Duck-Punching the jQuery UI Datepicker into a Date/Time Picker

Posted by on June 23, 2010

There are a TON of awful date pickers out there.  For a who’s who of the worst, check out Date Time Picker Competive Analysis.

jQuery UI’s Datepicker control is by far the best looking and most intuitive picker.  In light of maintaining a uniform UI, I wanted a date time picker that played on that control.  I found two:

  1. http://blog.w3visions.com/2009/04/date-time-picker-with-jquery-ui-datepicker/ – Integrates with Datepicker, but the UI is completely ... Continue Reading
Categories: Code

Beautiful PNG Wait Indicator with Raphaël and jQuery

Posted by on April 16, 2010

Can you believe that in 2010 we are still stuck  with using animated gif’s?  They support transparency, but not the alpha-channel.  So when you need to create a wait indicator that won’t have a specific background, you’re stuck with a pixelated look.

Recently, I wanted to create a beautiful wait-indicator to display while AJAX was loading.  I wanted to use PNG, but animated PNG’s don’t have wide support yet. Furthermore, ... Continue Reading

Categories: Code

Custom .NET Remoting – Easier Than You Think

Posted by on April 1, 2010

The idea of implementing remoting will give most programmers instant heartburn.  Granted, I’m not an expert on all the existing remoting solutions, but I haven’t found one that works intuitively.

All the different solutions I’ve seen require just about double the code.  You write a method once, then write a wrapper for the method to implement remoting. 

Furthermore, they often require special handling to make sure the contextual variables are ... Continue Reading

Categories: Code
Tags: remoting, c#

C# Imap and Pop3 Library

Posted by on March 26, 2010

Sigh. 

These are text-based services… it’s not that hard, and yet all the projects I found out there were nasty—bloated and severely error prone.  So, I rebuilt one.  This is based heavily on xemail-net.  I simplified it quite a bit—created standard methods for repeated code blocks and implemented a base class to simplify the creation of the Pop3 client.

Categories: Code
Tags: pop3, imap, c#

Getting Started with Yahoo and OAuth

Posted by Andy Edinborough on January 29, 2010

Yahoo doesn’t offer much help to .NET/C# developers when it comes to getting started with using their API’s and OAuth.  So I’ve put together a quick-hit starter pack.

  1. Yahoo! YQL Console
    This is fun for all ages!  I just get all giggly when I see all that Yahoo has made available through YQL (Yahoo Query Language).  You can use this tool to perfect your queries and figure out just what ... Continue Reading
Categories: Code
Tags: c#, oauth, yql, yahoo

C# OAuth Implementation

Posted by on December 17, 2009

AAAARRRRGGGHHH!!

I had to get that out of my system.  I’m not familiar enough with the exact specification of OAuth to know whether it’s Yahoo or Yedda that can’t read a spec, but the Yedda implementation of OAuth available on Google Code, doesn’t even begin to work with Yahoo’s YQL API.  Futhermore, the Yedda implementation is bloated and hard to follow.  Why is it that so many programmers feel the ... Continue Reading

Categories: Code
Tags: .net, c#, yahoo, oauth

Firefox v3.5 Needs to go back to the drawing board

Posted by Andy Edinborough on July 10, 2009

This truly is “embarrassing”.  image The Mozilla team really pulled a “Windows ME” with their latest release of Firefox.  After being open for 5 minutes, Firefox with only the “embarrassing” tab open has 26 MB more memory usage than IE8 running for hours with 3 tabs open (including a Bing Map).

LAME!  And what happened to Firebug?!  When I try to inspect a page, the CSS gets completely hosed.  I know ... Continue Reading

Categories: Tech Watch

Use Late-Binding in C# Now, without .NET 4.0

Posted by on June 17, 2009

The lack of late-binding in C# has been one of my biggest gripes about C#.  Finally, in the .NET Framework v4.0, the dynamic keyword has been introduced (it could be argued that it is too loose—allowing for variant types).  But until it is released, the need still exists, and even then, not all clients will immediately support it.  So, in a bind, I wrote a simple class to allow access ... Continue Reading

Categories: Code

RE: Microsoft may be Firefox's worst vulnerability

Posted by Andy Edinborough on June 3, 2009

A recent article at Slashdot that has now been propagated to TechRepublic, claims that Firefox's biggest vulernability this year is Microsoft.  For those who have not heard, as part of the .NET Framework v3.5 SP1, Microsoft added an extension to Firefox to support Click-Once application deployment.  The claim by Slashdot is that this is Internet Explorer's biggest vulernability and that Microsoft has forced it onto Firefox users.

Having done ... Continue Reading

Categories: Tech Watch

Mosso's URL Rewriting Rules Are Wrong!

Posted by Andy Edinborough on June 1, 2009

Mosso has been in the game of hosting for quite a while now and have become quite popular.  I was amazed to learn when we began migrating one of our projects to them that their URL rewritting rules are incorrect.

In case you didn't know, Mosso provides a platform that supports both ASP.NET and PHP.  ASP.NET requests are sent to an IIS server, and PHP requests are sent to a ... Continue Reading

Categories: Tech Watch

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