Monday, March 31, 2008

Event Bubbling

Don't forget that you can add your own events onto your user controls, take a look at this,

http://www.odetocode.com/code/94.aspx

When something happens in the user control (e.g. a button is clicked) you can pass that event onto the main page to handle if need be. Very handy!!

Monday, March 10, 2008

The Acid Test

This is interesting, a project which allows you to test your browser for web standards compliance.

Have a look here,

http://www.acidtests.org/

My results on acid 3,

IE 5.5 - 13/100
IE 6.0 - 11/100
IE 7.0 - 12/100
Firefox 2.0 - 51/100

This is what the page should look like,

http://acid3.acidtests.org/reference.html

Check it out, and check out these results for other browsers,

http://www.anomalousanomaly.com/2008/03/06/acid-3/

Very interesting.....

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Adding Links Into Checkbox List Items

This one is pretty basic, but something to know if you have not directly done anything like this before.

If I have this we will get a checkbox list on the page,

<asp:CheckBoxList ID="AreaCheckBoxList" runat="server" >
    <asp:listitem text="Format" />
    <asp:listitem text="Content" />
    <asp:listitem text="Other" />
</asp:CheckBoxList/>


What if I want to then add a link on the end of one or more of the items. At first this seems a bit puzzling. All we do is this which allows us to control the inner html of each of the list items,

<asp:CheckBoxList ID="AreaCheckBoxList" runat="server" >
    <asp:listitem>
        Format
        <a href="www.link.com">Link Name</a>
    </asp:listitem>
    <asp:listitem text="Content" />
    <asp:listitem text="Other" />
</asp:CheckBoxList/>

Thursday, March 6, 2008

EPiServer 5 - Office Plugin Show Stopper

Let's compare - EPiServer 4.62 is a very stable product, and has been released to many production systems. It also has had a number of updates including bug fixes and the like.

EPiServer 5 on the other hand is pretty new, and not as widely used yet. I along with another developer has been working on the first EPiServer 5.0 site in New Zealand! We will get there for sure, but there have been some hurdles along the way!

One such hurdle is the office plugin functionality. This is not new functionality, but a strange undocumented setting has caused us much pain and has been a show stopper for a couple of weeks.

Make sure that users and groups are set up in the site as you would want. By default no user or group has access to using the office plugin. To set this up requires a couple of steps, the second which is not documented and where we were having the problem.

1) Enter admin mode -> Click the config tab -> Click permissions for functions -> Click the edit button next to ‘View and publish pages from Microsoft Office add-in’. Use this page to add the users and/or groups that should be allowed to publish from office. Click the save button.
2) You should be back at the permissions for functions page. Click the option ‘Allow advanced upload of files using for example drag-and-drop’. Add into this setting the same users and groups as you did in part 1.

I am unsure what connection part 2 has to the office plugin, as the name of the setting does not really correspond. If you don't do this though the office plugin wizard will keep asking you to authenticate a few steps in and you will not be able to go any further!

Internet Explorer 8

I just downloaded internet explorer 8, my first impression is that is is similar in look in feel to Ie7. One of the first features that caught my attention was the debugging functionality which could be very useful for any web developer.


In the tools menu you can select 'Developer tools' which opens a debugging window. This window allows you to view html, css, and also view and debug the script. When errors occur the debugger will break in the script and show you what the issue is. It includes a full watch and callstack window too.


I received a number of script errors while browsing the internet, and this site. Whether that is to do with IE8 beta, or issues with the site is unknown, but a useful tool to keep in a developers toolbox for that 'strange' script error that is hard to find, or for next time that you are coding javascript.