AJAX Toolkit at ASP.Net

If you are not familiar with the AJAX Toolkit available at Asp.Net then you should take a look. You can download the toolkit from this site but also take a look at a number of samples in action. The AlwaysVisibleControl is an interesting one that will take an area of code and allow it to hover over the page in a certain predefined area. The DragPanel is very nice also, allowing a listbox or other control to be drug around the page and docked in temporary locations.

ModalPopup

The ModalPopup is a feature that a number of blogs are now utilizing to collect user data when you arrive at their page. If you have a newsletter that you believe your guests would be interested in receiving, you can popup a modal window and make them interactive with the window before they access any other part of your site. A little annoying but useful for building a newsletter email list.

WAP Requirement

It’s quite amazing the number of affects that are available within the toolkit. The Rating example, Reorderlist, and Resizeable control are quite impressive. There’s a rounded corners solution and a slideshow. We will probably implement the slide show example for a recent news area that we have on our site at work. There is one perquisites for using the toolkit and that is having VS 2005 Web Application Projects (WAP) update installed. It is available for download on the AJAX Toolkit Codeplex site.

Selecting the Top 2 Meeting Dates from Separate Records

I wrote this short SQL Server code today to select the top 2 meeting dates and combine them into a single record. Using a temporary table it was possible to select the first date as one column and then select the second date as a second column. These records will be placed into a grid with the first record representing meeting dates and the second record showing agendas. Therefore the Union All was used to duplicate the first record.

Making your Blog/Site Mobile

I have read a number of posts recently about making your blog mobile and found two pretty good versions that anyone can use for their site. The first uses Google Reader to present your RSS feed in a mobile way. And the second creates a more true mobile version with mippin.com and their technology. According to most posts, adding mobile ability to your site increases traffic by a fairly good amount.

Creating Image Buttons that Resize on Mouse Over

We needed to have a different way than previously designed to have image buttons enlarge on hover over that included a text label. So I wrote the code below to fill a table cell with an image and change the image onmouseover. The trick was getting the label to sit right on top on the images and having the images swap correctly. I used a div area to push the label down to the right spot on the image. And then I used some css style attributes in JavaScript to get the image to change when needed.