Onto Skins...

I have finally finished the module I have been working on COMPLETELY...for now at least. I still get to work even more with DNN!! YAY! /sarcasm. Im actually looking forward to this a little bit because the design of our portal is finally gonna match how I designed the app, which will be kinda cool. But knowing DNN its gonna be a pain in the ass to get this going completely. I started building the site and more importantly the skin. Its already proving to be a pain. Something I could do in one day with HTML/CSS/Javascript takes me weeks to do in DotnetNuke!! I have edited skins and containers before. but never built one from scratch. We will see how this goes, but after this. I think I have touched on all areas of DNN, ughhh.....

Created my first module in DNN...

Now that we are able to submit information, We need a place to store that information. We had been using a forms module that would allow for us to run a Stored Procedure is MSSQL, but it turns out that there was a vulnerability in the module leaving it open for attack. I contacted the the third party that makes the module and informed them of this. Unfortunatley this created more work for me. I now had to get DNN installed on VS locally, get it running with IIS, and create the new module to communicate with the database. After scowering the internet, going through many lines of code debugging, and bringing the server down multiple times, I have finally got the module working, DNN running locally, and running in IIS. It has taken alot of time and effort but Im glad I finally got it working, and now I have a better grasp of DNN and I should have no problem in the future creating modules. Although I am looking into how to upload an already compiled module to the site, right now it only allows pre-compiled modules but im sure there is some way to to do it.

DotNetNuke(cont.)

I have gotten comfortable finally in the new DNN environment. I have applied a skin to our page and gotten everything working correctly. The reason it wasnt working before is because in the web.config of the DNN site, the security settings had been defaulted to microsofts security, which had been hindering our WFC Service to create a new account. Once that was fixed on the main site, I moved on to the new site where I had a null reference error. Turns out I just needed to change the name of the module. This week I will be working on generating reports and storing information to the DB.

More Dot Net Nuke

I have been asked to make another DotNetNuke site for the company. I have gotten kinda used to the environment on the old site, but for some reason the environment on this one is a little different so it has taken sometime getting used to once again. During this process I have figured out a bug in one of the modules we used. It seems that when a customer buys the product, it is not registering them correctly in the web app. Now we have other ways of making users so its not a huge deal, but I can't seem to figure out why this module is not working. I have tested about a million times to no avail. One thing I definitely hate bout dotnetnuke is that I cant debug anything in their environment, Im sure if I had that capability, I could figure out this problem in a flash, instead Im trying to figure out how to export my site to visual studio and somehow getting debugging going in that envirnment. Once again DNN turns out to be a pain in the ass.

Keeeping it all together....

Awhile back, I added some help popup functionality to a hand full of our pages. Nothing too fancy, when you hovered over the image a div would appear next to it with information about the section you were in. At the time I just added the code to the top of each page as I was going through it. This obviously wasn't the best way to implement the functionalaty since we have a Common Functions js file on almost all of pages. So I finally got around to taking out all that old code.

I also have been hard at work on another Importing feature for our app. This will end up saving alot of work in the long run. It is able to import CSV files and create objects our app will use instead of a person hand typing them in through the app.

SSL certificate errors...

We recently added a new control/page to our app. Its nothing special, the code is less than 130 lines. But we have encountered a problem with our SSL certificate when trying to access it. Whenever we open it, it warns us that some of the content wasn't delivered through https. Now I opened up httpwatch(https://www.httpwatch.com/download/) a nice little problem to record how packets are being sent and it looks like everything was being sent through https. Now I tried opening the same page up in firefox and no error. We havent figured it out yet, but im willing to be it is a bug with IE.

post back and AJAX

I have been working on a live help button for our app. It will be used in almost every page on the app. Basically what it is, is a live help button. If so needed, the customer can click this button and a popup will appear with their information in it. They can then send the help request to us for processing. Since we are going to be using this on virtually every page, we need it to be asynchronis. We do need the button to post back, but we dont need to refresh the page when it's done. How this was able to be done was with an AJAX control and asp's script manager. So only the part we need to postback will, without doing the page refresh. I can see why virutally all web apps use AJAX.

