Web Development
It's coming up to the 2 year mark since I resigned from my full time job and went into freelancing / owning my own businesses. After many years of working as an employee, a contractor and doing small bits of freelancing on the side I probably thought that switching to freelancing would be a bit easier than it ended up being, which is part of why I wanted to write a little about my experiences. There's plenty of material out there offering freelancers helpful tips or things to avoid - this post is similar to many of those, but it's...
This is the obligatory Happy New Year post.. so, happy new year all! I’ve got quite a few posts currently sitting in various stages of draft – I’d planned to write a bit around Christmas, however the novelty of actually having a break took over. So I’m a little behind, but feeling well rested. Here’s a quick preview of what I’ve currently got sitting in draft: My “lessons learned” post from experience over the past couple of years as a freelancer/small business owner. Writing down a bit about my experiences was helpful for my...
The world of .NET is an exciting and ever changing environment to work in so it’s easy to occasionally miss useful things when they’re released. The asp:Chart control fits into this category – it was released well over a year ago, however I haven’t had any reason to use it until very recently. Here's a short (possibly the shortest) post with a snippets of information that I found useful about the Control, my 60 second summary if you will. To use the control with version 3.5SP1 of the .NET framework you have to install a...
A while ago I did a bit of exploring into jQuery. I really liked what I saw, and was trying to decide whether to invest a bit of time into knowing it better - but with so many JavaScript frameworks and libraries out there it's hard to know which ones are worthy of attention.
It looks like Microsoft and jQuery have made that decision a lot easier, with this announcement from Scott Guthrie:
I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be...
Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 both had their SP1 releases a couple of days ago, but I’ve not had time to install it. So this post is basically a reminder to myself and a place to store some links. I’ve skimmed over a few people mentioning a couple of compatibility issues with the VS2008 release, so take a skim through the comments sections of these posts before installing to see if you're going to be affected or not. Link: Service Pack 1 for VS 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 released! Link: More about .NET Framework...
If you work with ASP.NET and AJAX then you'll probably want to take a look at Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap document. After restating their goal of "making ASP.NET Ajax the first-class choice for all Web 2.0 Developers" they start listing some of their ideas for the future. Template driven binding sounds useful, and I've recently come across a few people mentioning that even though the version in Atlas had it's faults, that it was still a good idea. The DOM APIs around element selection look useful, and there are various other shiny things such as increased animation effects...
Somehow (and I can't remember how) I recently ended up reading the Wikipedia entry for the K&R style of indentation. K&R just seems so ugly to me – who out there loves it and feels like defending it for my benefit? Indentation styles are such a personal preference, I get that. But K&R just seems to sacrifice so much readability for what? Is it just a case that it's defenders simply can't adjust to anything else? On the subject of indentation styles, I'm wondering a lot about the default HTML formatting built into Visual Studio 2008. When I...
In/Out by 37signals is basically Twitter for corporates. I'd use it. It's the sort of idea that makes you wonder why no one has thought of it before (although in this case, it seems that someone else did). Tags: Web 2.0
Hopefully my last IE8 link for a wee while - The IE team posted that they were passing Acid2 a few months ago, yet people are seeing a broken face when they tested with IE 8 beta. If IE8 ends up passing ACID then there are a lot of presenters on web standards out there who are going to have to remove those chunks of their presentations where they load ACID in IE and laugh a lot.. what a shame! Tags: Internet Explorer , Microsoft
JavaScript in Internet Explorer 8 is apparently good better! Tags: Internet Explorer , Microsoft
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About me
My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a Developer, Consultant and Writer based in Auckland,
New Zealand (pictured below!). My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, jQuery, Ajax,
SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies.
I also have about 14 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies. While Notes/Domino
is no longer my primary focus I still like to dabble and keep my skills up to date.
I own and run 2 businesses - Hawkins Consulting Services,
and Ignition Development.
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Popular Content
Troubleshooting WebResource.axd
The .NET 2.0 framework changed the way clientside JavaScript is
delivered to the browser. Previously, ASP.NET 1.1 used the
aspnet_client directory whereas now 2.0 uses WebResource.axd.
Published on October 8, 2006
Microsoft AJAX Extensions: Sys.Debug is null or not an object
One of the breaking changes which was made with
the 1.0 release of the Microsoft Ajax Extensions was the renaming
of the 'Debug' class to 'Sys.Debug' for reasons of compatiability
with other frameworks. Breaking changes like this can often be a source of frustration..
Published on May 22, 2007
Simple ASP.NET Character Counter
A textbox character counter is a pretty simple piece of functionality, and there's a lot of different ways to apply one to your application. The following method is nice and simple, and can be done using only clientside JavaScript if required, or combined with server side code in order to create a more dynamic effect
Published on December 4, 2006
Adding Tooltips to Gridview Headers
As the title says, this is a very simple but dynamic way of achieving tooltip text on a header column. It's not overly flash, but it's lightweight and quick to implement.
Published on April 15, 2007
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