Sunday, March 29, 2009
I just got back from the Mix '09 conference in Las Vegas, and it was so much better than I expected! For being a Microsoft sponsored conference mostly focusing on .NET and other MS technologies, there was about 50% Mac users there and most of these people were designers. It was a really nice mix (haha?) of designers and developers. I've got some photos from my trip up here on Flickr.
I think one of the best things they do is put up ALL the session videos online for free! There's some really valuable information in these!
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09 (also you can view past years MIX sessions at http://videos.visitmix.com )
Here's some highlights I'm going to recommend:
- Web Form Design - absolutely one of the best sessions I attended. Watch this video! He talks about why forms suck and what we as designers can do to help the process along. Very very well done and extremely informative. As soon as this session was over I went and bought the speakers book.
- The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures - Anotehr great session, but not necessarily directly related to web design. It's on how to get ideas out of your head and communicate them properly to people via a whiteboard of napkin.
- Measuring Social Media Marketing - If you or your company does any kind of social media marketing, this is a great one.
The following sessions I did not attend, but they seem great:
And finally, for any other ASP.NET or Visual Studio users, These are somre great previews of what's coming soon!
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Once a year my company, AppRiver, allows me to attend one work related conference and my for first year working here I’ll be attending MIX ‘09 in Las Vegas! Until recently, this wasn’t even a conference I’ve heard of, so don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it before either. Mix is an annual conference for web designers and developers with a heavy focus on Microsoft technologies (also sponsored by Microsoft).
So, I’m headed out to Vegas on Monday the 16th and expect to learn a lot and have a blast doing so for about a week. I’m scheduled for a few different sessions that I’m excited about attending, and there’s tons and tons of sessions to attend. Need I even mention this all takes place in Las Vegas? I took a trip out there about 3 years ago with my dad and had a blast, so I fully expect to have a great time when I’m not doing web related stuff. I know the grand canyon and the Hoover Dam are fairly close, and it would just be a dream come true to see either one of these (or both!).
I’ll hopefully be fully armed with my laptop and camera where ever I go, and a goal I’m going to try and set for myself is to do a daily photo-blog of what’s going on at the conference and anything else I can take pictures of. It’s my first conference and I’m usually pretty trigger happy, so expect lots of photos.
More info about Mix here: http://2009.visitmix.com
Posted by Chris Barr on 03/12 at 09:33 PM
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Friday, January 30, 2009
At work we develop in the ASP.NET framework (with VB), which is powerful but it has a lot of oddities - especially for me writing all the markup and CSS. My biggest gripe has been with the ID property of any element. You give it an ID, and then ASP all assign it a different one when it renders! For example, lets say I write the following code:
<asp:Panel runat="server" id="MyPanel">Hello</asp:Panel>
What actually gets rendered to the page may look something like this depending on how many Masterpages and controls its been nested inside of:
<div id="ctl00_ctl00__userMessage_uxUpnMessage_MyPanel">Hello</div>
Why the long ID Microsoft? I understand that sometimes ASP will need these unique ID's for forms and postbacks, but in reality for many things (especially things that only relate to page structure or style) you don't need this unique ID, you only need the ID you gave it! Today I was messing around with exactly how to do this and I came across a solution! Check out the VB code below:
Protected Overrides Sub OnPreRender(ByVal e As EventArgs)
Me.MyPanel.ID = String.Empty
Me.MyPanel.Attributes.Add("id", "MyPanel")
MyBase.OnPreRender(e)
End Sub
So just put that as the last step of your VB code, and it renders the exact way it should now - with the ID you told it to have in the first place. It's a bit of a hack, or a way to trick ASP into doing what I want, but ti works great. I'm sure there's a better way to implement this, or perhaps even extend certain elements to have a RenderID="MyNewIDName" property that would set the ID property from the front end instead.
Anyway, that's my big discovery for today. Hope it can help someone else out who was as frustrated as I was.
Posted by Chris Barr on 01/30 at 11:08 AM
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