Styling and search....

I think my favorite thing to do with our app is style it. We had such an old boring looking app for so long, and now it seems I'm getting to be creative more than ever with it. I have been adding glossy headers throughout the app and its really starting to come together. My brain just keeps on ticking though and I keep coming up with better ideas constantly and wanting to implement them.

We have also been working on a really cool search. Sort of like google has where you can type a couple characters and a listbox pops up below the textbox with matches. This will definately help our customers search through their contacts faster and easier. Im starting to realize how useful AJAX .NET toolkit really is and I cant wait to get my hands in it.

its hard to break old habits....

I have been asked by the company to build them a new website. It was a pretty straight forward build: header, image, nav-bar, content. Simple, well yes those little things keep coming back to bother me. I have gotten lazy with my CSS and not parting it out from my markup. I have just been copy and pasting it to each element. This gets extremley repetive and non-efficient, its a really bad habit. So with this build I separated out my CSS(except for a few, particular, small non-resuable styles) and man does it look a lot cleaner. I also decided to use divs and containers for my data instead of tables. Im starting to feel alot more comfortable with them, even though I keep wanted to throw some table tags here and there. Its hard to break old habits, but I think I'm really growing into a better developer.

Calendar....

Well this past week I have been hard at work at building a calendar for our application. I think it came out pretty well, and now I can definately see my JS,JQUERY,CSS skills have come a long long way since I first started. I didnt even really know what JQUERY was when I first started, now I dont know how I'd ever live without it.

Return to spacing issues...

This week I have been working long and hard on a calendar for our app. I have it completely built but once again I got caught on styling it. For a little background, there is a weekview, this shows all the days of the week and the events that happen on them. Clicking one causes a popup to come up with the details of the day. We decided to add weather for the morning, noon, and the evening at the top. I was going to post the Hi and Low for each time with an icon displaying next to it kind of like this:

Hi: 54 [icon]
Low: 32

Seems simple enough but It just turned into a huge mess that I couldnt figure out. I tried doing it with a table, about a million different ways. But every way I did it either put the icon underneath the table, or pushed the second row down too far. This once again caused me to believe the best way would be to do it with div's. I tried a couple cracks at it using the float, display, and align properties but just figured I was wasting time. It was totally pointless to see a hi and low at those times of day anyway, it was irritating but I had to put it down and move on.

Edit: We decided to nix the times of day with with the weather, but still keep the high and low. So I went back to work on this today and figured it out. What I ended up doing was setting the float property to right on both the tables I needed to line up. I just sat down and got it right away, I guess I just needed a to give my eyes a break.

How to make a glossy menu bar or button and use it on the web

Open Photoshop, create an image of whatever size you desire(I use 200x30 for my example, so I can get an idea of what it will look like.)


Next Fill In with whatever color you like, this will be our base color.



Once the image is filled in, we need to add some layer style to it, so right click the layer and select blending options and use these parameters:




Now we need to create a new layer, and use the rectangular selection tool to select half of our image:


Now, use the color dropper and we are going to click on the pixel above the very bottom one for our color:



Select the gradient tool, and make sure that the gradient is set to Foreground to Transparent at the top. Drag from the top of the bar to about 2/3's down(make sure you have just the second layer selected)


Now we have our bar! Continue on if you would like to figure out how to use this with any bar/button on your webpage:



Select an area with the width 1 pixel and height of however tall your image is and save it(I have found .png to be the best for size).

Now in your HTML create a table and in the tr tag(or your css file) simply add:

style="background-image:url(your/image/url);
background-repeat:repeat-x;"

Heres what it might look like:

Welcome!!

Here you can type stuff...yaaaaaay!!

OR make it a button!!

Button

voila we are done!!

