Rick van den Bosch - Blog

Microsoft DevDays ‘09, I’m attending!

Rick van den Bosch — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:45:23 GMT

Thanks to our friends at Microsoft (and their great BizSpark program) I will be able to attend DevDays ‘09! We won tickets because we updated our company profile and added projects at the Discover Metro site. Normally attending this kind of event is not available to young startups like ours, but now it is!

I’ll be seeing you @ The Hague next week :)

Finally, a way to preview your site in all (important) browsers

Rick van den Bosch — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:22:09 GMT

I just read this great article by Mark Voermans: Expression Web SuperPreview: Look how your site renders in various Browsers

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been waiting for this for a long, LONG time. I’ll give it a go this afternoon and let you know what I think…

Update
This first beta version only allows you to preview your site in different versions of Internet Explorer. We will have to wait for the full feature set until the final release of this tool…

Taken from the SuperPreview site:

This free download will allow you to compare renderings of IE6 with whatever other version of IE you have installed on your machine. If you have installed IE8, you’ll be able to compare IE6, IE8 and IE8 running in IE7 compatibility mode, side-by-side.

Twitter

Rick van den Bosch — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:27:10 GMT

Of course, twitter has been around for quite a while. The popularity of the service is booming, because it is becoming more and more mainstream now. I myself joined somewhere in the end of 2007, when it was still underground… :p

Do you (actively) use twitter? And if so, what’s your account, do you use it on your desktop / laptop / mobile device … and which client(s) do you use?

My Twitter info:

Username: rickvdbosch
Desktop / laptop client: www.twitter.com, Tweetdeck & Twhirl
Windows Mobile device: m.twitter.com & PockeTwit

Article ‘de MediaGarde’ online

Rick van den Bosch — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:52:43 GMT

The article about our company that was placed in two Dutch magazines can now be found on our website (and of course, this one is in Dutch).

Fix available for IE8 asp:menu problem

Rick van den Bosch — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:09:29 GMT

I just read an interesting article on Bertrand Le Roy's blog. The most important information:

It so happens that the menu control is making a bad assumption on what the default value for z-index should be. We debated this at length with the IE team, but it became clear as we did so that they were right and that we were wrong. We had to fix that.

So here it is, the patch for menu is out and you can apply it to build IE8-compatible ASP.NET WebForms sites…

Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB962351/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2294

Windows Vista, Server 2008:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB967535/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2328

(the KB article is not yet ready but will be published shortly)

Read the entire article over here: http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2009/03/23/asp-menu-fix-for-ie8-problem-available.aspx

Our company at frankwatching.com

Rick van den Bosch — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:48:46 GMT

Our company has been mentioned in an article at the (pretty well-known) blog www.frankwatching.com

Read it over here (Dutch): http://www.frankwatching.com/archive/2009/03/13/app-gespot-microsoft-bizspark/

In this mode, command line arguments will not be passed to the executable

Rick van den Bosch — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:45:00 GMT

When trying to pass some command line arguments to a Console Application, I got the following message: "The current project settings specify that the project will be debugged with specific security permissions. In this mode, command line arguments will not be passed to the executable. Do you want to continue debugging anyway?" (see image)

I didn’t run in to this earlier, but yesterday it suddenly popped up. But I did change my zone security, so that might be of some influence… Apparently, this is because of the Debug in Zone settings you can find at the Security tab of your project properties. Deselecting the ‘Enable ClickOnce Security Settings’ checkbox will solve this ‘problem’ for you.

For more information about Code Access Security, take a look over here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z17ceyya.aspx

Installing my laptop after a repair

Rick van den Bosch — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:45:05 GMT

I’m reinstalling my laptop after I got it back from a repair… EMPTY (grrr).

What tools shouldn’t I forget when preparing this laptop to be my development machine? Already have Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Office and the Windows Live tools installed… (and of course I have all kinds of tools at hand from my server like DebugView, Reflector and whatnot)

HowTo: Add a body onload script to a page that uses a MasterPage

Rick van den Bosch — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 05:57:00 GMT

When you use a MasterPage to define the design of your website, you might come across the problem that there is no body element in a web content form. This can be a problem when you want to add an onload script to a specific page. You could of course add the onload on the MasterPage, but you might not want the script to run on every page. There are several workarounds to fix this ‘problem’. The one I used last week was to do the following:

Add the runat=”server” tag on the body in the MasterPage
Add a unique ID on the body in the MasterPage
Add a method to the MasterPage to set the onload for the body. This might look a bit like this (of course you can also have the script for the load be a parameter for the method):
```
   1: internal void SetBodyLoad()
```
```
   2: {
```
```
   3:     MasterPageBody.Attributes.Add("onLoad", "initialize()");
```
```
   4: }
```
Add this line of code in the Page_Load of the page you want to have the onload:
```
   1: ((MasterPageName)Master).SetBodyLoad();
```

This worked for me! Hope this helps.

(Re)surface

Rick van den Bosch — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:49:00 GMT

I know it has been a while since my last post, but I’m about to resurface! I’ve played in a musical the entire month of December and (because of that) we were busy getting our company up and running again in the new year. So now I’ll be developing more and I’ll probably have more things to blog about. So keep posted to see more stuff over here…

For now, here are some interesting articles about Microsoft’s Surface:

Clicking 'Choose items' on the toolbox crashes Visual Studio 2008

Rick van den Bosch — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:25:37 GMT

I've had my current installation for a few months now, and I've used it for development purposes. Today I suddenly encountered an error when trying to add items to the Toolbox. Visual Studio 2008 simply disappeared... No errors, no warnings, it just went away.

After some searching and a lot of trying, I found that deinstalling the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 did the trick. I'm guessing that the installation of a service pack (for either Visual Studio or .NET Framework) changed something somewhere, making Visual Studio disappear into thin air when having PowerCommands installed and clicking the 'Choose items' context menuitem. Anyway: the problem is gone now...!

According to some forumposts I read reinstalling the PowerCommands after this problem was solved does not cause the problem to reappear. I haven't come to testing that yet 'cause I'm working on a deadline here... (Why do these things always happen when you have a deadline...?)

Hope this helps.

Nice new addition to ASP.NET

Rick van den Bosch — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:49:35 GMT

Scott Guthrie posted about a cool new ASP.NET server control: Chart. It can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios.

Read more over here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

New website

Rick van den Bosch — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:01:10 GMT

Our company has (the first draft of) a new website online. We're still working on the content, but the design is now online. Check it out @ www.mediagarde.nl (Dutch).

Inline wrappers & Response.Redirect() == Error

Rick van den Bosch — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:39:34 GMT

While developing a page that was to be used through an inline wrapper, I got an error: "Validation of viewstate MAC failed". This error can usually be resolved by disabling event validation, viewstate encryption or viewstate for the MAC. In my case these solutions did not resolve the issue.

After some testing Response.Redirect appeared to be the cause. I changed the page so it doesn't need the redirect any more, and the problem disappeared. I'll try if ending the response when redirecting will help, but for now I can continue working...

Hope this helps.

I will return...

Rick van den Bosch — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:05:00 GMT

I've been busy the last couple of weeks. Between (the announcements at) all the congresses to follow like PDC and Tech·Ed, all the projects to do, the rehearsal for the musical I'm in in December (Dutch) and the start of our new company (Dutch), I didn't have a lot of time to blog...

Since we expect things to settle down in the next couple of days, I'm expecting to pick up where I left in a week or so. Hang in there, and if you have any subjects you would like me to blog about or any questions you would like answered: let me know. Oh, and try to keep those subjects and/or questions development related. ;)

PS I'm guessing you know why I didn't title this post "I'll be back" :)