Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in October 2008

Amazon Kindle – a few Things I would improve
October 29, 2008 @ 1:05 am

I love my Kindle and it's been a blessing for my recent long periods away from home and keeping me in plenty of reading material without lugging books around. Still there are a few things that could improve and Scott Watermasysk blog post kicked me into writing them down.

6 comments

Dealing with Complex Client Interfaces: Html or RIA?
October 25, 2008 @ 7:44 pm

I'm working with a client who has a new project that needs to be built that is based on a complex window based layout and the app needs to be built for the Web. We've had a bunch of back and forth over which tools to use: AJAX/HTML or a RIA solution like Silverlight or Flash. In this post I have a few thoughts and comments on this discussion and talk about what we ended up with.

21 comments

Using jQuery to search Content and creating custom Selector Filters
October 24, 2008 @ 12:57 am

jQuery makes it easy to search content of matched elements by using the :content filter which allows for some pretty cool search effects you can implement with a couple of lines of code. Unfortunately :contains is case sensitive though, but never fear jQuery allows creation of custom filters that allow you to provide a custom case insensitive version.

7 comments

Making Element Position Absolute with jQuery
October 21, 2008 @ 1:15 pm

It's common for me to create DOM elements that pop up ontop of existing content by making them absolutely positioned. Here's a quick plug-in that makes an element absolute.

5 comments

HTML Mangling with Literal Controls in the <head> tag
October 20, 2008 @ 2:28 am

Ran into an odd problem with Literal controls in the head tag of the document causing HTML to get corrupted today. It appears that literal controls - and only literal controls - are causing some odd designer manglage that can result in broken HTML.

12 comments

Client Templating with jQuery
October 13, 2008 @ 5:32 pm

Client templating in Javascript can be a great tool to reduce the amount of code you have to write to create markup content on the client. There are a number of different ways that templating can be accomplished from a purely manual approach.

11 comments

LINQ to SQL DBML fails to build or open
October 10, 2008 @ 3:50 am

Arrgh. Today I got back to a LINQ to SQL app that’s been sitting idle for some time. It’s a demo app and as I started the app up and compiled the solution I got: Error 1 Build failed due to validation errors in C:\projects2008\TimeTrakker\TimeTrakkerBusiness\model\TimeTrakker.dbml. Open the file and resolve the issues in the Error List, then try rebuilding the project....

5 comments

No Empty Selector in jQuery
October 03, 2008 @ 12:41 am

One thing that bugs me about jQuery selectors is that empty or null selectors return the HTML document object, rather than an empty jQuery object. This has bitten me on a number of occasions and requires some

5 comments