I had a problems with my mailserver during past two days and some of emails I received are lost. Since I can't access these emails, I have to ask all those who emailed me in this period to do it again so that I can answer their questions.

Sorry for any trouble caused by this.

- Janko

I saw that many bloggers share great resources they discover. Since that is helping me a lot, I'll do the same here. There are 16 sites and articles about web development and web design I'd like to share with you.

Web design

CSS Decorative Gallery
This great article on Web Designer Wall shows how to decorate your images and photo galleries without editing the source images. It uses just a <span> tag and an image to create overlay effect. Don't miss this extraordinary article!

Continue reading

In my previous article I wrote about an importance of handling different message types properly. In this article we'll create a simple ASP.NET user control and apply CSS styles shown in previous article.

Let me explain why we need a user control. If you want every aspx page to support same notification logic, you will need a same functionality on each page. Thus, a user control emerges as logic solution. This can be placed on each aspx page or on a Master Page if you use it. This way you can render any information or an error in the same manner on any place in your application. You can, for example, use this control to show your error messages.

Continue reading

Can you believe this: Few days ago I went to my bank to check my credit score with the Credit Bureau. The bank official typed in my personal data and sent a request. Web application responded by displaying a yellow message box with an exclamation icon saying that data processing is still in progress. He checked several more times, but he didn't notice that at one moment the message changed to "Account available". But the message box hasn't changed. He continued to check a few more times and eventually he realized that the request was successful.

I don't know what was in the minds of developers and designers who created this application, but it certainly wasn't the user. This poor bank official was really frustrated. I can't imagine what the rest of the application looks like.

Continue reading

In a previous post "Partial page rendering", we have looked into ASP.NET Ajax basics - partial rendering using UpdatePanel control. In this article you will see another way to perform partial page rendering and that is - by calling a ScriptService from JavaScript.

Let's see why UpdatePanels are not always a good solution. UpdatePanels are very simple and it is very easy to turn your classic aspx pages into ajax-enabled pages. However, this has its own downsides:

1. Each request includes full ViewState that travels to the server and back to the client
2. Full web page lifecycle still remains
3. The size of the response is still large since the whole portion of HTML markup is rendered

When developing complex applications, this could be a point for potential blunders. Much more optimization can be achieved by putting ScriptServices into the game.

Continue reading