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Agile web development

How to fix divs floating outside their container

January 12th, 2008

Have you ever had two div tags floated next to each other? Don’t you love how they’re outside the container? Thanks to David Mead, I can show you the fix! Check out the code!

If you have any questions, leave them in comments. I’ll try to fumble out an answer!

Re: Explain to me the value of Silverlight

November 2nd, 2007

Update: One of the most important things you can do as a developer is to learn to admit when you are wrong. This is a perfect example. I may have been to harsh in my initial assessment of Silverlight, as the ability to call .NET from a Flash-like container would be very nice. Plus, the DLR came out of it (vicariously), so it can’t be all bad. Point being, I spoke to soon. In the spirit of full disclosure, here you go:

Milan at ASP.NET Resources wants to know the value of Silverlight. Quite frankly, so do I.

In response to: Explain to me the value of Silverlight

Maybe I’m ignorant, I haven’t spent much time looking at the technical capabilities, but it doesn’t look much different from Flash. I’m guessing you can interact with the .NET Framework on the backend, but woopee. It just seems like another example of Microsoft’s terrible case of NIH. Couldn’t they also have partnered with Adobe to create a .NET version of Flash? I mean, everyone already uses Flash, so it would have been easier. As for the .NET integration, I think Ajax would be a better fit. Of course, I mean REAL Ajax, not the Ajax wrapper toolkit, but that’s for another day.

Implementing an RSS Feed

November 1st, 2007

I recently implemented an RSS feed for Road and Travel here. I learned an important lesson working on that feature.

Some developers prefer to loop through their results and manually build the XML necessary for an RSS feed. While this method may work, it is very difficult to maintain & you lose compatibility with other syndication formats (such as Atom or RDF). I implemented this feed using the ASP.NET RSS Toolkit. It was very easy, maybe 20 lines of code. It seems fairly lightweight, at 122kb, and supports multiple syndication formats out of the box.

When it comes to implementing a feature like this, don’t discount third-party frameworks. They may greatly improve the maintainability of your code, and allow you to write your code much more quickly.