Posted by MicheeRose, geek on February 9th, 2006 — Posted in .Net
Well, I’ve decided my next project at work is researching content management systems. I have two applications to develop off of that type of system so it seems logical.
Now, mind you, I’ve worked with and played around with (read: installed on my hosting server) probably a dozen different (LAMP-based) CMS/blog-wares over the past several years. I currently use WordPress as my system of choice as that’s what works for me; but I’ve used Drupal, Mambo and TextPattern to name but three.
Nearly every system I’ve even tried, much less spent any time developing on, has taken under 30min to get running (sans creating a test database). This is download time to “working” site (by working I mean the software is running). I think there’s been maybe 2 I’ve given up on (and those were generally the less-developed ones).
That said…
I’ve downloaded 4 .Net-based CMS systems for testing. Four. Not a single one will install. And, they being .Net—a technology I’m just learning—I don’t fully understand where things are breaking. I’ve tried Rainbow (failed on SQL; seems 7.0 doesn’t support cascading deletes and there doesn’t seem to be a workaround and I don’t know what that’s specifically supposed to do so I don’t know if I can get away with simply deleting it), ndCMS (flat out won’t install), dotnetnuke (this is the Drupal or PostNuke of the .Net world it seems so ought to work with little trouble. Not true. It acts like everything’s gone peachy, but there’s no evidence of install on the db and nothing runs. And the install guide has a cryptic “press ctrl+F5 to build.” Um. Where? What’s supposed to be open? Hunh???) and, finally, Umbraco (again, seemed to be recommended and well-developed. I get partway through the install and…SQL error on “COLLATE.” Oh bother.)
I have, easily, a half-day’s work into this. No, closer to a full day. A full day and I can’t get a single software running???? Sheesh!
Okay. So maybe there’s something screwy with my setup but I dunno…
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Posted by MicheeRose, geek on February 8th, 2006 — Posted in AJAX
I finally got the server set up properly. I’m not sure which bit I fiddled with was the right one…but the software works on the server now! It’s currently in end-user testing (my that sounds so formal!) The only change left is some edits, any mods from the users and to switch it to the production database.
Whooo-hooo!
I just wish I could show it off! But alas, it’s internal software (and I can’t even create a dummy database; the software’s written in C# for ASP.Net and my host doesn’t support that. Ah well. C’est la vie, non?)
As you can tell, I’m a bit excited.
Now to decide on my next project…
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Posted by MicheeRose, geek on January 11th, 2006 — Posted in AJAX
No really, it does work. Everything works just like it should! Save all works and puts the messages in as it should. Single saves work, detail saves work. Just a little tweaking and testing left, as well as some code-clean-up and commenting and setting everything up on the real server. But the functionality is all there. I’m very excited.
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Posted by MicheeRose, geek on January 5th, 2006 — Posted in AJAX
Or, rather, “It works!”
I’ve got my ToolPath Priority page working. Not fully functional (yet) but the AJAX goodies finally work like they should. Yippee!! I had a little bit of code wrong (I’m going to try to write up an article—’cause I never came across one that made the distinction of just how different get/post is…just hope for that article. lol)
Phew! I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels for a couple of weeks on this! I mean, I was making bits of progress, but the “cool” parts were stymied by this problem.
But now, the script properly displays the “done” and then properly sets a timeout to remove the done. Whoot!
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Posted by MicheeRose, geek on December 19th, 2005 — Posted in AJAX
Is this what I’ve been doing?
Asynchronous HTML And HTTP (AHAH). AJAX without the “X”—Reader’s Digest: instead of sending XML, send XHTML snippets to directly output to client (i.e. process the transformation on the server rather than the client).
I can see the benefits; some of what I’ve been doing with my latest project is that exactly. I can definately see the advantages to that. I think it’d be most useful when you only have a small amount of information to display.
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Posted by MicheeRose, geek on December 16th, 2005 — Posted in AJAX, .Net
I’ve got my program to act as if it’s functioning correctly. And in fact, the only thing I’m missing (aside from tweaks) is the actual connection to the database. I’m very proud of myself. Unfortunately, I can’t display the stuff here as this site does not support ASP.Net. Sorry.
I do have one very large complaint: I wish VS would quit “helping” me format my html file. It insists on reducing my inline CSS to one line per class/tag/id. Grrr. And it insists on “correctly” my html “mistakes.” Except that they’re not mistakes it’s just that VS doesn’t recognize that my document is xHTML instead of HTML (yes, I have a proper doctype). Sigh. The editor isn’t so bad with my js & C# files (although I wish it were a little more helpful with js functions and attributes…) But it’s workable.
I still have some issues to clean up. I’d like to have some sort of “progress” image or text to show that the server’s off doing something (i.e. saving the info). But I can’t get it to work. I believe the issue is because it’s a synchronous call. Only I can’t seem to get the async to function. I’m still working at it but I decided that I’d live with what I could get to test the rest of the functionality. I’m still a little confused on the whole service function call. lol. Other than the db connectivity, I’ve got a little bit more error checking and maybe a few other “niceties” for the user and then I’m done. Whoot!
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Posted by MicheeRose, geek on November 29th, 2005 — Posted in .Net
See, I knew I could find the answer once I started hunting…
Indeed, I have discovered the .Net method for generating the table. I still hold that it’s not intuitive. Okay, maybe it could become intuitive but regardless it’s clunky. First I have to create row & cell variables, then set the various properties, then add the cell(s) to the row, then the row(s) to the table. Each action being a new line of code. Sheesh! And apparently I can’t (or it requires more steps) reuse a variable. Example: I was building my table header (here I have a problem: asp-generated tables won’t use the thead tag; although they will correctly generate th cells…). I didn’t want to create a new variable for all 5 of my header cells. So I set values, added the cell & modified the values again, wash, rinse, repeat. But that doesn’t work. I think there’s a cell.clear property somewhere, but I haven’t explored that yet (I will shortly).Edit 11/30/05: Ooops, wasn’t thinking about how it was referencing the variable. I started to explain my problem to someone else and it dawned on me.
