Categorie: tips+tricks

(Better) JQuery IntelliSense in VS2008 – BradVin’s .Net Blog

I know, I know, this has been done before. The reason I’m writing this post, however, is to improve on what I have found on the web. For anyone wondering what jQuery is, goto the jQuery site and also read this tutorial. Now onto the good stuff….

If you are like me and you’ve read the many articles about how to get other javascript libraries to work in VS2008, you’ll know that all you really need to do is install the visual studio HOTFIX. This patches your VS and among other things, gets the javascript intellisense working nicely.

BradVin’s .Net Blog – (Better) JQuery IntelliSense in VS2008

Emma Alvarez Site: Most Useful 50 CSS Tips And Tools For Webmasters

The style of a website is defined by the CSS. CSS describes text fonts, if images must have borders or shadows, etc. Simply changing the CSS styles, you can change the appearance of your website completely, without changing the contents (text, images…).

For changing the CSS styles, there’s no need to be an expert webmaster, as there are tips and tools that can ease this task.

Here you are a list of the 50 most useful tips and tools for customizing your website easily with CSS.

Emma Alvarez Site – Most Useful 50 CSS Tips And Tools For Webmasters

Fix: Cannot copy file ‘X’ to file ‘Y’. The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. in Visual Studio 2008 – ISerial

Fix: Cannot copy file ‘X’ to file ‘Y’. The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. in Visual Studio 2008

ISerializable – Roy Osherove’s Blog – Fix: Cannot copy file ‘X’ to file ‘Y’. The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. in Visual Studio 2008

SEO Basics, introduction to Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the on-going process of making sure that your web site performs as well as possible on specific search engine searches.

This article aims to explain the absolute basics of SEO that every web site designer, developer, or owner should know.

web design from scratch – SEO Basics, introduction to Search Engine Optimisation

70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding | CSS | Smashing Magazine

CSS isn’t always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren’t sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements. An easy way to minimize the complexity of the code is as useful as not-so-well-known CSS attributes and properties you can use to create a semantically correct markup.

We’ve taken a close look at some of the most interesting and useful CSS tricks, tips, ideas, methods, techniques and coding solutions and listed them below. We also included some basic techniques you can probably use in every project you are developing, but which are hard to find once you need them.

And what has come out of it is an overview of over 70 expert tips, which can improve your efficiency of CSS coding. You might be willing to check out the list of references and related articles in the end of this post.

Smashing Magazine – 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications

In no particular order, here are the top ten things I’ve learned to pay attention to when dealing with production ASP.NET applications. Hopefully they will help you save you some time and headaches. As always, your thoughts and additions are welcome.

Daptivate & by Kyle Beyer – Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications

Troubleshooting Expired ASP.NET Session State and Your Options

I have a love/hate relationship with the ASP.NET Session. It’s such a convenient place to put things, but when you start putting applications into production there are a number of less-than-obvious edge cases that can come up and bite you.

Most often the Session is used when managing state over a long process like a multi-step wizard or questionnaire. However, when people use the Session, they often lean on it a little. They’ll bake it into their design so deep that when it doesn’t work, they’re screwed. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be able to lean on it, I’m just saying that there’s a lot of things going on with Session (not just on ASP.NET, but other frameworks as well) in order to get it to look seamless.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Troubleshooting Expired ASP.NET Session State and Your Options

Web Developer’s Field Guide

This site is pretty much a collection of links that I’ve found very useful over the last year, or so. First, and foremost, I must thank Vitaly.Friedman for getting the vast majority of them together all in one place for the first time. I used his version of this page for many months before taking on the not small task of creating my own. Why would I do such a thing?

Web Developer’s Field Guide

PNG in IE6 and IE7

Two related posts about the same problem. The solved mine 🙂

While working on a new site, I started playing around a little more with 8-bit PNG files, comparing them to GIFs. In a few cases the PNG was smaller (it didn’t used to be that way, but perhaps Photoshop CS2 does a better job of compressing PNG files or something), so used it. All was good until I started testing the design in IE, where the colors were all off. Here’s a breakdown of how the same graphic (placed as a CSS background image against a background color equal to its own background color) rendered between the two browsers:

Easy Reader – PNG color oddities in IE

In setting up the new vehicle details page for DDC, I noticed that the background color for the 24-bit PNGs did not match the css background color, but only in IE6.

