June 2009

On a current project I had to animate the "opening" of an absolute-positioned div (initially hidden) from the top-right to its full dimensions (917x228). That means animating the width (from 0px to 917px), the offset left (from its initial value to 917px less than that) and the height (from 0px to 228px).

If you want to do Friendly Urls or other things in an Agility website that requires you to add an Http Module, you should do it by extending Agility.Web.HttpModules.ExtensibleAgilityHTTPModule.

Normally, if a SSIS package is scheduled to run in a SQL agent job using a proxy user and this proxy user has permission to access a network drive, then there will be no permission problem for accessing files on the network drive from the control flow items in the SSIS package. However, the Bulk Insert Task item apparently works another way.

Bing has released a toolkit and API for displaying search results on 404 (page not found) error pages.

If you get a 404 on a WCF web service (SVC) in IIS7, you may need to re-register WCF on the machine.

Do you want to get rid of the dashed border that appears when you click on links, flash controls, etc? Try this!

This nifty utility allows you to place a talking avatar on your site to guide your visitors through the functionality and navigation.

Talk about thinking outside the box.  This is one of the coolest TV ads I've seen a while.  It provides instant value to the consumer while creating the perfect association with the product.

Sometimes we use a different domain based on the language of the site, but technically the site code is the same on both domains.

In looking into what is involved with customizing google maps icons - the markers that appear as points on the map - there are a bunch of properties that need to be tweaked to ensure that they react appropriately to the user's actions.  Trying to perfect these properties could entail a lengthy session of guess, check, refine.

Here's a great way to verify that your HTML code is an exact, pixel perfect match to the designs provided.

The Google Translator Toolkit combines automated translation with 'crowdsourcing' so actual people can review and edit machine generated translations.

Microsoft has released a toolkit that will simplify basic SEO tasks like making it easier to build a site index and robots.txt file.

I've recently joined Twitter and find it quite useful for staying on top of the latest tech news and for sparking ideas from my friends and colleagues.  Still haven't tried it?  See if TIME Magazine can convince you of its value.

Amazon S3 is a great way to store media files.  It can be slow though so if speed is needed it should be used with Amazon Cloudfront.

This is the update to the VS 2008 Database Edition and adds support for SQL Server 2008 and no longer requires a local database server to operate.  It was released back in April, but I just realized I needed it when I installed SQL Server 2008 on my local development machine, and found out that the base install does NOT support SQL Server 2008.

This is a process that is becoming more and more important as we offload a ton of our page processing to .js files as opposed to HTML files processed by the server.  This is because we are doing more client templating and logical processing on the client and not on the server.