SpotGnome.com - Sunday, December 23, 2007

Sunday, December 23, 2007

20+ IE Add-ons For Web Developers & Designers

Taken From: TechDune

Internet Explorer has cool add-ons which make the job of website designers and developers much easier. Here is my list of 20+ excellent Firefox add-ons that every web developer and designer should know about.

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar
Variety of tools for quickly creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages.

IE Watch
Allows you to view and analyze HTTP/HTTPS headers, Cookies, GET queries and POST data.

IE Web Developer
Allows you to inspect and edit the live HTML DOM, evaluate expressions and display error messages, explore source code of Web page and monitor DHTML Event and HTTP Traffic.

IESpy
Allows one to inspect or manipulate the DOM of any IE Web browser control.

DebugBar
Brings new services to surfers and professionals. Surfers: zoom, direct Web search, e-mail page screenshots, and color picker. Developers: view HTML code, cookies, JavaScript, HTTP/HTTPS headers, and miscellaneous information.

Virtual Machine
Allows you to view java applets on Web pages.

Microsoft Fiddler
Logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet.

Tangram Xtml Designer
Visual designer for IE Band Object, activeX Control and .NET user control.

Http Watch
HttpWatch shows you HTTP and HTTPS traffic from within IE allowing you to quickly debug, fix and optimize your Web site.

Embedded Web Browser
The package contains all the programmer need to extend the development of a Web browser.

CGToolbar
Must have tool for CG Artists, Animators, VFX and 3d professionals.

Site Studio 6
Build rich content Web sites, with no HTML skills required.

Haptek Player
An ActiveX control and Netscape Navigator Plugin that allows any webpage or application (with ActiveX support) to include Haptek’s Autonomous characters.

Flash2X Flash Hunter
Save Flash movies from web pages.

iOpus iMacros
Check the same sites every day,data upload, online marketing and functional testing and regression testing Web sites:

Telerik RadToolBar
A flexible component for implementation of tool and button strips, needed in most web applications.

UltraEdit-32
Powerful Text, HEX, HTML, PHP and Programmer’s Editor.

Bytescout Post2Blog
Freeware powerful blog editor for WordPress, Typepad, MovableType and other blogs.

Search Monster
Free Flash Web Directory & Internet Search Engine is the Flash-remoting Web directory instant content for you Web site.

Zend Studio
Encompasses all the development components necessary for the full PHP application.

DbaBar
Integrated toolbar enabling Oracle Database Administrators to browse their databases from within Internet Explorer within minutes after installation.

Explorer Toolbar Maker
lets you create your own Explorer bar from any HTML page, picture, Macromedia Flash file, or Microsoft Office document.

Sunday, December 23, 2007 1:40:15 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

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CSS | Design | Javascript | Programming

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Give Your Body An ID For Better Css Use

Let’s say you want to change the color of your links on just your contact page to red. They are blue on every other page, but it just makes sense for them to be red on your contact page (for some reason). There are a couple ways you could go about this.

You could declare a separate stylesheet for your contact page.
This isn’t ideal, because it’s redundant. If you make any other changes, you’ll always have to make them both on the main stylesheet and the contact page stylesheet.
You could give all those links a unique class on that page.
This isn’t ideal, because it isn’t very semantic and it’s also redundant. Why apply a class to every single link on the page when they really aren’t any different from links elsewhere on the site, contextually speaking?
The best solution is to give your the body a unique ID.
This solves the problem perfectly. You can use the same stylesheet and target just the links you want to with a single CSS selector.

Simple, literally just apply the ID to the body tag:

   ...
</head>

<body id="contact-page">
   ...

Now for our example of making all links on the contact page red instead of blue, just use some CSS like this:

a {
color: blue;
}

#contact-page a {
   color: red;
}

Thursday, December 20, 2007 6:45:41 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

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CSS | Design | Programming

XML Configuration Files Using Serialization

If you want to store configuration information in a XML file, you can easily use serialization to assist you. Instead of using XPath or DOM, and have some code to maintain, simply use the XmlSerializer to retrieve information.

Here's an example of a XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<DatabaseConfig>
<Data>
<DatabaseConfigData
File="Data/Principal.xml"
EntityName="Principal"
Format="Xml" />
<DatabaseConfigData
File="Data/Role.xml"
EntityName="Role"
Format="Xml" />
</Data>
</DatabaseConfig>

And if you have the following classes (C#):

public class DatabaseConfig
{
public DatabaseConfigData[] Data { get; set; }
};
public class DatabaseConfigData
{
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlAttribute()]
public string File { get; set; }
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlAttribute()]
public string EntityName { get; set; }
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlAttribute()]
public string Format { get; set; }
};

All you have to do to load the XML information into the DatabaseConfig class is (C#):

DatabaseConfig GetDatabaseConfig(string file)
{
XmlSerializer serializer =
new XmlSerializer(typeof(DatabaseConfig));
using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(file))
{
object obj = serializer.Deserialize(reader);
return (DatabaseConfig)obj;
}
}

There are a few issues you have to handle when using XML Serialization, wich you can see at my earlier posts about XML, XSD and Serialization.

Thursday, December 20, 2007 6:35:13 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

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.Net | Programming | Serialization | XML

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