SolutionBot

The Legacy

I recently worked on a legacy asp web application that had been hacked. The problem? The programmers didn’t think that hackers would/could attack them. This seems to be a prevalent problem in the development world. Developers have a zebra mentality. ‘Ok, we all have to cross the river, but if we all jump in at the same time hopefully I won’t be the one to get eaten’. If you don’t see the flaw in this logic please do not waste any more time with this article and go have loads of fun playing Click the Button. If you do see the logic continue on.

The Publish/Subscribe model allows you to build loosely coupled applications in which an event is ‘fired’ and subscribing functions ‘respond’. This can be very powerful, if implemented correctly, and provides your application with more scalability.

"I don’t know how in the world you can sit in front of a computer screen and stare at weird words and symbols all day!" is a question I’ve heard many a time from many a friend. It can, and is, mentally exhausting after a few hours. And of course then there are deadline days; crunch time; The day which all the work is due all at the same time and you have to stay till 6 AM (whew). So how do we just sit and type syntax all day?

Site maps are important tools for webmasters to have some sort of control over how their sites are indexed. This doesn’t give ultimate control by any stretch of the imagination. Google and yahoo will still index websites the way they will, a site map is more like a webmasters ‘tip’ to crawler bots to tell them what pages they should crawl, how often they change and what kind of priority the crawler bots should give to certain pages.

Debugging is something that all mortal programmers must do. Any programmer who claims that his code is perfect the first time he writes it is #1 Lying #2 A legendary immortal Greek god of Programming. I for one am not a legendary immortal Greek god of Programming so I need methods to debug the code that I write. In this article, I’ll be talking about methods of debugging Javascript in Visual Studio and Internet Explorer. Part II will be debugging Javascript in Eclipse and Firefox.

Most browsers are similar in the sense that they all have a javascript engine and a css engine that processes css code in your style sheets or inline in your html and the javascript engine typically has access to most if not all of the css properties. Browsers differ in what css properties are available to be modified in javascript. Here is a quick piece of code that creates a list of all css properties are available to the javascript engine in your browser. The list will differ depending on what browser your using.

When thinking about optimizing your web application, something to consider is javascript and css compression. There are a few good javascript and css compressors, one you can use for free online is http://www.creativyst.com/Prod/3/. However these can obfuscate your code so that it isn’t readable. Sometimes that is the goal, but for projects in which you want to keep your code readable there are other methods to keep your code smaller.

There are many date add methods online. I recently needed a simple bulletproof method for dateadd and didn’t like any of the ones i found online so i figured i would actually sit down and write one ;). Here’s what I came up with.

I’ve recently been working on a large javascript based application that does a lot of DOM manipulation. There are literally thousands of loops throughout the application that traverse the DOM and make changes in some way shape or form. The application has been running slow of late and we’ve been working through small ways to optimize performance. One of the things that I noticed is that literally all of our loops were written the following way:

CSS has many useful ways of getting the element you want to style. Most of us have seen using the ‘#’ sign to select your element by id or using ‘.’ to select an element with a specific class name. However there is a lesser known yet very helpful selector. CSS2 allows you to select an element based on any attribute using ‘[]‘ brackets.