Oh yes, and one more complaint (yes, this is a complaint): when setting column widths, I can’t simply do cell.width = “15%”. No. I have to do cell.width = unit.percentage(15). Gracious me!
I guess I’m just the “quick and dirty” sort of programmer.—even though I’d like to think I write well-thought-out code…I just don’t like to spend a lot of time actually coding my solution.
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Posted by MicheeRose, geek on November 29th, 2005 — Posted in .Net
I’m finally getting into the ASP.Net portion of my AJAX(ish) project. I’ve only recently acquired Visual Studio 2003. I managed to install the software a week or so ago but I’ve been too busy with other projects to anything on it.
I’ve got the javascript part of it work (which is nice). My next step is to generate the page.
The page is a large table of information. I probably should make each summary level its own row, which then would contain a table. But I’m not thrilled with the idea of lots of nesting tables (when the user clicks for details, that’s a nested table within a row). But then, nesting logically makes sense.
Well, regardless, I can work with the “template” I’ve got and make the decision with little fuss at a later date.
Now…if I were working in PHP or even Perl, I’d have this page generated in just a few minutes. I have the SQL statement to grab the specific data I need (yes, it’s complicated). I have a template of sorts (just needs the placeholders filled). With the aforementioned languages, this task is almost intuitive.
But I’m working with ASP.Net (with C# to brush up my skills). I did take a class this past spring on ASP.Net in VS2k3. But not only was that this past spring, it’s all guided examples. Their examples are peachy for their little demos…but less than helpful for me.
What I want is simply a “header” area—to be filled with static information and instructions—then a table filled with templated information, followed by a very simple “footer” area—again, filled with static information. I don’t want a table-dump of information. I don’t want server controls (because I don’t want to force a refresh—thus the presence of AJAX). I just want what amounts to a flat page with database-driven information.
Yes, I’m mostly ranting. I’m sure 75% of my problem is lack of familiarity with the language, IDE and methodology of .Net. And this really is much more of a rant than complaint. Just needed to comment that the method didn’t seem intuitive. Thanks. 
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Posted by MicheeRose, geek on November 8th, 2005 — Posted in AJAX, .Net, JavaScript
As mentioned previously, I’m doing a bit of AJAX research, with a specific slant on implementing it in ASP.Net.
I’ve gotten familiar with the AJAX concept in a general sense and while I’ve been waiting for my Visual Studio .Net 2003 software to come in, I figured I could at least hammer out some/most of the client-side logic. So I happily went about developing a dummy page and creating some JavaScript to make it do cool things. Case in point: I have a summary level list w/ a button to expand the summary to show the details. Only one summary is allowed open at any time and the js tracks if something has changed on any detail and even prompts for a save if another summary is attempted to be open. I’m pretty proud of myself.
So what’s this have to do with my title?
I was reading an article on using ASP.Net’s Postback for AJAX stuff, “Outpost: Postback over XmlHTTP.” I haven’t gotten too far…really not much farther than the introduction. I’ll edit this if I see I’m mistaken. But I have a beef with an assumption the author makes:
With AJAX you would call a web service to retrieve an array containing the subfolder names, links and icons and create the tree nodes using DHTML. You would have to create the web service methods, write cross-browser JavaScript to make it work and have hidden fields in your ASP.NET WebForm containing the state of the control.
Hrm. Well, actually you don’t need hidden fields in your form. I’ve quite successfully tracked two forms of state changes, simply using javascript variables. Now, granted, I haven’t integrated the server calls yet, but unless I’ve totally misunderstood the way things work, making a HTTP request won’t touch my variables. It’s not a page load, so nothing should be wiped from memory.
There are other bits of the article I’m not too keen on either…but I don’t know that I have a proper rebuttal for them. (i.e. “but it is not so cool, if you use 95% of the time on testing in different browsers” …um…isn’t a good portion of any web-project cross-browser testing & debugging? maybe that’s just me…).
Maybe it’s because I’m not in the “.Net Camp” but a lot of the article seems awfully narrow and without regard to other methodologies or technologies. Yes, it is about .Net technology, but the author doesn’t seem to be aware of any other technology. I think I’ll read this article with an eye of wariness.
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Posted by MicheeRose, geek on November 8th, 2005 — Posted in AJAX
So I’ve got this project at work. I could do a straight ASP.Net implementation. They wouldn’t care one way or the other. But I thought: perfect opportunity to learn something about AJAX; it would certainly make the program nicer to use.
But that’s not what I’m writing about. No, I’m referencing this article, titled “Implementing AJAX in ASP.NET - Getting Started.”
Now, it does mention that AJAX is actually a collection of methods, and in the intro suggests downloading AJAX.Net (a framework for using AJAX w/ .Net technology). But what I find irritating/amusing is that, as she begins to explain how to implement AJAX with .Net, she acts as if AJAX were a language, not a set of methods. I refer specifically to: “First, if you don’t already have it, download the latest version of AJAX.” Um. I think you mean AJAX.Net (and you forgot to link it there).
Immediately, I begin to suspect the credibility of this article. I may continue to skim through it, but I doubt I’ll take is as seriously as I once might have.
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