Tod1d's Thought Process

Tomorrow we start a new year. I am very excited for several reasons.

I should find out soon whether or not the organization I work for will allow me to work remotely. I am coming up on my third anniversary with this organization and they are seriously considering allowing me to telecommute from my home office. Not only that, but if all goes according to plan, I will be able to move back to Virginia to be closer to my family and get out of the nearly unbearable Arizona heat and pollution.

This week I purchased tod1d.com and tod1d.net. I will be moving this blog from tod1d.blogspot.com to tod1d.com. I will probably continue to use blogger and ftp to publish the blog. So, you can look forward to a new domain, a site redesign and maybe even a logo if I can get enough creative juices flowing.

May God bless you and yours in the coming year!

You have probably already noticed that due to the holidays, "The Article of the Week 8" has been postponed until next week. But never fret, I have come up with some excellent reading material for you.

I have been researching the use of MSBuild (included with Visual Studio 2005) much of the week and have come up a list ofMSBuild tutorials and resoureces that I decided to post here for your reference and mine.

Using Web Deployment Projects with Visual Studio 2005 - Excellent tutorial for using MSBuild and Web Deployment Projects with Visual Studio. Which is exactly what I am trying to do.

Customizing Web Deployments with MSBuild - Douglas Rohm writes another MSBuild / Web Deployment tutorial that compliments the preceding article.

MSBuild Reference - This is the meat and potatoes, baby.

MSBuild Team Blog - The MSBuild team's blog is has tons of information, tutorials, and even new tasks.

MSBuild Hands-On Lab - An MSBuild beginner's guide located on the MSBuild Team Blog site.

msbuildtasks Project Home - Similar to NAntContrib, msbuildtasks saves time by including many of the tasks you will need, but were not included with MSBuild.

MSBuild Wiki - A helpful, but sometimes buggy, wiki provided by the Channel 9 team.

Update(s): Added MSBuild Wiki link.

I ran into some trouble trying to get a Textbox on a User Control to have the cursor in it by default. I tried several Javascript tricks but nothing worked.

I finally tried adding the Javascript to the page through the code behind file using C# to see if that would help, and it did.

Here is the code I used:

        protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
        {
            base.OnPreRender(e);

            //Setfocus script
            if ((username != null) &&
                     (!this.IsStartupScriptRegistered("SetControlFocus")))
                this.RegisterStartupScript(
                    "SetControlFocus",
                    string.Format("<script language='JavaScript'>document" +
                                  ".getElementById('{0}').focus();</script>",
                                  username.ClientID));
        }

Title
Why Good Programmers are Lazy and Dumb

Author
Philipp Lenssen

Description
This week's article reminds us all why decided to become computer programmers in the first place. A very short read.

Favorite Quote:

"But there’s a more crucial point why a good programmer must be dumb. That’s
because for him to find the best solutions to problems, he must keep a fresh
mindset and manage to think out of the box (or rather, know its actual shape)."

Enjoy.

Title
Nothing is as Simple as it Seems

Author
Joel Spolsky

Description
This weeks essay discusses why you should design things before you implement. Something about an "ounce of prevention" being worth a "pound of cure", comes to mind.

Enjoy.

Scott Guthrie posted about ASP.NET Design Starter Kit Templates now available on Microsoft's website. The templates use CSS rather than tables for their layout. They look great.

I have been toying with the idea of designing my next site using a CSS layout, so this works out great for me. I can spend less time researching how to create a CSS layout that will not break in the most common browsers, and more time researching neural networks.

Problem

When converting a web site from Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 to the non-beta version released on 11/07/2005, you receive the following error message when you try to compile the web site:

'SomePage_aspx' does not implement interface member 'System.Web.UI.ICallbackEventHandler.RaiseCallbackEvent(string)'. 'SomePage_aspx.RaiseCallbackEvent(string)' is either static, not public, or has the wrong return type.

Solution

1. Open the file SomePage.aspx.cs

2. Create a member variable to hold the string to be returned

public string ajaxReturnString = "";

3. Add the following function to the page:

public string GetCallbackResult()
{
    return ajaxReturnString;
}

3. Change your existing RaiseCallbackEvent() function in two ways:
a. Change the return type form string to void.
b. Replace the code that used to return a string with code that sets the ajaxReturnString variable to the string value you wish to return. Then call return;

public void RaiseCallbackEvent(string eventArgument)
{
    ajaxReturnString = GetStringValueToReturn(eventArgument);
    return;
}

Resources:

• Implementing Client Callbacks Without Postbacks in ASP.NET Web Pages
• Google Groups: ASP.NET 2 ICallbackEventHandler

Title
Things You Should Never Do, Part I

Author
Joel Spolsky

Description
This article was very convicting for me. When I am asked to make changes to applications I have previously written, I often take one look at the source code and think to myself, "What on earth was I thinking?" At which point, I wonder to myself, "What would it take to rewrite this from scratch?" Joel's article tells us why that is a very bad idea.

Enjoy.