Dot Net Nuke

I was approached with a problem, It seems that on our customer purchase page, we were not including state tax. So I was supposed to go in there and add the sales tax depending on which state was selected. Sounds simple, but DotNetNuke was a PAIN to work with. I can see why companies use it though, it is very easy to edit to those who may be a novie, but it is super frustrating when you need/want more control.First of all, it was slow to work work with, it seemed like hours for each page to load after I had edited them. On top of that, I could only be editing one thing at a time which drastically slowed me down.

Before the user had entered a two letter state code themselves, but I decided to change this to a drop down box and populate it via SQL(This was one nice feature of DNN). We had just hardcoded the price to a set value before, now it had to be dynamic. DNN allows each page to be created via a template, this one was using a dynamic forms template which essentially allowed us to use variable for each form. With each form, you could execute client side scripts(another nice feature), since it was client side I had to create a hidden textbox and depending on the state, it would return a value to that text box and add it onto the total at the end.

It seemed so easy to do at the begining, I knew exactly what had to be done. But just doing it in this new environment made is super difficult. It seems to be that way with any new language though and the more I mess with it the easier it becomes...I still think dot net nuke sucks though.

The Grid...

The application we are building makes frequent use of a grid created by ComponentArt. I can see how it would save time implementing this instead of taking the time to write your own, but sometimes it can be very difficult to work with. There is little documentation online for it, so troubleshooting is not fun. Anyways, we were approached by a customer to add a links section to our app where they can essentially post up a link that may be relavent to their bid. So we decided to use the grid, allowing the user to choose an icon relating the the link, and the link itself. After the user adds it to the grid, it becomes editable just by clicking on the row. This is where the problems started. We found this to be the source of many bugs, the AJAX controls we used for selecting the icon did not get along well with it. As well as if the user decided to sort the grid while editing, it would result in the user losing some information. I had suggested since we already had an icon for editing and deleting in the table row, we should just go with that instead of allowing a click anywhere on the grid to make it editable. But since the rest of the application had already been implemented the previous way, we decided to stick with that and just not allow sorting while editing. Not looking forward to working more with this grid, on top of that its just plain ugly!!

spacing issues...

Well I have been approached to make the landing page for the website of our company(not the application). Its long over due anyway. I have begun working on it today, it's a pretty straight forward layout. I have being throw back and forth ideas about a couple issues. I don't know if I like using tables, sometimes it seems like I would have better control creating them purely with CSS, but for right now I'm using a combination of both. Spacing between cells, table, and text has become an issue. This is what leads me to believe that just doing it purely with CSS would be the best route. Its just time consuming trying to figure out how to get the spacing perfect, the way you want it.

Besides that page we are still working on the new portal for the application, which I think we're finally getting down. We are going to do it with two releases. One release letting us ease customers into the new layout and functionality, and the second one being the completed product. Hopefully well get the first one out soon!!

can't all you browsers just get along?

While building my first "real" website(berea cemetery documentation project, it became clear to me that dealing with issues in different browsers can be a real pain in the @$$. And I think its pretty common in the web community for little things to piss us off. You can build the best web application in the world, but if your spacing is off between the header and the body, its gonna stick out like a sore thumb to you. This brought me to my first "project".

Turns out that a logon screen we had used was not displaying correctly in FF although it had been in IE. A simple logon form in asp.net was beng used, your basic everyday logon. username [textbox] password[textbox]. The text was lining up in the middle of the textbox in IE but not in FF. I thought this was either a problem with the text, textbox itself, or a problem with the CSS at first but it turns out it was with the validation we were using. A red astericks appears next to the textbox which was empty, the problem is that in IE it was displaying next to the textbox and in FF it was displaying below the text box, bumping it up and out of line with the text next to it. I made a quick fix for this by extending the table in which contained the controls by 19 pixels, but where are these extra 19 pixels coming from in FF?

During the process I have fallen in love with CSS hover-over hints and validation. A great site I found(CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions) provided lots of inspiration for the project.

We have also been working hard on the new portal. It will be completley reconctructed using asp.net's webparts. I think it's a GREAT tool(think of webparts as widgets) and I cant wait to dig into it soon.