Slumming it with IUI and ASP.NET

With all the hype surrounding the iPhone, the SDK, and building applications for the App Store (which recently tipped the scale at 2 billion downloads), I'm taking a slightly different angle and am exploring "old-school" iPhone develompent: Web Development.

I was just mulling things over and it seems to me that there still is definitely a market (or rather, a need) for iPhone web applications.

So I'm investigating IUI, since it's relatively "mature" but the thing I'm concerned about is how well it integrates (or doesn't) with ASP.NET. So that's what I'm going to be exploring in the near future.

Big Shout Out for Panic's Coda - Awesome Web Development Tool for Mac OS X

Over the last few days I've discovered Coda from Panic:

Panic - Coda - One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X

It is a truly awesome tool for doing web development and it does exactly what I want it to:

• By default it opens to the file system on the left pane, with the editor on the right


• It just works.


• It's code sensing (a la IntelliSense) is fun!

Anyway it's definitetly worth checking out.

Notepad++: How to Associate Syntax Coloring for a File Extension

For the life of me, I could not figure out how to permanently associate the XML syntax coloring for files with a .config extension in Notepad++.

The help did not help, nor did the FAQs.

At any rate, this is how you do it:

1. Settings Menu --> "Styler Configurator" (which then displays the "Style Configurator" window (note the discrepancy)).
2. Click on "XML" in the Language list on the far left.
3. Notice at the bottom there are two text boxes: Default ext and User ext.
4. Enter config in the User ext text box.
5. Click Save & Close.
6. Open a file with .config extension - file should be automatically highlighted.

Here's a suggestion for Notepad++ developers (since it doesn't seem as if they have UX or Interaction Designers on the team)...

Help the user out by doing one of the following:

• When an unrecognized file is opened ask what kind of file it is, or
  
• When the user clicks on an entry in the Language menu, save it as the default for files with that extension.

Thanks!

TIP: How To Fix ASP.NET CalendarExtender when used with Blueprint CSS

I just ran into a bizarre condition where, when using the Blueprint CSS with ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit, the popup calendar produced by the CalendarExtender control has its date numbers pushed out so I only saw about four or five days in each week.

It turns out that this is caused by the padding defined in Blueprint for TD elements are set to 5px. This expands the calendar so only part of it is visible in its containing div.

To fix the problem, I added a DIV called "calendarContainer" around the text box and the CalendarExtender control to "insulate" them:

<div id="calendarContainer">
  <asp:TextBox ID="dateFromTextBox" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
  <cc1:CalendarExtender ID="dateFromCalendarExtender" runat="server"
    TargetControlID="dateFromTextBox"></cc1:CalendarExtender>
</div>

...and then added the following to my CSS file:

div#calendarContainer table td {
 margin:0px;
 padding:0px; 
}

The calendar dates snapped right back!

Problem solved!

kuler: thank you, adobe...

Since I'm not a trained designer, it sure is nice that Adobe has created Kuler, which is a community driven collaborative environment for sharing colors and swatches:

kuler

(...you can even access it from within Adobe Illustrator. very cool.)

Colors are definitely one of those areas I have a big weakness, since I never studied color theory. So it's very nice to see the palettes and swatches other folks (i.e. competent designers) have created.

Thanks, Adobe!

ASP.NET Bug: Button.OnClientClick

I really don't understand this one.

According to the ASP.NET MSDN online documentation for Button.OnClientClick Property (System.Web.UI.WebControls), you use Button.OnClientClick to assign a client-side script (javascript) when the button is clicked (for example if you want to have the button perform some action(s) before submitting, or to short-circuit the click entirely).

However, I couldn't understand why the client-side onclick handler was not getting rendered, no matter what I tried!!!

Then I scrolled down to the bottom and noticed the comment by user contributor "Perley":

"MS has made it so that if you disable the button on the server then the onclick attribute is not even rendered to the client"

Mystery solved.

I had indeed set the button to be disabled in the markup, and it was flat-out not rendering the onclick handler in the HTML.

I fixed the problem by wiring up the onclick event for the button manually using a pageLoad function, but still it was a hassle.

I really think the people who designed, approved, and coded that "feature" should get their head checked, because, seriously... if a button is disabled initially, don't you think it's possible that the button - a user interaction device - might become enabled at some point, and not through server-side intervention???

Developer's Guide - Google AJAX Language API - Google Code

Over the last few months I've been attempting to learn Portuguese, and, having finally been dismayed by the lack of an API from Babelfish (formerly AltaVista, now Yahoo!), I was pleasantly surprised to see that Google now has a translation service.

I'm really excited about this, since not only do they have a decent translation page, they're also exposing an API:

Developer's Guide - Google AJAX Language API - Google Code

Way to go, Google!

This opens doors for applications, both web and [internet connected] desktop, to perform translations.

They also have the ability to detect the source language, but I'm not sure how useful that would be for me personally, but it's a cool feature nonetheless.