Month: March 2007

Most popular posts

Posted on | by brian | Leave a Comment on Most popular posts

Today, Ayende wrote about calculating the most popular blog posts using SubText1. Though his methodology was quite unscientific (rating a comment as worth 3 1/2 aggregator views, and a web view as 1 1/2 aggregator views), it makes enough sense for an unscientific calculation.

Taking his approach, here are the top ten most popular posts on my blog.

  1. ASP.Net, CDO, and ‘The transport failed to connect to the server.’
  2. Installing Linux on Virtual PC
  3. Top 20 geek books (and three of my own)
  4. Selective searching in Windows XP: When search all doesn’t search all
  5. Copying an ADO RecordSet in Visual Basic
  6. CodeSmith Templates for Wilson’s O/R Mapper
  7. New (kind of) CodeSmith templates for Wilson’s O/R Mapper
  8. Compiled version of ASP.Net CSSFriendly Control Adapters (RTM 1.0)
  9. One less reason to use IE: Opera is now free!
  10. Changing the autogenerated password format in the SqlMembershipProvider

It’s funny to look back on this. Among the posts above, one is in a programming language I almost never use (#7), one is on an operating system I almost never use (#2), one is among the shortest posts ever (#9), and one doesn’t really work as much as I thought when I wrote it (#10).

Still, thanks to all those few but faithful readers over the years.

1 At the time this post was written, this blog used the SubText blog engine. We’ve since converted to WordPress.

Microsoft OKs community development of CSS Friendly Control Adapters

Posted on | by brian | Leave a Comment on Microsoft OKs community development of CSS Friendly Control Adapters

Back in late 2006, I modified Microsoft’s CSS Friendly ASP.Net 2.0 Control Adapters to be distributable as a single DLL. Since that time, the code I wrote was downloaded from this web site, and everything seemed good, at least until the server crashed. After being prodded by a few people in the ASP.Net community, I moved this little project over to CodePlex. Before doing so, I checked to make sure this was OK with Scott Guthrie, the grand poohbah of ASP.Net at Microsoft. (You’ve got to cover your basis!)

Anyway, today I read a post on the ASP.Net forums stating that Microsoft OKs community development of the CSS Friendly Control Adapters. In short, this is a good thing for the users of this product, for reasons that are explained in that thread, and it looks like I’ll be more involved with the ongoing development of these adapters in the future. It’s also nice to see your efforts noticed by the largest software development company in the world. 😉

I will keep the pages on this site that mentioned these adapters, but I highly suggest everyone who used them to bookmark the CodePlex project “CSSFriendly” and use that as their source of code and information going forward.

Showcasing Ajax at MiniAjax.com

Posted on | by brian | 1 Comment on Showcasing Ajax at MiniAjax.com

As part of my transitioning from the world of WinForms to MonoRail, I’m embracing Javascript libraries like Prototype more and more. (Actually, I’ve been embracing Prototype even when I was doing WinForms stuff, but using anything but WinForms makes it all that much easier.)

Part of getting the most out of a library like Prototype is using the many add-ins that people have written for it. These include script.aculo.us (effects library), TableKit (table sorting/editing/styling library), field validation libraries, and more. To find these, it’s usually a matter of reading Ajaxian and doing web searches — but that may be changing today.

MiniAjax.com is a new site that not provides links to various Javascript and Ajax libraries and utilities. Thanks to this fantastic new site, I was able to find the Prototype Window Class, bubble tooltips, and ClickHeat. I stopped after a quick scan through the dozens of links on their site because I knew if I continued I’d be on that site for over an hour.

Be sure to check it out — http://www.miniajax.com.