An interesting article just popped up within my rss feeds on email design.

Please take a look at:
www.campaignmonitor.com

The article has good guidelines for constructing emails.

Come across an interesting website for web development.

The site contains helpful tips on CSS, ASP, ASP.Net, Ajax and much more.

Check it out at www.jankoatwarpspeed.com 

We looked at Silverlight Deepzoom sometime ago. We even met with the developers that were working on this BBC Deepzoom 'big zoomy photo thing' at a VBug talk in Bracknell. Though we weren't shown any of this code we were given a great demonstration.

It seems that alot of people are interested in this, strangely this post here also looks into another Deepzoom showcase that we had used as a demonstration of the exciting things you can do with this technology.

I'm just trying to spread the Silverlight word!!

This site i find really handy.  It takes a rough-as-you-like chunk of javascript and formats it in a readle fashion with keyword colouring and everything

http://javascript.about.com/library/blformat.htm

There's a lot of nasty looking script out there, somtimes intentionally faux-obfuscated to protect their inner-workings, but this site overcomes that with ease

Hi All

After a sparse month on Scott's blog, he has released a new set of links for all the new technology running around at the moment

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/05/20/may-20th-links-asp-net-asp-net-ajax-net-visual-studio-silverlight-wpf.aspx

Mike Ormond even had time to write 50 (!!) screencasts about different things.  He's a great speaker and his screencasts are always very factual and concise.  Even the more obscure speakers have some really interesting content and it's refreshing to see that there's always more thna one way to skin cat :¬)

Enjoy

Tim

While on the google website the other day, a colleague and I noticed a new and controversial feature has now been implemented within google search! Google recently introduced a secondary search box into their search results.

This new feature was thought up by google while studying teleportation.

According to google “This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site” “sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.”

Now this is not a totally new feature, as you have been able to search within a specific site within google for some time. For example to search for 'development' within the Creative Jar website you would type “development site:creative-jar.co.uk” within google search.

Google will now also display a number of extra links under the webpage description taken from the webpage navigation which will allow the user to go directly to that page.

You will find a number of blog posts on the internet, with people expressing concern that this new feature may have negative aspect on their web site, and the fact that this may divert traffic away from the sites' internal search and navigation tools. There is big concern for sites that have ad revenue and sponsorship prioritised on their home page.

A few I read can be found at:

http://www.marketing.fm/2008/03/27/google-secondary-search-box-what-is-the-impact-on-sem/

http://www.davechaffey.com/Paid-Search-Best-Practice/implications-of-google2019s-secondary-search-search-within-site-box-1/

But it has been brought to light that some companies have asked for this feature to be removed and according to a googles’ spokeswoman the company has honoured such requests from “a couple” of unnamed businesses. These companies, however, may not be able to reverse their decisions.

We are often required to validate input fields. One field that is often neglected or relies heavily on users inputting data in the correct format is the UK postcode field. The format of the postcode is listed here http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/gdsc/html/frames/PostCode.htm.

We have a Regular Expression / Javascript solution that validates UK postcode formats. Briefly all valid formats are:

The regex we use is:
/^([A-PR-UWYZ0-9][A-HK-Y0-9][AEHMNPRTVXY0-9]?[ABEHMNPRVWXY0-9]? {1,2}[0-9][ABD-HJLN-UW-Z]{2}|GIR 0AA)$/i

Or you could try this:
^((([A-PR-UWYZ][0-9])|([A-PR-UWYZ][0-9][0-9])|([A-PR-UWYZ][A-HK-Y][0-9])|([A-PR-UWYZ][A-HK-Y][0-9][0-9])
|([A-PR-UWYZ][0-9][A-HJKSTUW])|([A-PR-UWYZ][A-HK-Y][0-9][ABEHMNPRVWXY]))\s?([0-9][ABD-HJLNP-UW-Z]{2})|
(GIR)\s?(0AA))$

Simple and effective.

UDPATE 2009 This will only validate UPPERCASE input. You will need to upper your input before validating it.

I've worked with data for the whole of my programming life.  If it's not dbf, mdb, ldf its those annoying Excel spreadsheets people love to send you and just "import" with all the dodgy quotes and pipes etc

I was used to opening the file low-level and reading the file line-by-line, splitting up the fields as we go and inserting the data into the database.  However, people love to put quotes, commas and any combination of quote-comma-quote actually in to the text.  Fine if you're a human, as it makes the reading of the text much easier and feature-filled ; Nightmare if you're a computer as those just look like new fields leaving you with more or less fields than the last record

Those clever guys at Microsoft have done it again with OleDb.  Ever wondered how Excel knows how to delimt the fields properly, given a really poor system of data entry?  I have wondered this for years, putting it down to sheer magic, and the magic really works!!

http://ronaldlemmen.blogspot.com/2008/03/import-csv-file-to-datatable.html has detailed instructions on how to get a CSV file and translate that directly into a DataTable.  DataTables are one of the most logical structures i've used and that format suits me fine

Shazzam!!

Before Windows Server 2008 even hits, people are blogging about the breaking changes for older apps.  some of the stuff is pretty fundemental so a 25 point blog on the subject is semi-worrying :¬(

Read these before upgrading your IIS version.  Depending on the complexity and topology of your application, there could be afair few changes required to get it working on the new version of iis

http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/12/08/IIS-7.0-Breaking-Changes-ASP.NET-2.0-applications-Integrated-mode.aspx

Microsoft just released the BETA SP1 update to the 3.5 Framework but the picrute isn't all that rosy

Scott adds a whole load of caveats to a successful installation, including the fact that you need Vista SP1 and you can't have the Silverlight 2.0 Beta installed in any way shape or form.  looks like i'll have to give it a miss until it's final release later in the summer :¬(

Check out what he says : http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/05/12/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-service-pack-1-beta.aspx

However, it is packed with new features for WPF and even has some in-built URL-Rewriting classes for out-of-the-box SEO @ last!!

Also, just read that classic ASP support is back in so there's a very good feature right there!!