What size should you make your layout for a web site? Is there one layout that will fit all monitor sizes?

The basic width of a layout determines a lot of the internal layout sizes for panes, modules, images, and internal content.  Read More...

What size should your photos be when posting them to the web?  What are the common standard digital photo image sizes? 

Every site I looked at had different size images, but some common themes did emerge.  240 x 160 pixels was a very common small format. Larger images were typically around 460 pixels wide.  If you make your images larger than 460 pixels, most layouts in most blogs or site designs will have some difficulty fitting these sizes into the layout.

My Preferred Image Sizes

1. Very Large 800 pixels
2. Large 500 or 520 pixels
3. Medium 460 pixels
4. Medium-Small 320 pixels
5. Small 240 pixels
6. Thumbnail 100 pixels
7. Square Thumb 75 pixels

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When it comes to designing layout for on-line content, what size is the right size?  How does one design for multiple screen sizes without spending duplicate effort on multiple designs. The answer depends on what size windows users are using to access the site.  For me, creating a variable fixed width design based on both 960 pixels (large) or 700 pixels (medium) helps minimize duplication of design effort. Read More...

How to create a new account in Windows Live Writer for a site using BlogEngine.Net 1.3.0.18 or later.

Add a new weblog account.

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How to use ASP.Net Cache settings to automatically read and update values from an XML file when the file is updated, and how to lookup a value in the XML file.

.Net surprises me every day.  I think about how I want to do things and then I dig a little (some time a lot) into .Net components and viola, I find it provides some new interesting functionality that I didn't know about before. 

I recently wanted to implement some features for using configuration values for an ASP.NET application.  My requirements were as follows. Read More...

Cameron Moll has posted some incredibly useful information on his site regarding CSS, JQuery, AJAX and extensibility in a set of articles titled The Highly Extensible CSS Interface.  The information is PHP oriented, but the concepts certainly apply to ASP.NET. Read More...

Short on the heels of the Visual Studio 2008 release in November 2007, Microsoft released in early February a hot fix that contains several fixes.  I took a bit of time before jumping on the Hot fix for production projects, but there are several IDE editing and build improvements for those using ASP.NET. 

Based on the list of fixes surrounding HTML source view / HTML editing, JavaScript editing, and web site  build performance, it looks very compelling to apply this fix .  I've updated today and see no adverse side effects yet.  The hot fix installation instructions state it can be uninstalled in the future if needed.

The information on the hot fix details and the download can be found in Scott Guthrie's post VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up Available.

Those who've read the book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering know the mantra Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.  But why does it make it later?  How many resources should you put on a project to optimize the delivery date?  How do you explain and justify to the customers and teams the optimal number of resources to be on a project?  How do you explain that adding more than the optimal resources won't make the delivery date sooner?  Resource saturation is my answer. Read More...

Help authoring tools like RoboHelp and Doc To Help provide the ability to generate PDF, Word .DOC, and compiled html help (.CHM) from a single HTML source.

Some time ago, I needed the ability to generate other forms of documentation for help files other than HTML.  The original content was authored as a standalone simple HTML (h1, h2, ul, ol, dd, dt, p, etc.) with images and used a common style sheet.  I needed the ability to generate other forms of documentation that could be printed and transmitted over the Internet to clients (Word documents, PDF, etc.).  Read More...