Windows 7 integration with Internet Explorer 9

 ASP.NET, Software  No Responses »
Mar 022011
 

The latest and greatest (so far) Internet Explorer 9 introduces a new kind of bookmarks. It is now possible to drag an IE Tab to your Windows 7 taskbar and have it pinned there.
IE9 supports quite some integration with your taskbar; customized icon, icon overlays (eg. show a little bell when you’ve got mail), popup task list, make the icon flash when action is required, jump list and some more.

This is quite a smart move of Microsoft, in my opinion, since the web is centering alot around applications as of late.

Most of the integration options can be configured in metatags as i will demonstrate. This is just a small preview and a lot more features are available for you.

Some easy – fast to integrate customizations:

  • application-name: determines the name of your web-application; this will be the name of your shortcut
  • msapplication-tooltip: determines what is shown when one hovers the pinned site icon
  • msapplication-starturl: the default start url of your web app, if not specified this will be the page that the user was on when he dragged the IE tab to his Windows taskbar
  • msapplication-navbutton-color: yes you can change the color of the navigate buttons, this property will take any hex value and when left blank will determine the color of the buttons based on your favicon

to add a 32 x 32 favicon you can add: <link rel=”shortcut icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”images/large.ico”/>

Drag the tab to your windows taskbar like so:

After adding the tab the taskbar should look something like this:

 

Adding a Jump List

The jump list is the list you get to see when you right click the pinned program. This is an easy way to let your user navigate to much used pages.

Here’s how you go about it; the tasks are all defined with meta tags once more.

<meta name=”msapplication-task” content=”name=Mijn Zoekertjes;action-uri=http://local.zooka.be/myaccount.aspx;icon-uri=http://local.zooka.be/images/editimage.ico” />

There is even support for different category dividers within the jump list.

Obviously this is just a small samle. In real life applications you can easily parameterize these metatags to build up dynamically according to your user’s needs and wishes.

Like this? Check out the full pinned sites article on msdn!

 Posted by admin at 21:37

ASP.NET Radiobuttons in a Gridview

 ASP.NET, ASP.NET, Software  No Responses »
Sep 122009
 

Here’s another one of those classic Gridview problems:

I’ve got a Gridview that needs to have a RadioButtonList in it so that users can select only one row.

You can’t do this in ASP.NET with use of the <asp:RadioButton runat=”server”  />. Even though you can fill in a groupname it doesn’t work.
The reason it doesn’t work is that the rendered radiobuttons all have a different “name” attribute (you know, because the namingcontainer requires that all controls have a unique id).

The solution is very easy though; instead of using the .NET radiobutton control we will use a plain old <input type=”radio” />

Just like this:

<input type=”radio” name=”defaultfilegroup” value=’<%# Eval(“resource”) %>’ />

The name attribute works like the groupname; make it equal for all relevant radiobuttons.
The value attribute will contain the value of what the user selected. This is what we’ll retrieve as the selected option.

Retrieving the selected option:

supposing you save all changes when the user hits the “save” button here’s what we’ll do:

    public void SaveSetupLinkButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        string selectedFile = Request["defaultfilegroup"];
    }

Whoa! That’s how easy it is.

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 Posted by admin at 16:48
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