It always seemed a little strange to me that the new Expression Web and Blend tools would not be available under a MSDN Subscription ... after all, they are still development tools at heart.

Well Microsoft is, from now, adding these two tools to the MSDN Premium subscribtion, which was apparently inspired by customer feedback!

As announced on Somasegar's WebLog:

"Expression Blend and Expression Web are intended to help creative professionals collaborate with developers to create rich user experiences for the Web, Windows Vista applications and beyond, which means we need to make sure both tools are readily available to our developer community."

The offer excludes Expression Design and Expression Media as they "... are not directly intended for application development, we feel they fall outside the current scope of MSDN Subscriptions". Fair enough.

I've just fixed a strange bug I was having when comparing a web page in IE and Firefox. The page simply had a single textbox, and a button. By default, in accordance with W3C standards, both browsers will post-back to the server when the user hits <Enter> from within the textbox.

Just the behaviour I wanted, except that when the post-back occurs from IE, the button's event handler does not get triggered on the server!! Very strange ... but this article on 4guysfromrolla.com gives a great explanation.

Basically, IE does not post-back a fully serialised form if there is only one textbox on the page! The server does not know what triggered the post-back and so cannot call the correct server-side event handler. The workaround? ... add another textbox to the form (but just make it hidden!).

This is true for IE6 and IE7 ...

I wanted an animated give for an AJAX application I am working on and was struggling to find anything until I stumbled upon http://www.ajaxload.info. Very simple site (work in progress?) but it gave just enough options to create just the "Wait Image" I needed.

I've looked at used some of the online tools from 37signals, such as Writeboard, Ta-da List and Backpack, and so I was interested to learn that they've written a book about their philosophy and company ideas. The basic theme is how to start out in a new technology venture, using the contrarian approach of providing less, releasing early, and above all - staying small.

"All the cash, all the marketing, all the people in the world can't buy the agility you get from being small."

The book is available online here. You can also pay US$19 to get a copy in pdf or US$29 for a paperpack copy. The online content is exactly the same as the printed version, which I'm actually contemplating purchasing ... I always find it easier to make my notes directly in the book :)

"Keep it small. Keep it simple. Let it happen."

I've been meaning to look more into building a Sidebar Gadget in Vista for a while now. I just happened to come across a post from Nikhil Kothari's blog entitled Authoring Sidebar Gadgets in C#. I don't really have the time to the follow longer, in-depth tutorials you see around and was interested to see how his Script# project allowed the use of C# when building a Gadget. Worth a closer look I think.

As your solution grows, the number of assemblies you have will undoubtedly grow too. Updating the version numbers of all those assemblies by their projects AssemblyInfo.cs files can be a hassle. However, there is a way to change the version in just one file, but have that change affect all project assemblies!

By using a “link” file in your projects, you can include a file from a shared location that contains only the version information.

• Add a new file named VersionInfo.cs
• Add to this file only the version information from an existing AssemblyInfo.cs file
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• Add VersionInfo.cs as a solution item

Now, for each project that you wish to include this version information:

• Select “Add Existing Item…” on the project menu
• Browse to VersionInfo.cs file
• Click the down arrow on the “Add” button and choose “Add as Link”
  
  The file will have the shortcut icon when you look at the project files.
  
• Remove any version information from existing AssemblyInfo.cs

When then assembly is built it will essentially have the combined attribute values from the AssemblyInfo.cs and VersionInfo.cs file.

Now you only have to change the version in one place and all projects will get it :-)

When using the GridView, you can specify an “EmptyDataTemplate” to display when there is no data specified in the DataSource. This is great, but the problem from my point of view is that the column headers are not displayed. I would like them to be displayed, even if there is no data.

In my search for the solution I found the following article which explains how to achieve this result by overriding CreateChildControls:

http://www.dotnetslackers.com/GridView/re-27953_Displaying_GridView_When_No_Data_Exists.aspx

To support Web Farms (multiple machines) or Web Gardens (multiple processors), changes to the ASP.NET configuration will need to be made. Thankfully this is just configuration; no code changes would need to be made.

The main thing to be aware of when setting up for a farm/garden is that a user's request can hit any processor or server. As such, the user's session needs to be available across the entire farm/garden and so session state cannot be held locally in memory, which is the default configuration.

The following links give further details on what can be involved:

Session-State modes: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178586.aspx
Web Garden Model: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/dngrfTheASPNETHTTPRuntime.asp

I was forwarded the following link to a pretty comprehensive list of online generators.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2006/11/09/online-generators/

It seems there’s one for any occasion. I particularly like the ColorBlender.com which will give you a colour matching palette based on a preferred starting color. Perfect for those of us not trained in Graphical Arts to produce something aesthetically pleasing!