What is it with dogs and water? I don't know for sure but I DO know its hilarious!

And that after I just washed her(needed some more brushing though....this is how pristine she CAN look:

Sadly enough...that never lasts very long!

Update: The final version has arrived, changes are the same though!

Blogengine.Net 2.5 is coming is here, and it features a nice set of changes:

• Upgraded to .NET 4.0
• Multiple Blogs in Single Installation
• Razor Theme support (Razor theme included, "Garland-Revisited")
• Converted Admin pages to Razor (Dashboard, Extensions, Themes)
• Install Themes from the BlogEngine.NET Gallery while in the BlogEngine.NET control panel.
• New language resource files for Estonian and Polish, and other translations updated.
• Upgraded to jQuery 1.5.2.
• Upgraded to latest version of tinyMCE WYSIWYG editor, v3.4.3.1.
• Numerous fixes and improvements.

If you want to test-drive this new version, the release candidate can be downloaded here final version can be downloaded here.

Looks promising, so yesterday I downloaded the latest branch to get a little preview, and what did I see?

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Website layouts can be so frustrating. The current theme I'm using is one I modified to some extend now, I'll write about that later. But at this moment I'm expanding the middle text area so basically well....it becomes bigger.

Screen resolutions have improved and I want to use that precious screen space, and also because I feel text is easier to read with the correct line length. So without further ado, I'll share my tips on how to use Photoshop to easily(and also correctly) resize your CSS theme. This is a pretty basic tutorial, but it might help people on their way, at least, that's my hope.

Step 1: Data gathering and even some math

Math you say? Yes but please bear with me, it's not rocket science. But since this blog has a slight shadowy edge to the right side of the layout items, which is represented in the transparency layer of the .PNG files(so whatever you do, don't save to .JPG if you have transparency), AND we need to resize three items(header, footer, middle lines) we better do it precise, else it will look like crap! This also goes for things like borders etc.

So what I did was make a rectangular selection to measure how many pixels were between the edge of the paper making up my blog, and the edge of the image. This picture will make it all clear.

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Sun is up(well it was) and I figured it was time to cheer up this site a bit among all the code over here so here it comes:

How cute is that?

Since today I posted my Facebook widget on this site(turned out it actually was the second, but oh well - mine is better  - not meant to be rude rtur, I've seen and appreciate the work you did for Blogengine.net) I decided to elaborate a bit on the design I picked for implementing it. My main concern was to keep all code for working with the settings in one place, not spread out over multiple classes. See the point with Blogengine.Net widgets is that there are (obviously) specifications:

1. There may only two controls, widget and edit, and they live in the same folder
2. Those controls use code behind files, so total is 4 files:widget.ascx, widget.ascx.cs, edit.widget.ascx, edit.ascx.cs
3. The Widget Class must extend WidgetBase and override the Name and isEditable properties, and the LoadWidget method
4. The Edit class must extend WidgetEditBase and override Save method

That's it in a nutshell. I won't elaborate more since this is all documented on the Blogengine.net site. Now add the following points:

1. It deviates from the normal way of doing things to add more classes/folders to other locations - who needs change anyway?
2. It's bad practise to put stand alone class files outside the App_Code folder

Still, I want an extra class for the data, and put it neatly in place...now what?

My solution

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 (I also added a page containing a widget how to, and my implementation considerations for this widget, find it over here)

Since I wanted a widget to connect to a Facebook page from my blog, and I found out there wasn't one(Facebook extensions there are, but no widget) I decided to make myself one. See it in action over to the right-------->

It does what it's supposed to do, and is fully customisable. This is what you can change, if you want to:

• The Facebook page to like
• The width and height
• Theme(light/dark)
• Border Color
• Options to show the header, feeds, and/or Faces of people who pressed like

Here is a picture of some of the layout options:

Installation instructions

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Software engineering is the most "vague" and craftsmanship based of all engineering disciplines, since it's so human oriented, but at the same time very technical. That's what makes it so appealing. At this moment I'm studying human interface design, using Soren Lauesen's iterative design method using virtual windows.

Because of that, me and my teammate needed a quick prototyping (mockup) tool, for doing usability testing. Preferably a free one, and easy to use ofcouse. After some searching I stumbled upon Lumzy. It's very comparable to a better known tool called Mockingbird, however, Lumzy is free. And even better...it allows you to handle events!!!

Events

It's obviously not perfect, but for a tool like this, it's very close to that. Let me start by showing a screeny of the default workspace:

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Take a look at my sweet little doggie!

She's a beautiful and loyal friend, those who have the privilege to be friends to an animal need no more explanation. Although she had some health issues recently(inner ear infection also causing epileptic episodes) she's as energetic and playful as ever! Ok, one more photo!


This is her when the garden was still a mess, she was about 1,5 years old here.

On a more geeky note:now that I see them side by side, notice the HUGE difference in color fastness and contrast between a Nikon Digital SLR(top) and a mobile phone(bottom). Also note I have't done anything to the top picture except resizing it, the bottom one was even more blue then it is now because of the UV light saturation. I quickly took care of that using Paint.Net, a free program to edit your photos for when you're just too lazy to fire up ye olde photo shop.

This will be my first tutorial on this site since I've noticed many people struggling with this subject, I’ve decided to give a short explanation for it. This is not going to be covering the more advanced stuff, like creating your own generic classes etc, it will just focus on problems encountered by people beginning with programming. The language used here is Java, however the subject is common to most modern languages. Also this tutorial covers some aspects of static and dynamic typing, and one of the OOP(object oriented programming) pillars: polymorphism.

Alright, let’s begin!
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