I'm a pretty good dev. I'll toot my own horn. But as far as design skills go, frankly I'll admit I have some serious room for improvment. So, when someone asks me to build them a site, I'll spend 80% of my time monkeying around with photoshop and CSS sheets while the actual coding is a piece of cake.

That was, until now. Check this site out. It has over 400 free CSS temapltes that you can use for your sites. Very cool.

http://www.freecsstemplates.org/css-templates/

I was bored this weekend so I sat down and pimped out my motivation poster generation Facebook app a bit. Originally I opted to leave out any notification spamming from the application, mostly because I hate getting stupid notifications from random applications. But, now that the app is running smoothly, I figure it's time to try to get the user base amped up a bit. So, going forward, if you creat a photo from your friends albums, the owner of the album will get a notification that someone has created a poster with one of their pics. I figure this should get peopler interested in seeing what's generated form their photos.

I also made some updates to the CGI dll that actually generate the motivational poster. It handles small and odd shaped photos much better now without cutting off the text.

Always interested in feedback on the app so if you give it a spin let me know what you think...

Check out the selection of crap in our vending machine at my work...



Yes...that's right...that's Tuna Salad in there...

I entered an internal Microsoft coding competition called Code2Fame a few months ago hosted by the Windows Hom Server(WHS) team. They put up a bunch of cash for prizes and set us free to develope add-ins for the software and submit them for judging. Turns out the stars aligned and my add-in won first place in the individual (single developer) category. Anyway, you can download the add-in from my hobby site here:
http://www.ravennasoftware.com/whswidget

There's also a few WHS enthusiast sites that have decided my add-in is bad-ass enough to host. Those links here: http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/2008/12/18/add-in-whs-widget/ http://mswhs.com/2008/12/18/add-in-whs-widget/

I just finished my first "official" Facebook application. It's called iMotivate and it allows you to create (de)motivational posters from your friends Facebook photo albums.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=86202490267

I hate Facebook apps that spam alot so I made this one very quite. It only spams if you want it to. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

/Eric

Every since I got my Windows Home Server up and running I've been using the machine as a development box for various hobby projects. The Home Server product does a really nice job of giving you an internet presence straight out of your home office, but, there is a major limitation in the actual bandwidth speed you can host your services at. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, my upload speeds sit anywhere from 0kbps (thank you Comcast, my enternal nemesis) to +/- 1000kbps.

So, how do you run a site/service in a performant way with this bandwidth limitation? Well, one solution I've found is to leverage the Amazon.com AWS storage service. There's about 4.6 billion blog posts, many of them good, about this service already so I won't waste keystrokes. Here's a good link to the basics: AWS Service How-To Basically I can host my site at home, but upload all my images to Amazon so that a user pulls "heavy" content from their API leaving only the page source served from my sluggish connection at home. Then, to avoid the typical browser cross domain complaints, you simply add a CNAME in your DNS settings to point directly to "s3.amazonaws.com". So my default homepage image link with say www.ravennasoftware.com/banner.gif. but in reality the host of the file is img.ravennasoftware.com.s3.amazon.com/banner.gif. Sneaky. :)

Anyway, after signing up with Amazon service I decided to build a library that uploads files for me. I must have downloaded 10 other C# Amazon S3 libraries before giving up. The problem? NONE OF THEM BUILD! One of my huge pet peeves is people posting VS projects online that don't freekin' build. They're either missing references, assemblies, or entire source files. Maybe it's the tester in me that makes my blood boil when en example project won't even build. I know they say that good programmers are lazy but that's the wrong kind of lazy. Check your programs before you post them for the rest of us to learn from. Drives me nuts.[/ getting off soapbox]

Anyway, my library posts images as streams, not just text, so it's already a bit more advanced that most of the garbage libraries I found. It's a hybrid of a few other libraries I found so by no means did I write the whole thing myself but at least it builds. Also, since I'm such such a nice guy, I included a console example that consumes the library and uploads a .JPG to a S3 bucket.

Anyway, it's available here from my skydrive. And guess what, it actually builds. :)

"The Empire" is holding a Windows Home Server Add-In development competition (http://Code2Fame for anyone from Redmond) that I entered tonight. In addition to all kinds of nifty backups and storage features, the Home Server product gives you an instant home internet presence which is what my add-in is based on. (details are still super secrect) I'll post a link about details this weekend where you can download my Add-In. Since it's a competition I don't want to give my ingenious idea away....stay tuned for a link to the MSI.

Download MSI

[New! Check out ScottGu's blog on jQuery support for Visual Studio. I think this proves what a great library jQuery really is. ScottGu Blog w/jQuery]

I had the opportunity to attended STPCon Fall 2008 (http://www.stpcon.com/) test conference in Boston last week. The thrilling 6.5 hour plane ride back to Seattle gave me an opportunity to see if I could get one of my favorite jQuery plugins integrated with an ASP.net GridView.

As a starter for this project I hijacked an example that Matt Berseth (http://mattberseth.com/) had listed on his site for building GridViews. He writes a fantastic blog with examples that are far better than I could ever write. I’d highly recommend spending some time on his blog. I’d also suggest hitting up jQuery.com and poking around there as well. The jQuery plugin library is where I found Facebox which is actually a nice Facebox style popup div (fade in, out, static positioning, transparent borders) . It’s proven to be flexible on pretty much every major browser which is why I use it here.

I had two goals for this post. #1 was to show how easy it is to use jQuery (again, if you’re not familiar with jQuery, read up on it. It’s a great script library that has saved me hundreds of dev hours over the years) with ASP.net and #2 to show how to use ASP.net AJAX to build template HTML based on web user controls.

Below is the resulting screen of this post.



The original grid is nothing special, it simply shows a bunch of orders. The coolness starts where I added the details button to the grid that launches the Facebox jQuery plugin that behind the scenes spins up an ASP.net user control and renders the controls HTML to a ScriptService (.ASMX) AJAX call and renders it in the Facebox div.

The JavaScript behind this is super easy. You can see it ALL here.



I won’t go into depth on the in’s and out’s of the code. It would take eons considering it includes ASP.net AJAX, xPath, jQuery, and Facebox.

Feel free to download the project from my Skydrive space here:

I was working on a Windows Home Server widget the other night that will handle some Facebook integration and I came across a cool Facebook feature I hadn't seen before. It appears that you can log into Facebook and generate a profile widget or "badge" to embedd into your pages. It pulls your details (pic, status, feeds) real time from the Facebook back end. Here's an example of mine.





If you have a Facebook account you can create one of these badges here: http://www.new.facebook.com/badges.php

I dig it. Very cool and super easy..

"Well, real estate is always good, as far as I'm concerned." -Donald Trump

I'd have to agree with "The Donald" on this one. Real estate, if anything, is valuable. Especially when your dealing with the UI in your software. One of my favorite components of the AJAX Control Toolkit is the ModalPopupExtender control. There's a quick & dirty explanation and demo [HERE] of this control on the www.asp.net site but I don't feel like the posting does justice to the true functionality of the control.

In this posting I'll shjow how to use the modal popup extender to increase the amount of real estate available on the page, by hooking up a selectable GridView in a modal popop with a form entry on the main page. My goals are to show how the control can extend beyond simple display capabilities and can be used to hook up data between modal form and page form.

You can download the demo projet i whipped up from my Windows Live SkyDrive (Try it! it's free] here:


As you can see below, some form entry items can be very simple in appearance, but complex in the way they are chosen by the user. For example, this user needs to enter a specific product into the form.
Since nobody has a real time database in their head, they must chose. We use the modal popup extender to pop up a product selection form that allow the user to see a sortable list of products along with associated inventory and pricing. All good information that we wouldn't want to waste screen real estate on in our main page. The popup looks as follows.

After a user selects the product, we leverage the ASP.net AJAX cleint side control accessors ($get('contorlname')) to grab the selected product and push it through the DOM into the main page.

That's it. Pretty cake example but i think alot of people overlook this capability.