Who can say that Creative Jar don't enter in the seasonal spirit?! In light of the American celebration of Hallows, our Creative and Technical Teams pitted against each other to see who could produce the pumpkin sculpture worthy of a creative agency! The results were interesting...it would seem our Technical team are harbouring some secret creative skills! If only the opposite was true and we would be one multi-talented agency but that's another story!

Rob, Greg (Creative Team) and Ben, Alexey (Technical Team) were given one pumpkin each to make unique in order to win 1st Prize! After some close calls involving the very possible loss of fingers, the results were fantastic. Some were more loyal to their trade, involving the CJ logo and C# - others were just made to look scary! There was minimum blood loss which means Health & Safety were also kept happy.

Our (not so) independent adjuticator declared Greg the overall winner! Thanks to everyone for standing outside in the cold to watch & take part!

Vanessa came in super early this morning, to create a spooky Halloween Grotto.

Check out the photo below:

Her pumpkin wasn’t entered in to the ‘Pumpkin Off’,  she had to give the guys a chance after all. What do you reckon?

So there has been a big debate flying around the office about who are the ultimate killing machines.

The nominees were in no particular order: 

James Bond - Jason Bourne - Agent 47 - Leon - The Jackal

After many long discussions we put it to a vote and the results are in:

1st Place: Leon (53 points)

2nd Place: Jason Bourne (48 points)

3rd Place: James Bond (46 points)

4th Place: Agent 47 (41 points)

5th Place: The Jackal (22 points)

Personally I think everyone was wrong and Agent 47 would own everyone! What do you think??

we scored another seminar for early next year with the guys from NxtGenUG

Simon and I will do another whirlwind tour of the Blend tools, wiring up the C# to make it all dynamic

Sign up and come see us in action

http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=176

Hope to see you there, we're booked for Janurary 19th so plenty of time to get signed up

Back to the land of browser inconsistencies :¬(

I had such high hopes for the silverlight plug-in.  Cross-browser incompatablities can be the most time consuming areas of web development, so a browser plug-in overcomes these by sandboxing the application so it handles all of it's rendering internally

Or so I thought.  Having developed all my silverlight under Internet Explorer, everything renders fine with the default 100% heights and widths.  Rendering the controls is important for templated controls and the loaded event only fires when the control is rendered and the loaded event is important in order for the control to pipe up and accept some data from the dartabinding process. 

To my amazement, and slight relief, Firefox actually requires a fixed height in order for it to render.  By default, you are given a silverlight plugin, set to 100% height and width, wrapped in a div with a height : 100% style attribute.  Just change the containing div to a fixed height and your controls now render fine in Firefox :¬)

so from this

<div style="height: 100%;">

<asp:Silverlight ID="Xaml1" runat="server" Source="~/ClientBin/NavTeqBannerMain.xap" MinimumVersion="2.0.31005.0" Width="100%" Height="100%" InitParameters="ctlid=SilverLightBanner" />

</div>

to this

<div style="height: 256px;">

<asp:Silverlight ID="Xaml1" runat="server" Source="~/ClientBin/NavTeqBannerMain.xap" MinimumVersion="2.0.31005.0" Width="100%" Height="100%" InitParameters="ctlid=SilverLightBanner" />

</div>

 

It's fair to says IIS7 has some differences when compared to IIS6 (Well, Duh!)

The one I found most difficult to get my head around was the Wildcard Handler Mappings.  Traditionally, we wrote the handler in .net, or used the global.asax file to map the requested re-written URL to a pgae in the application.  IIS6 had the option to specify whether or not the file exists.

For example, you request http://www.creative-jar.com/News.  There is not physical file called News in the root, and even if there was, there's no extension on the file in the URL so IIS wouldn't know which dll to map it to, generating a 404 beacuse the file isn't found.  So, you set the WildCard handler to NOT verify that the file exists, before passing it to the handler to do it's magic

It's this Verify File Exists option that's missing in IIS7, causing the 404 to fire before your handler even get's a bite of the apple.

I found a good post on the subject here.  It explains the extra steps you need to get IIS7 not verifying files in your web application, instead just passing the whole request to your app and let it carry on as normal.  The post links through to an open-source UrlRewriting HttpHander called UrlRewriter.NET which has such a simple setup, it's untrue.  It currently uses a section of the web-config to work out it's mappings but, being that it's open-source, you can change it to collect from wherever you like

enjoy :¬)

Man, I love the .net framework.  Each release see me writing less and less of the boring stuff, allowing me to concentrate on the more exciting things in development.  However, as each release passes by, I'm always left with the thought : "How did we cope before this release??!?!!"

