Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in July 2008

Back in the US
July 31, 2008 @ 10:28 pm

It's been a long summer of fun out of the country for me. Some time off, some time away from the 'usual' and a time to go a bit lighter on work and time in front of the computer - just what the doctor ordered. Now it's back to reality and the catching up which invariably is left behind by 3 months of physical absence and putting off some work related stuff. The time off's been well spent. As I...

1 comment

Forcing Client Windows to pop up as Windows in Tabbed Browsers
July 22, 2008 @ 1:05 pm

By default if you open a new window in Tab based browsers like FireFox 3 or IE 7 new windows pop up in new tabs. In most situations this is the desirable behavior, but sometimes it's in fact required to get a new window to pop up on the desktop and get it activated immediately.

10 comments

DevMaven Ads on the Web Log
July 21, 2008 @ 1:56 am

If you've been visiting here for a while, you may have noted that the advertising on this Web log has been cut down quite a bit recently. At the beginning of the month I decided to switch off from the mish mash of advertising that I was running previously, which included Google Adsense, Steven Smith's Lake Quincy Network, James Avery's The Lounge Network network and some of my own ads....

7 comments

Buying a new Server
July 19, 2008 @ 2:07 pm

It's time to retire my existing Web Server which is going on 7 years now. The box that this site is running on currently is an old style 2ghz Pentium 4 box with 1 gig of memory and it's starting to creak at the edges pretty hard with a few off and on failures to power and the system board components (lthe clock seized to work a few weeks ago). As of late the box has been locking up on a few...

31 comments

West Wind Ajax Toolkit updated
July 15, 2008 @ 12:46 pm

I've finally had some time to update the West Wind Ajax Toolkit to version 1.90. A number of these changes I've written about and have updated previously, but this update finalizes a number of these updates into a full release. There are a number of enhancements to the existing functionality as well as a few new helper components that I'm finding very useful these days. As always you can grab the...

6 comments

Static Singletons for ASP.NET Controls
July 11, 2008 @ 12:19 am

When building generic ASP.NET Server controls that also provide a sort of API service to other custom controls or page level code, it's often necessary to ensure that only a single instance of a control exists, and that only that single instance of this control or component can be accessed in the context of an ASP.NET request. Using HttpContext and it's Item collection makes it easy to create reusable, cacheable instances and ensure you're only running a Singleton instance of it.

8 comments

Inclusion of JavaScript Files
July 07, 2008 @ 4:05 am

I find myself struggling with effectively managing JavaScript scripts across multiple projects. Between version changes and updates to my own components I spend a lot of time comparing versions and trying to sync up files. There are a number of different ways to load and manage script resources, and in this post I show a few with their pro's and con's, but none of them seem ultimately satisfying. What are you using to manage 'Script File Hell?'

25 comments

Permissions Denied to get Property location.toString in FireFox 3
July 02, 2008 @ 1:31 pm

Since installing FireFox 3 I've been getting errors showing up on a host of sites - including until recently my own. While the errors seem harmless engough and don't actually cause any problems on pages they do show up in Firebug as shown in the following screen shot: The above screen shot is from Yahoo's news page to a linked item and is clearly related to Flash components. Until recently I've...

4 comments