A lightweight AJAX.NET-enabled grid control
By Simon Gulliver
A lighweight approach to creating AJAX.NET-enabled grids, with advanced functionality built in.
Go here for article source…
Introduction
Managing lists of items from databases is the bread and butter of most web applications, but creating an user-friendly grid can be problematic. The obvious solution of creating Microsoft grid controls in an Ajax.Net Update panel can create very large HTML pages with long response times when a substantial amount of data is being worked with. Also, every grid has to be created individually on each page, and that makes it hard to create and maintain a common “look and feel”.
This lightweight grid outputs very compact HTML and uses javascript to dynamically generate input or select boxes when updating. It includes built-in Ajaxed sorting and filtering which is very user-friendly, and throws in csv export for free. It has a fixed table header and scrolling contents, to facilitate use with large amounts of data.
Many different grids can be very quickly generated in a standard way using an XML control file and a single common style sheet. Multiple AjaxGrids can be defined and used, even on the same page.
You can customise grid column data to include links, images, etc and to support your own custom validations.
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Iomega has some fairly solid products. I have been using them for years and with only one exception I have found all of them to be reliable and durable.
Their new pocket-portable drives make most other quick backup alternatives a thing of the past. And now their heavy backup drives are becoming ever more affordable for large, database storage requirements for both the consumer and professional technician alike.
Today, a new promotion of their drives hit the wires and they are definitely worth taking a look at if you need such equipment. A 500GB drive goes for around $123.00 USD.
Iomega hard drives here…
ASP.NET is an excellent development environment for creating web-sites with… even with its idiosyncrasies. However, making an ASP.NET site work with the Firefox browser can be a maddening experience; especially when you find the changes required are so slight and often ambiguous as a result.
This experience has happened to me more than I care to remember. And recently, I had the pleasure of reliving the anxiety associated with one of these tiny “gotchas” in one of my web-pages. It worked just fine in Internet Explorer but once I tested it under Firefox, I knew I was going to be in for another long debugging session.
What was the problem? Something we most likely take for granted as ASP.NET developers; the use of the “Element.innerText” property to extract information from a label control. Seems fairly innocuous enough as this property appears to be pretty standard fare for accessing portions of text in the HTML-DOM. This would be true except for the fact that Firefox has never heard of the “innerText” property and as a result doesn’t support it.
Firefox doesn’t do a lot of things we have all gotten used to with Internet Explorer, such as supporting my favorite scripting language, VBScript. Sorry, but I never liked JavaScript… However, I love Firefox and do a lot of testing with it against my own web development.
After a frustrating hour or two of research I finally found two articles on the Code-Project that not only solved this problem by providing a JavaScript function to emulate the “innerText” property but may help a lot of us ASP.NET developers in general experience a whole lot less pain when it comes to using our JavaScript skills with the Firefox browser.
So if you are currently undergoing one of these experiences with Firefox than rush over to the links below and find out if they are “the cure for what ails ya!”…
Steve
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/scripting/JavaScript_Tips.aspx (part 1)
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/scripting/JavaScript_Tips_-_Part_2.aspx (part 2)
Microsoft Stealth Update and Windows XP repair don’t mix
Click title to read rest of article at ZDNet.com…
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
September 27th, 2007
Remember that Stealth Update I talked about a couple of weeks ago? The one that Microsoft sent down the pipes to XP and Vista users and installed it irrespective of whether the user had given consent for updates to be installed? Remember too how the apologists claimed that there was nothing wrong with how Microsoft had behaved because there was no harm done? Well, it turns out that this update isn’t as benign as we first thought and can indeed cause problems for Windows XP users if they try to repair their installation.
Information uncovered by Scott Dunn of WindowSecrets.com indicated that a bug in this update prevented users from being able to download and install patches on XP systems that have been repaired:
However, after running the repair option from an XP CD-ROM, Automatic Updates defaults to “on,” and the new 7.0.600.381 executables are automatically downloaded and installed. These new executables fail to register themselves with the operating system, preventing Windows Update from working as intended. This, in turn, prevents Microsoft’s 80 latest updates from being
Dept of Homeland Security: inexcusable IT waste on ADVISE project
Click title for source at ZDNet.com…
September 10th, 2007
Michael Krigsman
Following its $30 billion virtual fence debacle, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has disclosed another failed IT-related project, this one costing $42 million. DHS has suspended, and will likely cancel, a massive data-mining initiative on grounds that it violated privacy standards. Significantly, the program has also suffered from dramatic, severe, and systematic project management failures.
The ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement) program, which is still in the prototype and testing stage, is part of a large-scale, anti-terrorism data analysis operation run by DHS. As reported by Mark Clayton in the Christian Science Monitor, ADVISE is intended to “display data patterns visually as ’semantic graphs’ – a sort of illuminated information constellation – in which an analyst’s eye could spot links between people, places, events, travel, calls, and organizations worldwide.” For additional background, see another Christian Science Monitor article written by Mark Clayton.
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IBM to give OpenOffice the Outlook e-mail killer it needs?
Click title for source at ZDNet.com…
Paula Rooney
September 10th, 2007
IBM has finally taken the big leap to support rival Sun’s OpenOffice.org project, a move that could have significant impact on the adoption of the open source Office suite.
As part of that commitment, announced Monday, IBM released its first code contributions from Lotus Notes such as accessibility enhancements. But more important, the Armonk, NY company, a longtime Linux supporter that competes aggressively against Sun in the server business, hinted that other “rich features” from the leading e-mail and groupware program could find its way into the OpenOffice code base.
Has the Outlook killer for OpenOffice finally arrived?
OpenOffice is the most promising open source alternative to Microsoft Office that runs on most Linux distributions, Windows, Macintosh and BSD but to date it has lacked an integrated e-mail service such as the Outlook client that is integrated in Microsoft Office.
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