Thought I mention it here…

On our local biggest Microsoft conference - WinDays 2007 - I am doing a presentation this year on an interest topic of writting client scripts and components with ASP.NET AJAX. I am excited to see the reaction of people when they see the possibilities with client side scripting with ASP.NET AJAX so I am glad this session went through the conference content team.

You can see more info on the conference here:

http://www.microsoft.com/croatia/windays/english/default.mspx

or (in Croatian) more info on my session (see under the “Web platform” section):

http://www.microsoft.com/croatia/windays/sadrzaj_teme.mspx


Also, if you have any questions on ASP.NET, DotNetNuke, Sharepoint, or any other area in which I can assist you, you can find me in the “Ask the Experts” lounge of the conference - in the area for ASP.NET:

http://www.microsoft.com/croatia/windays/CentarZnanja.mspx


Hope I see you there… Cheers!

In the past (especially when I still didn’t know both C# and VB.NET) I’ve long looked at code converters.

Back then I remember only finding one at ASPAlliance and some other as some xyz site. As they both didn’t work quite good (actually only did for simple scenarios) I’ve forgotten about such things till a few years later.


So, recently (a year or so ago) I stumbled upon a development tool for .NET called Sharp Develop @ http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/ which besides being a IDE also had a great converting functionality which worked pretty well (been using it since then when I am too lazy to convert code manually).

Then this morning (the point of this post) I came over a new tool from Telerik “Code Converter” which for now works only online (one bad side currently) @ http://converter.telerik.com/. It works well for now (although didn’t try it for real, only on one class I’ve pasted from a recent project), but I still find some things lacking (mentioned them on their forums). I would definetly like to see:

1. Integration as an addin in Visual Studio - would provide easy access to converting code (something quite frankly that Microsoft should have done already)
2. Integration as a “Paste as…” option in Visual Studio - again… the point is easy access and usability (again… something Microsoft should have done with the tool)

Both of these things would raise the bar and would finally take a tool like this into main stream which would in turn help (especially novice) developers to use it more easily.

When making my implementation of ASP.NET AJAX for DotNetNuke and later Ajax Control Toolkit, naturally first control I’ve tried was the tab control from the Ajax Control Tookit (naturally to me because I’ve waited for some time to use it).

But when the control had rendered on the screen it had problems and looked like this:

After digging into the problem, I’ve found that it was related to one of the tab control’s css styles having a wrong height. To remedy it (the problem was seen only when implementing it in DotNetNuke, in normal ASP.NET for some reason it works ok), I’ve overriden the style in my .ascx control like this:

<style type=”text/css”>

.ajax__tab_xp .ajax__tab_tab {
height: 21px;
}