June 2006 - Posts

Atlas + Wizard control validation bug

When using the ASP.Net 2.0 Wizard control with validation under Atlas, then you have to ensure that there is a validation control on EVERY page of the wizard, or an unhelpful 'null object not found' script error appears.

If you do not need a validation control on a particular wizard step, 

  1. Add a text box with some text inside it to the step
  2. Add a RequiredFieldValidator to it.
  3. Hide the textbox control with a 'Visibility: hidden' CSS style tag. (Using the 'Visibile' property of the control will not work)

(I am using source code release 137. Future releases may have fixed this bug)

posted Friday, June 09, 2006 5:51 AM by andrewwhitten

Atlas flicker problems

I have a demo next week, and the dynamic collapsible panels from the Atlas Control Toolkit were flickering like crazy. (Especially my listboxes)

So.. I found this discussion thread and installed IE 7 (Beta 2) to see if it made a difference, and it became as smooth as a standard desktop app.

Firefox (Version 1.5.0.4) is also quite good for this

 

 

posted Wednesday, June 07, 2006 1:00 PM by andrewwhitten

Integrate RSS with Outlook 2007

Although not comprehensive, there is a nice RSS reader integrated in Outlook 2007, and you can enable your users to add feeds to it by simply publishing the link to your rss feed as a link with 'outlookfeed' instead of 'http' like this:

outlookfeed://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/andrewwhitten/rss.aspx

It doesn't support many of the tags, but here are the basics:

  • <Title>               - Name of the post
  • <Description>    - The main body of the post, can be HTML
  • <Author>           - Who wrote this
  • <PubDate>        - When post was published
posted Sunday, June 04, 2006 6:33 AM by andrewwhitten

RSS Toolkit

There is a really nice toolkit for comsuming and producing RSS feeds from Dmitryr which makes RSS a simple task.

There isn't a great deal of tutorials or anything for it, so therefore Scott Guthrie made a tutorial which covers all the functionality.

Well, it is missing something, in that he says that by creating the format of your output in XML, and saving it as a .rss file in your /App_Code folder is all you need for creamy RSS goodness, since the wrapper class will be generated from this action.

This is 'nearly' true.. what is not stated is the need to add some lines to your web.config file in the <buildproviders> and <assemblies> sections. You can find what you need in the sample web.config.

Also ensure that the  RssToolkit.dll is in your /bin folder

posted Saturday, June 03, 2006 12:55 PM by andrewwhitten