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Announcing the ASP.Net Control Adapters, a new open source project

Over the past few weeks, I started doing some experimentation with a different approach to changing the rendering of default ASP.Net controls. For a few years, I (and many others) have used the CSSFriendly project for this. That project does some nice things, but has many shortcomings.

I hemmed and hawed about this a bit (see Rewriting the ASP.Net CSS Friendly Adapters - does anyone care?), but in the end some fundamental interest — and the underlying popularity of the CSSFriendly project (consistently in the top-20 downloads on CodePlex) made me decide to go ahead with it.

So, I am proud to announce a new open source project: the ASP.Net Control Adapters!

The project site is hosted through Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/aspnetcontroladapters/

I have checked in my original test/experimentation code, cleaned up a bit to make it more useful. It implements limited support for the CheckBoxList control. Source code includes the main project, a UnitTests project (using NUnit), a WebTests project (a web app that invokes the adapted control in a web page), license/readme files, and an NAnt build script.

I also started working on a documentation format, which you can see at http://code.google.com/p/aspnetcontroladapters/wiki/CheckBoxList.

There’s still a lot missing in terms of implementation (not even postback support yet!), and unit testing, but in general the programmers out there should be able to understand the approach I’m taking, and designers/front-end developers can understand the GUI approach.

Still lots to do before this is consumable by others, but I wanted to get this up and hosted.

Also — there’s a Google Group for it: http://groups.google.com/group/aspnetcontroladapters — be sure to head there to add to the discussion.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Posted 04 October 2008 § , , ‡ Comments (0)

Why I won’t support Mike McMahon for Congress

I just received the following in an email from the campaign of Michael McMahon for Congress:

Dear Friends:

I write to ask for your support in my campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives for New York’s 13th Congressional District, which includes all of Staten Island and a portion of Brooklyn. I graduated from Farrell in 1975, and with your support we can make sure that this Congressional seat stays a Lion seat in 2008!

Mike McMahon and I went to the same high school (he graduated 13 years before me). Yes, I’ve seen his name emblazoned on signs throughout my neighborhood and others in this election season. Not knowing much else about him, I decided to go to his web site, MikeMcMahonForCongress.com, to find out.

A lot of it was political fluff, and nothing shook me good or bad, until I got to the Michael on Social Security page, which says:

Since its creation in 1935, Social Security has been the single most successful domestic program that our government has ever run…

Replacing our current Social Security system with privatized investment accounts is simply unacceptable, and I strongly oppose it.

That’s all it took to convince me not to support Mike McMahon. Why? Well, I wrote him a letter about it, and I share it with you below.

Continue Reading »

Popularity: 1% [?]

Posted 02 October 2008 § ‡ Comments (0)

Sometimes, search results bring unexpected surprises

While working on a project today, I needed to incorporate an animated AJAX spinner image. I knew there was a web site that had lots of them, but I couldn’t remember the domain name, so I did what most people do: I turned to Google.

Here’s a screenshot of Google’s search results for the terms ajax load image.

Granted, the first item in the search resultswas the site I was looking for, www.ajaxload.info. What I didn’t expect to see is a woman in a bikini coming up in the image search results. The image comes from a blog post tutorial, How to Make a Brazilian Bikini Photo Gallery With Drupal and AJAX.

OK, maybe Google’s results weren’t too far off, but they certainly were surprising!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Posted 02 October 2008 § , , ‡ Comments (0)

Rewriting the ASP.Net CSS Friendly Adapters - does anyone care?

A few days ago, I wrote a lengthy post on the official ASP.Net forums where I discussed some thoughts on a new version of the CSS-friendly ASP.Net control adapters. In the post, I outlined some new approaches to improve testability and configuration.

Since that post (written on the evening of Sept 16), there have been no replies, which leads me to consider a few possible realities…

  1. No one reads the ASP.Net forums. (Not true; the post was read at least 79 times, as of this writing.)
  2. No one posts on the ASP.Net forums.  (Not true; other posts were written since my post.)
  3. No one uses the CSS Friendly adapters. (Not true; they have been downloaded over 1,800 times in the last week, according to CodePlex — making it the 14th most popular CodePlex project in that time.)
  4. No one cares about rewriting them.
  5. No one who cares about rewriting them reads the ASP.Net forums.

OK, so either no one cares about improving on what we currently have, or no one who cares saw my post. Which is it? Do you use the CSS adapters? Would you use them if they were improved?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Posted 23 September 2008 § , ‡ Comments (4)

Rebuilding my work computer with Vista

It’s been a hard run the past few weeks, as my work computer started behaving in all sorts of unusual ways. Windows, as we all should know, has a half-life of six months (for heavy-duty use). It’s been nine months since my last rebuild, so I’m already overdue.

The first big change this time around is going with Vista. This was a tough decision, but ultimately, I have to take the plunge at some point. Vista has been around for quite some time now, so you’d think most of the kinks are worked out. (I’m keeping my fingers crossed).

The second big change is a real attempt to use Microsoft Outlook instead of Mozilla Thunderbird. Yes, Thunderbird is a superior email product, especially when teamed with GMail (which I use for all email, business and personal). Unfortunately, Outlook has superior contact management and calendar features, and is much more effective at synchronizing with my Palm Treo.

So far, I’m dealing with the expected delays using Outlook, mostly related to its difficulty doing a first-time sync of my Google mailboxes (both are over 500MB). Turning off UAC helped get some other odd things to work (like the PPTP VPN to SoftLayer). I’m sure there will be more issues, but I’m being hopeful that they can all be resolved.

We’ll see how things are after a week of heavy use.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Posted 22 September 2008 § , , ‡ Comments (4)