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Last weekend I was in Cambridge, Mass. for New England GiveCamp 2012, the third of annual meet-ups that match technical and design people with nonprofit organizations that need their help.

The Charles River Esplanade is on the left. Hatch Memorial Shell and Teddy Ebersol's Red Sox Fields are in the foreground.

My cause was The Esplanade Association, an organization that cares for the Charles River Esplanade Park.

The Charles River Esplanade Park is the Boston-side green space along the river, from the Museum of Science to the Boston University Bridge. While it’s owned and managed by the state of Massachusetts, TEA (which has to be the coolest acronym possible for a Boston-based group) exists to organize people to help protect and care for the park.

Much of their work involves organizing volunteers to clean up the park several times each year. TEA also holds a number of programs in the park — yoga, Zumba, dances and the like — and runs several fund raising projects.

They came to GiveCamp, initially, looking for a way to better coordinate singing up groups and individuals for cleanup days.
Continue reading: TEA Time: New England GiveCamp 2012 Recap »

Previously, I blogged about “Displaying Selected YouTube Video Thumbnails On An ASP.NET Web Forms Page,” when you know the video IDs of the thumbnails you want to hyperlink.

A reader recently asked me how to hyperlink YouTube video thumbnails based on searching for a keyword. I promised to address that, so here goes.

Interestingly enough, searching the YouTube Data API is accomplished in a REST-like manner quite similar to the methodology I used for shortening URLs in ASP.NET via the bit.ly API.

• Form a simple request URL to the YouTube Data API that contains the appropriate search parameters;
• Use a WebRequest to send that URL to Google, which returns an XML document with results;
• Use WebResponse to dump that stream into an XmlDocument;
• Use XPath and XmlNode‘s SelectNodes method to recursively get the thumbnails from each entry; and
• Bind up a pile of Hyperlink controls, which are added dynamically to a Panel control.

Sounds more complicated than it actually is. Let’s do it.
Continue reading: Displaying Selected YouTube Data API Thumbnails On A Web Page Via ASP.NET Web Forms »

I received a kind email recently from a reader, thanking me for my article titled “Retaining Values In A Form Following PHP Postback And Clearing Form Values After Successful PHP Form Processing“.

He also asked how he could use the YouTube Data API to search for videos by keyword; display thumbnails of those videos on an ASP.NET page; then either hyperlink to those videos on YouTube, or display them on his page via the YouTube Player API.

I’ll address that specific question in an upcoming post. First, I want to show how to do what the questioner asks if you already know the video IDs of specific YouTube videos you want to show on a page.

If you know the video ID(s) for the YouTube videos you want to display on a page, you can call them directly from YouTube’s image servers, thanks to a predictable URL and naming scheme, and hotlinking.
Continue reading: Displaying Selected YouTube Video Thumbnails On An ASP.NET Web Forms Page »

A lesson I learned the hard way today, while installing aspell support for Notepad++:

If you’re installing Kevin Atkison’s English dictionary for aspell, you need to disable your antivirus program (at least, if you’re using Avast, as I am).

If you don’t, the dictionary installer can’t write its unpacked files to disk and will fail silently. As in, it just plain closes, and Notepad++ will report something along the lines of “Aspell and/or dictionaries are missing.”

FYI.

Also, if you haven’t heard of Notepad++, you should check it out. It’s an open-source, GPL-licensed Win32 text editor. (It runs perfectly fine in Win64).

Highly extensible via plugins, translated to all kinds of languages, exceptionally powerful, with support for syntax highlighting in just about every programming language under the Sun and syntax checking for a fair number of them, too.

It’s pretty much the only tool I use any more for Web coding, even when writing ASP.NET Web Forms. (I still use Visual Studio for some Windows coding. But Notepad++ has completely replaced Dreamweaver.)

All links in this post on delicious: http://delicious.com/dougvdotcom/disable-windows-antivirus-when-installing-aspell-english-dictionary

Some time ago I promised a formspring anon I would do a tutorial on parent / child DropDownList controls in ASP.NET Web Forms. At long last, I’m delivering. (From here on out, I will use “DropDownList” and “select list” interchangeably.)

I’ll be demonstrating two different ways to accomplish this task, as well as a few variations on the first: First, binding with only SqlDataSource controls, which is by far the easiest way to proceed and will suffice for about 90 percent of applications; second, using code behind and CompareValidator controls, to cover all possible roadblocks.

Some notes before we proceed:

• I’ll use the ZIP Code database I’ve been using for a while as the back-end data. I also have a separate table of USPS state codes I’m using as the parent data, to help illustrate that you can use several tables / data sources to fuel this solution, provided the keys that relate the data make sense to each data store. In other words, you can use a lot of different sources for your data, so long as the data is relational.
• I’m going to use SQL Server, stored procedures and a connection string stored in my web.config file to access my data. I recognize that some people prefer to use SQL statements / LINQ and the like, or can only use Access / MySQL or other data stores. I really urge you to always use stored procedures, as they are way safer than inline SQL statements. As far as alternative data stores go, that should be a easy a fix as switching your code to use to the relevant ADO.NET ODBC classes, rather than the SQL Client classes.
• This solution should work for ASP.NET versions 2.0 forward.

Continue reading: Parent-Child DropDownList Controls In ASP.NET Web Forms (VB.NET) »