Arnold Matusz's Blog

Choosing the right type of menu for a website is not easy at all. The ASP.NET Menu Control is definitely NOT a good starting point due to the horrendous markup it renders, nor is it good for SEO because of the Markup/Content ratio, neither can it be easily styled.

Of course there is the CSSFriendly Control Adapters project that started back in 2006, which made the the ASP.NET Menu (and many other ghastly markup rendering controls) render beautiful <div> based markup. In the case of the Menu it rendered <div> and <ul>-<li> type markup which is probably the most widely spread technique used for creating menus known to mankind. » 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...