Monthly Archives: February 2007

Web Developers – Freelance VS Firms

Posted on 2/28/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Now that I’ve worked as a freelance web developer and as a web developer working for a small company that does a variety of Internet consulting and I.T. related work I have some thoughts on choosing one over the other. … Continue reading →

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Joomla And botMosXslt – XML Feeds In Portals

Posted on 2/25/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Last night I installed the Joomla open source content management system on my local web server and explored its ability to consume XML data feeds (web services, developer APIs, and RSS news feeds). The News Feed module did not allow … Continue reading →

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What Technology I Am Studying

Posted on 2/24/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I devote a lot of time each week to studying new technology. It is very important for a web developer to keep up his skill set because his expertise is his major asset. I prefer to learn incrementally because most programming languages … Continue reading →

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DotNetNuke 4 News Module and Web Parts Synergy

Posted on 2/23/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Tonight I tried to use some of the XSL stylesheets I created for my ASP.NET 2.0 web parts mashup in the DotNetNuke 4 web portal. I was very pleased to find that most of them work when used with the … Continue reading →

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RegexBuddy And xmlns:media

Posted on 2/22/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Today I purchased RegexBuddy, a tool for creating and testing regular expressions. Regular expressions are strings that describe or match a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules. In other words, a regular expression is a complex syntax for … Continue reading →

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ASP.NET Cryptography

Posted on 2/20/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

For the past two days I have been working on encrypting data using ASP.NET’s built-in cryptography classes. I experimented with TripleDES and Rijndael, also known as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Rijndael is accepted as a government standard for data … Continue reading →

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Programmers, Hackers, and Web Application Security

Posted on 2/19/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Some people are quite fearful of programmers and web developers. When a company has to let go of a developer there is usually a lot of fear that the disgruntled employee will hack their network or web site. There will … Continue reading →

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Mashup With ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts

Posted on 2/19/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Here is a video I created to demonstrate my custom mashup. I won’t be posting much source code anymore because the last two blog entries gave me a lot of problems. I spent several hours fighting with WordPress to get … Continue reading →

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Using JavaScript Within XSL

Posted on 2/18/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I have upgraded to Visual Studio 2005 Professional and I now have the XML menu with the Show XSLT Output and Debug XSLT submenu items. Unfortunately, it does not appear to work. I get an error. I searched on the Internet … Continue reading →

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XML & XSL – LiveVideo API

Posted on 2/17/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Yesterday I created a web part to show video comments using the LiveVideo API. The API returns XML so I had to format it using XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) which is a stylesheet for XML. I used Visual Studio 2005 … Continue reading →

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Mashup Sites – A Review

Posted on 2/16/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Today I investigated several other mashup sites to get an idea of how this technology can be used. I was impressed by the range of content you can include on your start pages. You can even submit your own content, … Continue reading →

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Custom Web Portals With ASP.NET 2.0

Posted on 2/14/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I really like the new web portal applications you can create in ASP.NET 2.0 so I have used this technology to create a custom mash up for myself. A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more … Continue reading →

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ASP.NET 2.0 – Database

Posted on 2/10/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I have finished reading my book on ASP.NET 2.0. There were two chapters on the new database server controls for ASP.NET 2.0. The new database controls eliminate the need to create database connection, command, and reader objects which was a … Continue reading →

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ASP.NET 2.0 – Security And Web Parts

Posted on 2/8/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Tonight I finished exploring the new security and web parts features of ASP.NET 2.0. The new security features are server controls for user login, password recovery, and new user registration. These server controls eliminate much of the repetitive coding required … Continue reading →

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Studying ASP.NET 2.0

Posted on 2/5/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I have finally begun to study ASP.NET 2.0. I am currently reading ASP.NET 2.0 For Dummies by Bill Hatfield. I am up to chapter 13. Unfortunately, everything I have read so far has been really basic review of ASP.NET. So … Continue reading →

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