DotNetSurfers Blog

Infusion is at it again, they are organizing a sleepless roadshow after the success of the Sleepless in NY sharepoint weekend, which i was fortunate enough to be a part of. Check out this video from last time. I highly recommend these events to any sharepoint/silverlight developers or anybody looking to add learn about these technologies.
This event is sponsored by .Net Rocks and will cover Washington D.C, Atlanta, Dallas, L.A, Silicon Valley and Chicago. And the goodies they give out to participants and winners are just awesome. You have to be there to believe it.

-Latish Sehgal

 Ok!! So everbody and their mother have already blogged about the new MVC Framework released with Asp.Net 3.5 Extensions preview 1 week ago, but i just got time to try it out. Its pretty different from the WebForms model, and is not meant to replace it in any way. Its an alternative that promotes test driven design and makes it easy to unit test your code. As per ScottGu, it enforces a clear separation of concerns within applications. In other words, it makes it harder for the developer to make bad design decisions, because it encourages you to keep your layout (view) separate from the data access code (model) and business logic (controller). Also, the URLs in an MVC point to the Controller and not to the view, so it gives you much more control over the URLs in your application. You also do not have the file extensions as part of the url by default, since you are pointing to the Controller class, and you can specify the method (ControllerAction) to call along with the parameters in the URL itself.  The  controller invokes the appropriate view which renders the html.
 
 To learn more about Asp.Net MVC framework, check out the following resources:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottGuMVCPresentationAndScottHaScreencastFromALTNETConference.aspx
MVC Part1
MVC Part2
MVC Part3
MVC Part4

Its quite a handful for a 1 week old technology preview framework, isn't it!!

-Latish Sehgal

 Sharepoint 2007 allows user targeting at the individual web part level. You can control what each user sees by default by enabling audience targeting on the control in its Settings, and then configuring the user groups that should see the web part under Advanced 'Settings->Target Audiences' .


You should remember though, that this only removes the control from the default view, and can still be accessed via the 'View All Site Content' link on the site. To completely remove access to a control for a user group, you should also configure the 'Permissions for the List' under 'Settings->Permissions'.

-Latish Sehgal

linky
Yay for javascript intellisense..

 Trying to decide whether to design a fixed,relative or fluid layout, and what resolution to target can drive you nuts. There are too many factors to consider - popular opinions, statistics, what others are doing...
 So how to decide what to target? Simple. Look at what similar successful sites are doing; If we look at facebook and orkut, it turns out that both are using fixed width layouts. That actually makes sense, because you would want more control over the presentation in a social networking site, it's a major factor in drawing the users. Facebook is conservative and keeps the width to 799px at all times, therefore ensuring most of its users do not end up with the annoying horizontal scrollbar (unless they resize the browser window). Orkut targets higher resolutions and has a minimun width of 920px and maximum width of 1003 px.
 According to W3Schools Browser display statistics, 14% of the users still use a resolution of 800x600, with the rest using bigger screen sizes. The application size should depend on your perceived audience, of course, and I would like 100% of my audience to be comfortable with the site. So, right now, targetting 800x600 screen size seems sensible or not a bad idea at least. Also, most of my colleagues with insanely large monitors and resolutions always resize their browsers and open multiple applications in parallel. So, targetting a smaller resolution should not lead to a lot of squinting.
This is the first post in a series on "Building My Own Social Networking site", i hope to write many more as i progress with my site, which i work on in my spare time.

Note: You can measure window sizes using JRScreen Ruler, or alternatively you can examine the css of a site using the excellent Firebug AddOn
for Firefox.