News

We have just released a minor update to Engage: Rotator, our content rotating module for DotNetNuke.  This fixes issues some folks were seeing where content would "jump" a bit when it was rotating.  If you don't already have it, pick up a copy from our Buy Now page on Engage Modules.

Version 1.1.2 of Engage: Employment has been released to the web.  It is currently available from EngageModules.com, and will be available from SnowCovered before too long.  See the Downloads page of EngageModules.com for instructions on how to get access to the new version there if you have purchased from another website.

Last weekend most of us from Engage went down to enjoy the Tulsa Tech Fest.  While the individual sessions were hit or miss, the keynotes were excellent and got us all excited to start using Silverlight, and we all definitely had fun together.

On Wednesday of this week, we made our first public release of Engage: Rotator on Engage Modules.  If you've wondered about that snazzy looking rotating banner on the front page of Engage Software, this is it.  This is a product that has evolved over the last few months from the needs of various clients, and has now come to the point where we've invested a lot of time in making it user friendly and configurable.  Have a look on our demo site and see if this could help add a nice touch to your site.

Have you ever wanted to change what DotNetNuke says on it's controls? Change "Register" to "Join Us" or "Terms of Use" to "Member Agreement"? It's easier than you think.

It often happens that I would like to know the size of an image so that I can smartly resize it in various situations. Until today, I had never been quite able to get everything that I needed to get it done.

Using a DropDownList, RadioButtonList, CheckBoxList, or other similar control as a trigger of an Update Panel (rather than in the Update Panel itself) will cause the initial value not to fire a SelectedIndexChanged event.

If you're anything like me, you've been greatly looking forward to Visual Studio Orcas, with its enhanced support for JavaScript.  You might also not know that some of that functionality is available to us currently in Visual Studio 2005.  It's not exactly easy to setup and use, but once you get it going, it can really help out when you're trying to figure out why, for example, all elements on your page suddenly disappear, only in IE.

When developing code for .NET, there are a number of attributes that you can define on parts of your code to make your job easier while you are debugging. These are new in .NET 2.0, and part of the System.Diagnostics namespace.

Yesterday, version four of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK was released (as noted in this blog post, V4 VS SDK Targeting VS 2005 Released!).  While I don't plan on developing any Visual Studio add-ins or extensions, I noticed that the SDK included SandCastle, which is a tool to build documentation based on your inline XML comments.  If you're working with large or distant groups, it can help to compile some of your work into a readable API document, and SandCastle will do that for you.  You'll need to go to http://www.sandcastledocs.com/ to get an automation script or GUI, since this release doesn't include any interface.  Get it here: Visual Studio 2005 SDK version 4.0.

The Rating control from the AjaxControlToolkit has been of use to use as we work on some of our websites that use our Engage: Publish module.  However, we needed to make a change to the style of the container around the Rating in order to change a background image from saying "Please rate!" to "Thanks for rating."  We tried wrapping it in an UpdatePanel to get at the CssClass, but we couldn't get it to react.  Eventually, we got the following javascript to work (which needs to be declared after divRating is declared).

Since the 1.0 release of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, we've been making use of the new functionality offered us through AJAX, both from the core extensions and through the AjaxControlToolkit.  However, we've run into a road block a number of times when we're tried to use the new UpdatePanel control to add some AJAX responsiveness into our web pages.  In short, we hadn't ever gotten it to work.