.NET Answers

Archive for November, 2009

I have long argued that 99% if the things people think they need to use Adobe’s Flash for could be done just as well using JavaScript.

Now that jQuery is available, I am even more convinced that this is the case.

There are, however, a few hurdles that need to be jumped to make this happen.  For example, one thing Flash has been good at is embedding fonts and while you can embed fonts using CSS, the little bit of research I’ve done on the subject has demonstrated that it wouldn’t necessarily be easy.

Recently, someone took me up on the challenge, and I am actually converting a Flash script to jQuery.  And it is working quite nicely, thank you very much.

Here are some tools I’ve discovered along the way.

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I got this interesting question the other day.

“I am interested in pursuing a career in Computer Programming and have a question. Which would be better: to get my degree through an online college, or to teach myself. If self teaching is better how and where should I start? Any help would be greatly appreciated.”

It’s been quite a while since I’ve provided any kind of opinion of the educational system with  regards to programmers on this blog.  So I guess it’s time to bring it up again, with this new twist.

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Google recently introduced the SPDY initiative where they are working toward making the web twice as fast.

If you have a public facing web site that is commercial in nature, speed has always been a factor that will drive sales, sign-ups, etc.  But we very rarely pay any attention to this, even though the solutions are relatively simple.

Now that Google is on a quest for a faster web, they have a number of ways they can achieve this.  One of those is by telling us that they will give bonus points to sites that are fast.  And that’s exactly what they’ve done.

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One of the controls that was added to ASP.NET 3.5 in the SP1 release was the Dynamic Validator control.

I completely missed it.

What it does is pretty cool.  But it doesn’t really do what you’d think it might.  Or at least not what I thought it would.  “Dynamic” implies to me some kind of hook up to the database.  But the Dynamic Validator control doesn’t hook to the database.  At least not directly.  What it does, however, is a lot more flexible.

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The Model-View-Controller pattern—universally known as MVC—provides a stable, testable approach to web application development by separating the major functions—or concerns—of an application into independently defined roles.

ASP.NET MVC in Action is a comprehensive guide to MVC-based development using this powerful framework. It offers a clearly-written introduction both to the ASP.NET MVC Framework and to the MVC approach. The focus is on creating real, maintainable web applications—so don’t expect toy examples and short snippets. The authors lead you from first-use through real-life scenarios.

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