Coded - Web Development and Programming Blog

Now that Google’s Web Toolkit is out of beta, I’m looking at ways of integrating it somehow with C# and ASP.NET.

First of all, if you don’t know what Google Web Toolkit is, here’s a quickie: it is a framework for creating Web 2.0 AJAX Web Applications using the Java language, preferably inside an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) such as Eclipse. You then compile this from Java to HTML/JavaScript using the provided tools, and you have a desktop application-like web-page without knowing anything about the W3C DOM, HTML or JavaScript.

What does this have to do with C#?

Well, don’t get me wrong, the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit is amazing, but being able to visually design a page and use JavaScript behaviors and AJAX from inside an IDE is a step forward.

It seems that Nikhil Kothari from Microsoft is working on a C# to JavaScript compiler, called Script#, as a side project of his. Unfortunately, Script# is not currently supported by Microsoft, and they are really losing ground on the AJAX field because of this. They should promote this to a corporate project, I would love having that same power that GWT has, but directly in the Visual Studio IDE. (more…)

While looking around trying to find a theme for this blog I came across the great Green Marinee Theme theme by Ian Main .

The theme has one flaw:

While I’m pretty sure that back in 2005 screen resolutions such as 800×600 were still common, in today’s world the theme is just too narrow for a big screen display, and too much space is lost.

This is especially a problem with a blog such as mine because I frequently use code samples, and lines can get pretty long.

My update:

So, I decided to keep the theme, but I modified it to make it exactly 200 pixels wider. I also added a Latest Posts display to the right navigation bar to improve the overall usability, and more importantly: Widget Support (more…)

Problem:

There is apparently no easy way to generate a transparent GIF image using the .NET framework. Microsoft provided a method in the Bitmap class called MakeTransparent() but it doesn’t work for GIFs, it only seems to work for PNGs.

To create a transparent GIF you need to recreate the color table of the image using Imaging APIs, as detailed in this KB article . Unfortunately, this can be pretty slow for an ASP.NET Web application, and it has a lot of overhead, so I needed an alternative. (more…)

Many people are wondering how SharpSpell is able to provide wavy underline spell checking for regular HTML TEXTAREA elements. Other competitors replace TEXTAREAs with editable IFRAMEs to provide the same functionality, but this is an invasive method that we strongly discourage.

The trick is to try to replicate the content of the TextArea as best as possible using a DIV that is positioned directly underneath the textbox. The TextArea’s background is then set to transparent, and the DIV shows up through it.

We then send the text in the TEXTAREA to the server using AJAX calls, retrieve misspellings and suggestions, and we then recreate the DIV on the client using CSS to display the underlines.

Technorati Tags: SharpSpell, Spell Checker, JavaScript, AJAX

Howdy,

Since everyone seems to be doing it ¹, I decided to start my own blog to write about my day to day experiences with web development and programming.

¹. yes, I realize that I’m starting way too late on the blogging phenomenon timeline, but better late than never right ² ?
². what better way to start a blog than with a cliché?

Who am I?

My name is Andrei Alecu and I’m a C# developer with over 5 years of experience in .NET, owner and lead developer of Tachyon Labs, a company that started as an outsourcing studio but later developed as a .NET component developer and web development company. Tachyon Labs is also the company behind SharpSpell, a real-time spell checker control for ASP.NET and WinForms. (more…)