It struck home good and proper today.

A Web Agency strives for perfection in design, perfection in usablity, perfection in accessability, perfection.*.  W3C validation is one of the many tests we put our sites under, and it gives some really good feedback on your mark-up ; which attribute have you forgetten to add? Which elements fit inside which elements?

We  know, by now, that <span> can contain very few HTML elements.  This has been the case for all eternity.  So, why oh why, does setting RepeatLayout.Flow on a DataList make anyone @ Microsoft think it's going to get away with wrapping each template up in a <span> when it can contain so few elements?

Thats the problem i was having today.  Alexey had coded me up some excellent HeaderTemplate, FooterTemplate and ItemTemplate for one of our ZoomSpace applications.  The raw HTML looked brilliant, the HTML was W3C compliant, everyone was happy, especially me.

Along comes DataList to ruin my day by injecting it's dodgy, non-compliant, and downright short-sighted markup into my ResponseStream.

DataList was prevalent in .net 2.0.  A good, lightweight, databound control which you could use to edit items, delete stuff, add new items, the lot.  I know the purer way would be to use the Repeater, but i needed the data-driven code.  I could have used ListView, but this a .net 2.0 application so that's out too.

We've been using ListView for a while.  It's pure mark-up, no additions and no weirdness.  How  easy I forget how different things were!!

I had to do this recently and thought it would be tougher than it ended up being. Here's the code I used:

function adjustMyFrameHeight()
{
var frame = getElement("myFrame");
frame.height = document.body.offsetHeight + 60 + "px"; // add 60 pixels to be safe...
}

function getElement(aID)
{
return (document.getElementById) ?
     parent.document.getElementById(aID) : parent.document.all[aID];
}

Then, just simply call the "adjustMyFrameHeight()" method from the child page's BODY onload event:

<body onload="adjustMyFrameHeight();">

Et voila, c'est bon!!

A couple of the CJ Dev team were down in Brighton for Re-Mix 2008 a few weeks ago, and one of the most useful sessions I went to was "ASP.NET Front End Performance" by Chris Hay.

There's some really obvious things, but others that I didn't know. I've collated the key points together for easy reference:

• Combine all JavaScript files together (i.e. single request)
• Combine all CSS files together (i.e. single request)
• Use inline scripts and CSS on the home page, load script and CSS assets post UI
• Reduce image requests
  • Use image maps
  • Use large background images
• Implement IIS caching
• Use versioning policy on filenames to avoid unwanted caching (e.g. my-js-file-001.js)
• Use Server.Transfer instead of Response.Redirect where possible
• Use SilverLight controls for common areas of the site (headers, footers, etc.)
• Implement HTTP compression in IIS
• Use the .NET ViewState wisely
  • Only on pages where necessary
  • Compress the ViewState
  • Offload ViewState to Session if possible / advantageous
• Avoid use of .NET UpdatePanel control where possible
• Expose web services to AJAX for use by JavaScript code, manually altering DOM
• Combine auto generated scripts by .NET framework (e.g. ScriptResource.axd)
  • Use script resource profiler to discover all script files
• Use SilverLight instead of AJAX
  • Detect presence of SilverLight, and fail safe to AJAX if preferred to forcing use of SilverLight
• Use Content Delivery Network where applicable (large projects) to bring the content closer to the user
• Implement use of data caching
• Use page / control output caching  
• Queue requests for processing (if any large / long requests will occur)
• Ensure all debug flags are removed from application

Cheers to Chris Hay!!

For those trying to make headway into Silverlight, there is a lot of old knowledge which needs to be gained in order for silverlight to become productive. 

For Flash-heads, there simply isn't enough material about to make a judgement about which one to use.  Based on in-house experience, and the fact that people won't have previous Silverlight experience (it was only released on the 14th October), Flash is tried and tested

Then along comes Project Rosetta with a 10 lesson how-to on comparing some old Flash-staples to new Silverlight techniques, code for both versions and working demos to boot!!

The new silverlight tools can now be accessed using the FREE Visual Web Developer edition of Visual Studio 2008, and there's trial version of Blend if you want to your Draw on :¬)

Enjoy

Tim