My last article on How To Create A JSON Web Service in ASP.NET did not attract much interest so it is time to step it up a notch. To make this article more interesting I’m going to create a new web service in Fujitsu NetCOBOL. As far as I know, there are no examples on [...]
ASP.NET makes it easy to create web services but they usually return XML. Like many web developers I now prefer JSON. This article and sample code will show you how to get your web service to return data in the JSON format. The web service is written in C#. Since my web hosting company only [...]
Tonight I revamped my web site. I have not updated my web site in a long time although I had a task on my To Do List to improve the wording. I have updated the content to reflect my current skills and services. I removed a lot of crap and made it look more professional. [...]
I recently finished reading the book ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking by Andrew Siemer. I consider this book to be one of the more important books to read because I’m very interested in building social networking web sites and ASP.NET is my area of expertise. However I’m currently devoting a lot of time to PHP and [...]
Last night I watched the movie Paris, Je T’Aime, a collection of short films set in various arrondissements. This is undoubtedly one of the best recent films to see before you travel to Paris. I especially liked the short film 14e arrondissement (XIVe arrondissement) — written and directed by Alexander Payne. It is a brutally [...]
Today I finished reading “ASP.NET 3.5 Application Architecture and Design” by Vivek Thakur. This book is published by Packt Publishing who “specialize in publishing focused books on specific technologies and solutions“. They have books on JavaScript Libraries like jQuery, open source web applications like WordPress, Joomla, and Elgg, and web application frameworks like CakePHP. ASP.NET [...]
Today I figured out how to add a custom property to one of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit’s controls, the Calendar control. I added a property so I could set its initial mode to years. You can read all about it on my ASP.NET Web Blog. I stayed up really late tonight working on my [...]
Yesterday I read an article that contained a perfect description of the work habit concern I’ve been trying to express: “You could potentially get caught up in research and skill building rather than doing or seeking paid work.” That is a major problem for me. I spend far more time on research and skill building [...]
Today I added a progress bar to my ASP.NET page for downloading YouTube videos. I’ll probably blog about this later at http://weblogs.asp.net/rrobbins/. I moved the code that does the file download to a web service. It makes more sense to have a web service handle the file download instead of using an asynchronous task initiated [...]
I finally have Visual Studio 2008 installed on my home computer. I have not used it much except for compiling the Video.Show open source video sharing site. However you can use Visual Studio 2008 to work on an ASP.NET 2.0 project and I did recently convert one of my major client sites to ASP.NET 2.0. [...]
I’ve recently learned that it is possible to create a web service which returns JavaScript Object Notation JSON rather than XML. ASP.NET 2.0 allows you to give a web service a ScriptService attribute which “AJAX enables” the Web Service and allows JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) objects to be returned instead of SOAP messages. The client [...]
Blogging on the Microsoft Community web site http://weblogs.asp.net has proven to be more rewarding than blogging on my own. I get more feedback from other developers. There have also been other benefits. For example, I was sent a free book to review. Microsoft AJAX Library Essentials: Client-side ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Explained by Cristian Darie and [...]
I’ll blog about this here because everyone on the http://weblogs.asp.net/ site has already announced it. Microsoft has released the .NET Framework 3.5 which includes the new version of ASP.NET, known as ASP.NET 3.5. Visual Studio 2008 has also been released but SQL Server 2008 is still not available except in beta. I had the beta [...]
Microsoft has given me a blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/rrobbins/, their community web site for ASP.NET developers. I’m excited by this because I do most of my work using ASP.NET and I have a lot of content in my technology notes which I can use. So far my blog posts have averaged 100 views which is probably [...]
Today I discovered that my Yahoo Widget for Stickam has been approved and is now available for download from the Yahoo Widget Gallery. I did not receive any notice that it was approved. Now I just need to get my Vista Sidebar gadget for Stickam approved. I have been invited to blog on the Microsoft [...]
This blog post is going to wrap up a week of activity that didn’t give me time to blog. This week I worked on an important web part that creates a parent / child relationship between two database tables. I based it on the Northwinds sample database and used some code from my book on [...]
Today I was converting some ASP code to ASP.NET when I ran into a problem with the eval statement which is not supported in the NET Framework. Fortunately, I found a clever solution on the Internet at http://odetocode.com/Articles/80.aspx. You can compile that C# code into a DLL and put it into the bin directory of [...]
There is a free charting component for ASP.NET by the name of NPlot but it is poorly documented and I could not figure out how to create a simple bar chart. I contacted one of the developers and he sent me some code that pointed me in the right direction. I have created some sample [...]
I feel that I have become a much better programmer this year. I have learned a lot more about Visual Studio and now use all of its features. This includes using bookmarks to find my way back to lines of code, using macros to automate some tasks, using the debugging features, using templates to create [...]
