Andy Edinborough

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

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:02:57 GMT

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:

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

Beautiful PNG Wait Indicator with Raphaël and jQuery

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:27:32 GMT

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

Custom .NET Remoting – Easier Than You Think

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:57:27 GMT

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

C# Imap and Pop3 Library

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:02:00 GMT

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.

Mail.zip ... Continue Reading

Getting Started with Yahoo and OAuth

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:31:47 GMT

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.

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

C# OAuth Implementation

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:22:25 GMT

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

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

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:32:29 GMT

This truly is “embarrassing”. 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

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

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:28:30 GMT

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

RE: Microsoft may be Firefox's worst vulnerability

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:49:30 GMT

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

Mosso's URL Rewriting Rules Are Wrong!

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:55:00 GMT

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

Microsoft Releases Bing without a "Search Provider"?

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:56:43 GMT

As my first post on my new blog, I'm pleased to say that Microsoft has finally released Bing, a "decision engine" that offers Google real competition. But did they seriously just release a search-engine product with no Search Provider add-in for Internet Explorer? Seriously? This is a huge disappointment; I actually really like Bing.

Ironically, I was able to add Bing as my default search provider to Chrome, and Firefox ... Continue Reading