Pop Art Blog

Such a casual question at party could have terrible consequences when you use weak passwords on the Internet. The best advice is to use a unique password for each account. If you spend all day online like me, plus a little more at home, you've probably garnered somewhere north of 50 or more accounts. The question to ask yourself is which of those accounts are just fine for a hacker to slip into because you used a weak password? Probably none, right? Just to put a little more emphasis on it, let's... Read More...

LINQ is an acronym for Language-Integrated Query and a new feature in v3.5 of the .Net Framework from Microsoft. This new version of Microsoft .Net reached RTM status a couple of weeks ago — this framework is chock full of brilliant things I can use to improve my efficiency and effectiveness on daily tasks here at Pop Art. As one of my favorite features, LINQ helps me write data-driven application even faster than what .Net 2.0 brought to the table. A common example starts with launching Visual Studio... Read More...

Update 11/27/2007 We do quite a bit of Flash video integrated into ASP.NET web applications. For video library application, the best solution from a usability perspective is to use JavaScript to control the flash player. There are some issues that keep popping up with the Flash Player, SwfObject, ExternalInterface, and ASP.NET that we needed to document for the good of the world. Hopefully, we'll save someone the hours that our team took to figure this stuff out. First, we begin with some background... Read More...

I'm working on a solution that requires a special type of chart to visualize results from some elaborate number crunching algorithms. Dundas Chart for .Net has an implementation of the standard polar chart. That's the closest "buy" option I could find and it might very well do the job. I'm a big fan of using existing software when it can solve a significant portion of the problem domain. When you find a good off-the-shelf option, they're often inexpensive and supported ... Read More...

SelecTrucks We launched four new sites this month: Grand Rapids, Little Rock, Miami, and Nashville. Miami is a particularly striking design, heavily inspired by old cigar and fruit boxes. We were playing a bit of catch-up this month, but we managed to get back on our feet with a new production process that's resulting in these sites getting out the door quite a bit faster than before. Detroit Diesel I am very proud of this site. DDC is the first Pop Art site where I've done the template creation... Read More...

Sean Fraser from The Elementary Group Standards reveals that more than 70% of the sites participating in the most recent CSS Reboot don't validate. He provides lots of interesting details, such as the breakdown between XHTML and HTML doctypes, and whether or not the CSS validates. After installing the HTML Validator extention for Firefox, I managed to confirm that while our upcoming Detroit Diesel redesign is valid, none of our DNN sites validate, due to the extra garbage code that DNN inserts into... Read More...

"If I employed a professional architect, I would expect them to design a house that complied with current legislation and industry best practices. I wouldn’t be expected to learn all this information up front, to make sure they did a good job. That’s why you hire professionals." -- Andy Budd, from an interview in .NET magazine I took this gem from an interview Andy Budd had with .NET magazine, discussing web accessability. The larger point he was making here is that accessability should not be the... Read More...

SelecTrucks In the last month, we launched three more SelecTrucks sites ( Chicago , Massachusetts , and Los Angeles ), and got one more to Alpha, but at that point we were two-three weeks behind on the project, depending on which estimate you were looking at, and with a major redesign on my desk for Detroit Diesel, it was clear that we were only going to fall further behind. Thanks to some clever planning by Andrew and Justin, in the last two weeks we came up with an emergency plan of action, and... Read More...

Training I continued my ASP.NET 2.0 training, and have gotten through five chapters in my book, the most recent about theming. Based on this, I gave a presentation to the office titled .NET 101 , which just gave a brief overview of what .NET is and isn't, and an really short demo of how to use Visual Studio 2005. I spent too much time preparing for that, though, and didn't get to cover the original topic Andrew assigned me, talking about themes and skinning in .NET 2.0 - I'll probably pick that up... Read More...

View Rendered Source plugin for Firefox will give you a nice view of your nested HTML elements. In explaining to me yesterday about the CIL yesterday, Andrew linked me to this screencast illustrating that CIL is truly independant of anything else. To prove it, Scott Hanselman compiles the same code in both Mono and Microsoft environments, and runs both assemblies in both environments - and they all work the same. Hence the benefits of CIL. Paul Thurrott has a real axe to grind with Windows Vista... Read More...