNot Nothing) Then
Dim link As New HtmlLink
link.Attributes.Add("type", "text/css")
link.Attributes.Add("rel", "stylesheet")
link.Attributes.Add("media", "screen")
link.Attributes.Add("href", "~/style.css")
header.Controls.Add(link)
End If

Categories
Server

Organising SharePoint Documents

I’ve been thinking about this for a while (how best to organise documents within a SharePoint website – whether to use document libraries or metadata) and have just stumbled across two blog posts, by Dustin Miller and Bil Simser, which seem to answers my queries.

Categories
Coding

ASP.Net Paths

Just posting a link to this article by Rick Strahl as its one I seem to refer to time after time…

Categories
Coding

Implementing Waiting Pages in ASP.NET

Just adding this for future reference (I know a project it would be perfect for).

Categories
Business

MIX:UK 07

I attended the Microsoft Mix:UK event in London recently (11 – 12 September). During the various sessions, .NET 3.5, Silverlight and the Live APIs were all heavily showcased. The highlights of the two day event were the sessions lead by Scott Guthrie, a manager within Microsoft’s Developer Division, who showed how to build Silverlight applications within .NET, and the lovely free “thank you” gifts from Microsoft: full copies of Windows Vista Ultimate and Expression Studio! Now I just need a more powerful PC to install them on.

Hopefully they will be posting videos of the sessions I missed in the very near future.

Categories
Coding

The ASP.Net Web Config File

Posting this for future reference…