I have a master page that serves as a template for a few related pages. Both the master page and the views that use it are strongly typed, and they all use the same view model data type. The declarations look like this: <%@ Master Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage<SearchDataModel>" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/InSpire.Master" %> … <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="Search.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<SearchDataModel>"…
try-catch-FAIL
Stories from the trenches of software development.
Month: <span>October 2009</span>
An auto-hiding menu bar with jQuery
What do you do with links/buttons/actions that are likely to be infrequently used, but should still be available to users anywhere in the system? That’s the question I had to answer for the new InSpire search engine we’re working on at my day job. The sort of links I am talking about are logout, preferences,…
A simple WCF host application
I’ve been struggling with getting some of our backend components to play nice over WCF for the past couple of days. Our situation is a little more complex than most I think; our systems have dependencies on a variety of COM libraries, uses some Java APIs via IKVM.NET, and has differing capabilities as far as…
Please stop over-using the var keyword
I just watched an excellent presentation by Jimmy Bogard on UI testing with ASP.NET MVC. While I really enjoyed the presentation and got a lot of really good ideas for how to improve how I work with MVC, I saw something that I really did not like: lots of var keywords. Here’s an example (recreated…
The long road to fixing delete behavior in liteGrid
A lot has been going on with liteGrid recently. The application at my day job that necessitated its creation is nearing production, and numerous additional features are being implemented in support of finishing that app. One of the big things that recently came up was making sure delete operations worked when the grid was in…
Improving jQuery’s Validation Plug-in
One of the 50 or so tasks I’m juggling at my day job deals with coming up with UI standards for one of our applications. I’m trying to think through every common scenario we have, design how it should work from a UI stand point (both the perceived UI as well as the HTML markup…
The additive nature of bad code
It really shouldn’t be a surprise, but I have recently witnessed firsthand how a little bad code sprinkled here-and-there quickly adds up to a lot of BAD code that’s painful to work with. That’s the scenario we’re facing now with our ASP.NET MVC application. Our team conducts peer reviews for every bug/feature, but we’ve still…
liteGrid – now with draggable rows!
I’ve just finished up the draggable rows module for liteGrid. You can check out the demo page here. The module supports the tree-grid module (but does not require it). It’s built using jQuery UI’s draggable and droppable behaviors. I’ve tested it on IE 8, Firefox 3.5, and Chrome, and it seems to work fine everywhere. …
Product Review: Balsamiq Mockups for Desktop
It seems like I’ve been doing a lot of user-experience (UX) design at my day job lately. It’s not an area I consider one of my core strengths. Up until recently, I would actually say it was a major weakness, but I was fortunate enough to take a HCI (human-computer interface) class while working on…
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