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.