Stuart Jones Weblog

New England Code Camp 7

2007-02-07T01:23:00Z

Chris Bowen has announced New England Code Camp 7. Microsoft will be hosting the event at their Waltham office on the weekend of March 31-April 1. If you haven't been to Code Camps before, they are an opportunity to learn about current software topics and present two full weekend days of talks. See Chris's blog post for more information.

Ajax Talk at Rhode Island User Group

2007-01-29T20:08:00Z

I'll be speaking on Ajax at the Rhode Island .Net User Group next Wednesday, February 7, 6:00pm. The group meets at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Ajax Talk At Maine Bytes

2006-12-07T16:37:00Z

I'll be speaking once again on Ajax at the Maine Bytes User Group next Thursday, December 14, 6:00pm. The group meets at UnumProvident's Home Office 3 building at 2211 Congress Street in Portland, Maine.

Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

2006-11-01T13:43:00Z

Adam Wiener has a blog post that explains the often confusing issue of which version of the MSXML parser to use in Internet Explorer. The gist of the article is that you should try to use the latest version of MSXML (version 6) if it is installed on the client machine and fall back to MSXML version 3 if not. Trying to use other versions of MSXML leads to many problems as discussed in Adam's blog post. MSXML 6 is the preferred version since it has the best security, performance and reliability. MSXML 3 is the preferred fallback since it is installed on every Windows OS since Windows 2000 SP4 (i.e., zero deployment).

Welcome Chris Bowen

2006-10-27T01:13:00Z

I found out at Code Camp 6 last weekend, and now it is official, that Chris Bowen is the new Microsoft Developer Evangelist for New England. I want to heartily welcome Chris to his new role and wish him continued success. I'm looking forward to working with him. Chris is replacing Thom Robbins, who is now Director for .NET Platform Marketing in Redmond.

Rico Drag-N-Drop

2006-10-27T00:49:00Z

I was using the drag-n-drop feature of the Rico Ajax library the other day and noticed that the feature was not working in Internet Explorer, where I was getting this error:

Microsoft JScript runtime error: 'document.defaultView' is null or not an object

In Firefox, I was seeing this error in the Javascript console:

Error: [Exception... "Could not convert JavaScript argument arg 0 [nsIDOMViewCSS.getComputedStyle]" nsresult: "0x80570009 (NS_ERROR_XPC_BAD_CONVERT_JS)" location: "JS frame :: http://localhost/Ajax/AjaxJSLibs/rico.js :: anonymous :: line 2644" data: no]
Source File: http://localhost/Ajax/AjaxJSLibs/rico.js
Line: 2644

Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the problem was buried deep inside of a Rico utility function that was using introspection to set HTML element properties. I realized that it was trying to work with the background-color style for the element, but this was not set in my CSS for the element, so it was referencing a null value. The fix was to make sure that the elements that are set up as the Rico draggables and dropzones have the CSS background-color property set.

This makes sense, once I realized what was going on. The background color changes for both the dragged item and the drop zones while the item is dragged. The Rico library needs to save the original background color so that it can be reset once the dragging is done.

So, when using the Rico drag-n-drop feature, make sure you set the background-color style for the draggable and dropzone HTML elements.

Custom LogFormatter with Enterprise Library 2.0

2006-10-24T20:10:00Z

I updated some of my custom types for Enterprise Library today from version 1.1 to 2.0. I have a custom logging formatter that takes log entries and formats them as XML. I ran into a rather nasty error message when the formatter was auto-constructed with the new 2.0 Enterprise Library. Although I had followed it rather closely, the Enterprise Library 2.0 documentation does not state that the constructor for the custom formatter must include a paramter of type NameValueCollection since that will hold the configuration data for the formatter. This is true, of course, regardless of whether or not you are using the configuration data. So, the custom formatter should look like:

[ConfigurationElementType(typeof(CustomFormatterData))]
public class XMLFormatter : LogFormatter
{
   public XMLFormatter(NameValueCollection nvc)
   {
         // Nothing to do in my case
   }

   public override string Format(LogEntry log)
   {
         // Implementation of Format()...
   }
}

Make sure you add the ConfigurationElementType attribute to your custom formatter class since it is also required by the Enterprise Library object builder.

Advanced Ajax Materials

2006-10-23T13:17:00Z

I have posted the materials from my Advanced Ajax presentation at code camp on the Berwick Heights Software website. The zip archive includes the source code for all of the Ajax examples that I presented on Saturday.

Thanks to all those who attended for making this an interesting day. I hope that you found the topics throughout the day useful. As I mentioned in my first talk, the various user groups that meet throughout New England present these kinds of talks on a monthly basis. The International .Net Association (INETA) website has a page that will give you all the details. Choose USA in the first select box and then choose the state in which you're interested to find out which user groups meet near you, when they meet and whom to contact.

I look forward to seeing you all at a future presentation.