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Have you ever wanted to change what DotNetNuke says on it's controls? Change "Register" to "Join Us" or "Terms of Use" to "Member Agreement"? It's easier than you think.

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It often happens that I would like to know the size of an image so that I can smartly resize it in various situations. Until today, I had never been quite able to get everything that I needed to get it done.

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Using a DropDownList, RadioButtonList, CheckBoxList, or other similar control as a trigger of an Update Panel (rather than in the Update Panel itself) will cause the initial value not to fire a SelectedIndexChanged event.

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If you're anything like me, you've been greatly looking forward to Visual Studio Orcas, with its enhanced support for JavaScript.  You might also not know that some of that functionality is available to us currently in Visual Studio 2005.  It's not exactly easy to setup and use, but once you get it going, it can really help out when you're trying to figure out why, for example, all elements on your page suddenly disappear, only in IE.

Using this Knowledge Base article as a starting point, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816173, I was able to get up, running, and debugging.  The first step is to enable debugging from Internet Explorer, by unchecking the "Disable Script Debugging (Internet Explorer)" box in IE's Advanced Options.  Then, in order to actually set a breakpoint and step into your javascript code, you'll need to use the debugger keyword in your code.  Just put that statement in your script wherever you would like the debugger to break, and...

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Working on web sites, I've come across the need, more and more, to be using JavaScript to make an application run more smoothly.  Unfortunately, I have absolutely no training in JavaScript, which means most of what I write does the job, but misses a number of the essentials.  Fortunately, there is hope.  If you, like me, didn't know that JavaScript objects are dictionaries, or that JavaScript inheritance is between objects, not classes, you should check out Ray Djajadinata's article for MSDN Magazine, Create Advanced Web Applications with Object-Oriented Techniques in JavaScript.  It really helped me to understand some more of all of this JavaScript craziness that I always saw but never understood.

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When developing code for .NET, there are a number of attributes that you can define on parts of your code to make your job easier while you are debugging. These are new in .NET 2.0, and part of the System.Diagnostics namespace.

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Yesterday, version four of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK was released (as noted in this blog post, V4 VS SDK Targeting VS 2005 Released!).  While I don't plan on developing any Visual Studio add-ins or extensions, I noticed that the SDK included SandCastle, which is a tool to build documentation based on your inline XML comments.  If you're working with large or distant groups, it can help to compile some of your work into a readable API document, and SandCastle will do that for you.  You'll need to go to http://www.sandcastledocs.com/ to get an automation script or GUI, since this release doesn't include any interface.  Get it here: Visual Studio 2005 SDK version 4.0.

Also released recently was the March CTP for Visual Studio Codename "Orcas."  This release includes a number of pretty cool updates to the IDE, including the new web form editor...

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The Rating control from the AjaxControlToolkit has been of use to use as we work on some of our websites that use our Engage: Publish module.  However, we needed to make a change to the style of the container around the Rating in order to change a background image from saying "Please rate!" to "Thanks for rating."  We tried wrapping it in an UpdatePanel to get at the CssClass, but we couldn't get it to react.  Eventually, we got the following javascript to work (which needs to be declared after divRating is declared).

   



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Since the 1.0 release of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, we've been making use of the new functionality offered us through AJAX, both from the core extensions and through the AjaxControlToolkit.  However, we've run into a road block a number of times when we're tried to use the new UpdatePanel control to add some AJAX responsiveness into our web pages.  In short, we hadn't ever gotten it to work.

Recently, some clients were pressing us for some functionality that required UpdatePanels (or diving much deeper than we liked into JavaScript), so after another failed attempt at partial rendering, I handed the project over to a colleague to see if he might have any better luck.  Fortunately, he was able to search out the information we needed.  I had seen Jon Henning's blog post about integrating UpdatePanels into DNN, but it was rather old, so I didn't...

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Sometimes, you have elements on your webpage (such as a Solpart menu or the greyed-out background of a ModalPopup) that you want to display over an embedded Flash element. And they don't. And it's frustrating.

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