I recently ran into this problem that seemed really odd. This is the .net world and I am using an item template. On itemdatabound I set a drop downlist’s selected item like this:
somedropdownlist.Items.FindByText("someText").Selected = True
I thought this should have worked. It did not. When the control was rendered the item I choose was not selected. So I thought that this could be a life-cycle thing. I tried:
somedropdownlist.SelectedValue = "Some Value"
that worked. Why? I don’t get it.
Any one in the Milwaukee area who is remotely interested in web design should check out the event put on by MilwauCHI. MilwauCHI is the Milwaukee, Wisconsin chapter for the Association for Computing Machinery (AMC) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI).
Titled “Multiple Facets of Accessible Design” this event will tackle accessible design on the web and else where. IndependenceFirst which is hosting the event is also in the process of revamping their website. Like their building, IndependenceFirst wants the new website to be a model for accessibility. I am really looking forward to this event.
A few days ago I “upgraded” to Parallels 5. I have multiple XP environments and one of them refused to start and was giving me the blue screen of death. Here is my mistake: I tried to resolve the issues appearing on the blue screen. If this happens to you don’t try to solve these issues. It iwll get you no where very slowly. I did find this post though: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10392166-263.html. It it turns out this is a known issue and easily be remedied. That is too late for me know, since I tried a repair on my vm which means might as well rebuild it now, hopefully though it is not late for you.
Recently when I was creating a contact us web page, I ran into an issue with 508 compliance. Generally, to make a site 508 compliant you have to sacrifice certain functionality to achieve this goal. However there is one area where this functionality cannot be sacrificed and this is in the use of a Captcha. Captchas are absolutely necessary when creating a website that allows user to submit comments, questions, or payments. However in general captcha’s are very difficult to read even if you have 20/20 vision, are sometimes impossible to read for the color blind, and are obviously impossible for the blind using readers to understand. .
As I have been pulling together material for our seminar in a couple weeks (http://www.consult-cts.com/events), I can’t help but feel more and more excited about this. I am working on compiling actual tools for people to walk away with and start implementing: active listening worksheets, tips/reminders before a meeting, post-meeting tools, instructions for good note-taking, etc.. If you have any thoughts, shoot me a comment or email please!
I also thought I would share a giggle for this was part of my “inspiration” . . . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TzHbcXYwI4 and an example of how everyone can relate to the office geek persona.
The power of the Internet is its ability to reach across mountains and oceans into the heart of remote towns and villages. This is even more emphasized by the popularity and availability of mobile phones and other devices that are Internet enabled. A business through its on-line presence will have the world as its market by the flip of the switch. The only barrier becomes that of communication rather than distance and physical limitations. An e-commerce site entering a new market will now have to communicate its value proposition, the quality of its products, support information and specifications and many other communication pieces that have to be delivered in the language of the potential buyer. This is, of course, in addition to the basic e-commerce fundamental requirement of currency conversion and fulfillment issues.
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I recently encountered an issue with an ASP.NET 3.5 solution after converting it from ASP.NET 2.0. The issue I’m going to be describing only pertains to the older web site projects (and only web projects — class libraries, etc. do not have this problem) as opposed to the newer web application projects. I believe this to be true because the conversion wizard built into Visual Studio has rarely ever had trouble converting web application projects, while I’ve never successfully been able to automatically convert a web site project. (more…)
I thought I share this mini tutorial I put together on RegEx. It is meant to get you started under 5 minutes. hope you find it useful.
Rugular Expression (RegEx for short) is a way of specifying a certain amount of textual data. For example, “^X” means “a line that starts with the letter X”.
The simplest regular expression is the literal expression. The expression “Where are you?” matches the test “Where are you?”. Any literal, letter or digit, will match itself with few exceptions that we will talk about below. There is a certain set of literals that have special purpose in RegEx and it is those literals that give RegEx its power. These literals are called meta-characters. (more…)
Recently I ran into and issue implementing SEF (Search Engine Friendly) urls on the for a Joomla website hosted on IIS. Specifically, I wanted to disable the SEF modifications made by Joomla for the search component in the site. When the Joomla property for SEF urls is turned on, it will automatically convert all hyperlinks on the page into server friendly urls. However since the Joomla feature in IIS requires a filter to be placed on the site in order to decipher the url, it can cause problems when the links are dynamically created, and can cause the links to be undecipherable by the filter. This problem occured in the search component, where the search results contain hyperlinks that are dynamically created. Therefore it was required that the search engine friendly names conversion in Joomla be turned off for the search component. In order to do this I was forced a custom code change in the Joomla site, by tracking down where the SEF urls are created and disabling it for the search component. The following steps we executed on Joomla 1.5, using the built in component for SEF conversion in Joomla if you are using a newer version, a different component for SEF conversion, or your site is not hosted on IIS these changes may not apply.
A question was posed to me as to why so many developers neglected to use beneficial tools which help in data modeling, performance testing, stress testing, and security testing during the development cycle. I believe this is a result of several factors. First, developers and customers miscalculate the cost to benefit ratio. Performing data modeling, performance, stress, and security testing comes down to one question. What benefit does the application gain from the time and money investment? A majority of projects start small, and they do not take into account the possible growth and ultimate usage. Many customers are interested in two things a quick turn around and that their requirements at the time were met, but the problem is requirements constantly change and expand, which then exacerbates the shortsightedness in design and testing. With requirements contanstly changing it makes it hard to judge what benefit a tool might have towards your application. In conjunction with this it can be very hard to determine the cost of learning a new tool. With the cost of the tool being unknown and the benefit often underestimated, this will often result in it not being used.
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