DonXML Blog

I’m borrowing a line from a famous New Jersey Tourism Campaign, but it definitely fits.  For such a small state, and so far from the Silicon Valley or Redmond, New Jersey has a thriving .Net User Group community.  Besides the opportunity to go to User Groups in New York City, the residents of New Jersey 2 established .Net User Groups (one in North Jersey, and one at the local MS office), there are a couple new User Groups starting up.  NJIT has created a group dedicated to the college crowd, there’s a FoxPro/.Net Group for the FoxPro crowd, and it looks like a Central New Jersey group will be joining the ranks soon.  With all of these User Groups, it looks like the future is bright for .Net in New Jersey.

The SharpVectors project will be represented at the SVG Open the following presentations:

The following question was asked on the WinForms Discussion Group:

Not sure if this is fixed in .Net 1.1, (got to check) but if you use an ASP.Net TextBox control and set the textmode to MultiLine, it will generate a textarea tag.  The bug is that if you set the size thru height and width attributes, it will convert them to a style attribute, but only for IE, not Netscape or Mozilla.

Jumping in on Jesse’s Flash based RIA thread, my personal take on the Flash RIA issue boils down to one thing, Flash does not grok XML and paradigm change that XML brings once you do grok it.  Don’t get me wrong, Flash is a very good tool for what it does, static (not data driven) vector graphics.  Used in its traditional niche, it is a great tool, but to try to expand its role to building full fledged UIs, will only tarnish its reputation.  I have the same problem with people that try to build SVG only web sites (and I love SVG).

From ScottW

The North New Jersey .Net User Group (N3UG) and INETA are sponsoring a Software Legends night, May 28th, at the Morris Plains, NJ Barnes & Noble.

Has anyone seen the current issue of asp.netPRO, and the cover article - 10 Rock-Solid UI Tips?  Here’s the link to the article, but you need to have a subscription to see it.  I’ve got a couple problems with the article, but my main complaint is Tip 1, Use SmartNavigation.  SmartNavigation is supposed to eliminate the repainting of web pages between posts on uplevel browsers using a hidden iframe.  If you have ever tried using SmartNavigation in your pages, you would find that it does not work if you are using a more traditional HTML/CSS page model (apposed to the VB-like model VS.Net tries to force you to use).  Just do a search of the MS newsgroups on SmartNavigation, and you will see hundreds of problems with this technology, and a lot of recommendations that it should not be used (especially with external CSS).  My problem with the article is that nowhere is it acknowledged that SmartNavigation is known to cause problems.  As the author you have a responsibility to alert your readers to any known issues of the technology you are using, and this tip is very misleading.  IMHO. use SmartNavigation in only the most basic WebForms, and becareful using it with any advanced browser technologies (i.e. Element Behaviors, CSS, Scripting).