Searching online, I found this is a known bug with IE that stems from a flawed interpretation of the PNG’s gAMA setting. It’s fantastic that the IE team added PNG alpha transparency to IE7, but apparently they kept the gAMA bug in IE7 to make sure browser compatibility specialists keep their jobs for years to come.

Netscraps – IE6/IE7 PNG gAMA bug makes PNGs appear darker

The tools used:
TweakPNG
Pngcrush

Copy project files to another location after build

For a (web-)project I am working on, I needed to copy the content of 1 website to a sub-folder of another website after the project was built. This enables the 2 projects being separately developed and deployed, but also allows the one project being deployed as a sub-site of the other one. Got it? 🙂

This is how I did this:
In the project file of the sub-project:

  1. In the project file I defined a few variables to make things easier 
    <PropertyGroup>
        <MyOutputFolder>C:ProjectOutputFolder</MyOutputFolder>
        <OutputSubFolder>SubFolder</OutputSubFolder>
    </PropertyGroup>

  2. I defined what files to copy, with the binary output (dll) separately from the website content: 
    <ItemGroup>
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.aspx" />
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.htm?" />
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.js" />
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.gif" />
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.jp?g" />
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.png" />
        <MyCopyBin Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)bin***.dll" />
    </ItemGroup>

  3. I created a new target that performs 2 copy commands, one for the binaries and one for the content: 
    <Target Name="MyPostBuildTarget">
        <Copy SourceFiles="@(MyCopyItems)"
            DestinationFiles="@(MyCopyItems->'$(MyOutputFolder)$(OutputSubFolder)%(RecursiveDir)%(Filename)%(Extension)')" />
        <Copy SourceFiles="@(MyCopyBin)"
            DestinationFolder="$(MyOutputFolder)bin" />
    </Target>

  4. I added this target to the BuildDependsOn property so that it is executed everytime the project is built: 
    <BuildDependsOn>$(BuildDependsOn);MyPostBuildTarget</BuildDependsOn>

This gives something like:

<!-- Copy project output to defined folder -->
<PropertyGroup>
    <BuildDependsOn>$(BuildDependsOn);MyPostBuildTarget</BuildDependsOn>
    <MyOutputFolder>C:ProjectOutputFolder</MyOutputFolder>
    <OutputSubFolder>SubFolder</OutputSubFolder>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.aspx" />
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.htm?" />
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.js" />
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.gif" />
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.jp?g" />
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.png" />
    <mycopybin include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)bin***.dll" />
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name="MyPostBuildTarget">
    <Copy SourceFiles="@(MyCopyItems)"
        DestinationFiles="@(MyCopyItems->'$(MyOutputFolder)$(OutputSubFolder)%(RecursiveDir)%(Filename)%(Extension)')" />
    <Copy SourceFiles="@(MyCopyBin)"
        DestinationFolder="$(MyOutputFolder)bin" />
</Target>

Some references on copying project files with MSBuild:
MSDN MSBuild Reference – Copy Task
Channel 9 Wiki: Copy Built Output Of A Visual Studio Project
SharpDevelop Community – Copy config post build
How To: Insert Custom Process at Specific Points During Build
How To: Add Custom Process at Specific Points During Build (Method #2)

A List Apart: Articles: Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation

Many web users don’t understand the inevitable consequences of exposing their e-mail address on the web. Experienced web developers and website owners, however do. Thousands of spam bots tirelessly crawl the web to collect e-mail addresses exposed on websites, in blog comments and elsewhere. These addresses end up in databases sold to unsavory marketers, who bombard the owners’s inboxes with unsolicited mail.
Of course, spam is an increasingly complicated problem that can never be solved by the efforts of web developers alone. But don’t underestimate your own powers.

A List Apart: Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation