Arnold Matusz's Blog

LINQ is one feature I could not live without anymore. It is always a pain to work on projects using older technologies. The gap between .NET 1.1 (VS.NET 2003) and .NET 2.0 (VS.NET 2005) was huge and it was difficult to develop anything in ASP.NET v1.1 after you got your hands on .NET 2.0. But the gap between .NET 3.5 SP1 coupled with Visual Studio 2008 and the prior version is far bigger.

There is LINQ, LINQ to SQL, Lambda Expressions, the Entity Framework (and allot more) which simply boost your development speed. Anyone who hasn’t tried these yet: you definitely need to have a go! » Continue reading ...

jQuery got so close to me lately that I can see myself adding the scripts to my project almost unconsciously. The thing is, jQuery is very useful for me, in almost all situations and it has been a do or die enhancement for all my project since I first put my hands on it.

Of course while using it, you encounter few situations which need a bit of research to solve, mostly when you are trying to combine it with some other technologies like: UpdatePanels and ASP.NET Ajax. For instance there are many situations when I would like to run some jQuery magic based on some decision that I make on the server side. » Continue reading ...

Most web designers and developers who target all sorts of browsers will ask the same question: Why do people still use Internet Explorer 6? I mean there is nothing obvious in using Internet Explorer 6 in 2009. I hardly observe myself checking for updates of software products I use on my computer, I’m doing it subconsciously.

I’m an exception, you may say here because I’m a web developer and I’m using this stuff daily. Well … NO!!! Everyone should update their software because time is passing by quickly, everything evolves around us, so does computer technology, so does software and so do the standards. » Continue reading ...

When the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit first came out with the CalendarExtender, I just loved it. That smooth transition when navigating from month to month or year to year really won me over. I’ve also loved how I could use it as a simple ASP.NET Control by integrating it in my pages and using from my code-behind.

I took a look at the jQuery UI DatePicker widget (from an ASP.NET Developers point of view), which again completely won me over. What was it this time? Well … the speed, the options, the themes, the frequent updates, the ease of integration, etc. » Continue reading ...

It’s a long time since I’ve last been out for a little photo shooting. It’s probably not the photography that is so desirable, I think it’s more the fact that I get to disconnect from all the daily matters, from programming, from all the new information that arises daily from nowhere.

I never seem to get tired, I always feel like I have enough reserve to do anything. I never feel I need to get a good sleep or that I would like to do something else. I always feel good in my little world of … hmm, there would be too many to enumerate here. Anyway I always feel myself occupied with keeping up with the latest technologies, the latest trends, programming languages and techniques, etc. » Continue reading ...

This post may be most relevant to those who haven’t had the chance to work with jQuery yet. Lately there is a great hype around jQuery, very many people talk about it, very many write excellent example but most of them target more advanced users.

jQuery is a lightweight (~19KB Minified and Gzipped) JavaScript library which easily enables us to traverse the DOM (Document Object Model), handle events, animate elements, and do asynchronous requests (AJAX – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). » Continue reading ...

I’ve been using Firefox for quite allot of time now, and I got used to many extensions I could not live without in the day to day development life. Firebug is one of these. When somebody told me: You can’t call yourself a web developer unless you have Firebug installed, I thought this was a bit to hard. But after I faced many situations where Firebug was the definitive tool, I really think everybody should use it.

I often have to do some work on websites in other browsers (Ex: IE – eeeek I know). This is when I really feel I like and I miss Firebug. I really love to see how asynchronous requests are performing (network monitor), I really love how you can inspect and edit DOM elements, I really love to edit the DOM on the fly and see the effects instantaneously, I really love to edit the CSS on the fly and see the effects, you guessed it: instantaneously. I also love that it has got a JavaScript Console where I can test my jQuery magic on the fly. Then there is the fact that it logs JavaScript errors and I also need to mention I love that I can debug JavaScript with it. » Continue reading ...

In my last post I blogged about how jQuery $(document).ready() and ASP.NET Ajax asynchronous postbacks can be made to behave well together. The issue is that normally $(document).ready() is called when the DOM is ready to be manipulated. But this doens’t happen after an ASP.NET Ajax asynch postback occurs.

This means that the initial jQuery bindings won’t be automatically available after the asynchronous postback is over. I underline “automatically” here because my last post describes more possibilities, how this issue can be worked around. » Continue reading ...

I’ve been a bit skeptic about the thought of combining ASP.NET Ajax with jQuery, partly because I didn’t really know what the impact was going to be. But jQuery is very fast, very appreciated throughout general opinion, there are extremely many plugins available for free, writing your own plugins only requires little JavaScript knowledge (opposed to writing your own extender in .NET, like controls in the AjaxControlToolkit).

To be sincere, there is a very short learning curve so there is no reason for not trying jQuery. I’ve tried with regular web applications, but when I coupled jQuery with ASP.NET Ajax on little niggle stood out. » Continue reading ...

Syntax highlighting code excerpts in our blog posts are visually pleasing. I prefer a nicely highlighted piece of code because it’s allot easier to read and comprehend rather than plain and simple lines of code.

It’s not just a coincidence that our development environments do syntax highlighting as standard, and it’s not just a coincidence that high level development tools like Visual Studio do “auto formatting” of our code, by making indentations, moving begin and end markers, etc. » Continue reading ...