I know this is not very spooky post for Halloween. Unless, of course, you were sitting there this evening thinking to yourself, I wonder how you make a web page location aware and happened across my post. Anyway, back to the subject. Using HTML 5 you can now include the user’s location within your application. The Geolocation API was included in HTML5 although not strictly as part of the HTML5 specification. You can now use the power of a location aware device to know where your user is and provide
Working with large data sets in Excel powered ASP.NET websites
Working with large amounts of data can be slow going using Microsoft Excel’s internal lookup functions which is amplified if you are publishing lookup results on the internet dynamically. In this example, I have created a large(ish) table of sales data that I want to be able to pick from using some specified criteria. All of the information in this table is dummy data and even the specified criteria are probably not what a sales manager would be looking for. The purpose of this data is to show that handling
Cookieless user data storage using HTML5 Web Storage API
A while back I started writing about HTML5 and wrote “a brief guide to the enhancements and new features of HTML5” as well as more detailed articles about “HTML5 Video“, drawing using the “HTML5 Canvas” and “HTML5 Canvas Animation” and also one about scaleable vector graphics (SVG) with examples using HTML5. This follows on from those subjects with an article dedicated to the “HTML5 Web Storage API”. There are two new types of web storage that are now available to web developers in HTML5 for both local and session storage.
Working with charts in Excel powered ASP.NET websites
Personally, I think Microsoft Excel charts are powerful and look quite good so in this article, we will use SpreadsheetGear to connect to a workbook and fetch a chart as an image to display on an APS.NET web page. Obviously websites could use a charting library or define their own chart like images using the data generated from Excel but in this example we will get the image of a chart that is generated in Excel. This article is part of a set on using SpreadsheetGear to include the power
Working with macro functions in Excel powered ASP.NET websites
In this article, we will use SpreadsheetGear to connect to a macro-enabled workbook that has one user-defined macro function and we will attach a class to the SpreadsheetGear object to replace that function at runtime. This is not just a feature of SpreadsheetGear as middle-wear between a website or application and a Microsoft Excel workbook will not support macros but some of them such as SpreadsheetGear will allow you some way of redefing them. We will populate the initial page values of an ASP.NET website from a spreadsheet, make changes
How to build Microsoft Excel powered ASP.NET websites
Microsoft Excel provides easy to use and very good (in my opinion) functionality for most business applications and with its charting capabilities and extensibility through Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and data links to other storage applications it gives you a powerful tool at your fingertips on your desktop or laptop. That is great if you are with your client or don’t mind sending them your Workbook to use on their machines but it’s not very practical if you want to protect your intellectual property or view on different devices
Creating and using scalable vector graphics on the web
This article is about Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) on your web pages. I would have classed it as a HTML 5 tutorial but it is not strictly speaking to do with HTML 5 although it does use HTML to display the images. An SVG is a file that has been written in XML and contains all of the information needed to draw the image on the screen in text. This way the browser knows exactly how to re-scale it depending on the viewing area so there is no loss of
Animation example using the HTML 5 Canvas
Following on from my article Getting started with HTML5 canvas, this short article adds another example of what you can do. If you haven’t already done so, it is worth revisiting my previous article to get familiar with the terms and Canvas setup. This article shows you that animation on the HTML 5 Canvas is really quite simple. The example here moves a small box around the screen and changes its direction and colour when it hits the boundary of the canvas. As there is not much to it so
Streamlining application development requirements
It has been some time but this article follows on from my previous article about breaking an application development project into several phases; introducing phases to an application development project. In this article I will cover how to break the phase or whole project (if it is small enough not to require breaking down into phases), estimating the amount of work and prioritising the order of that work. First up, the project or phase needs to be broken up into tasks that can be described by no more than three
Getting started with HTML5 canvas
A while back I gave an HTML5 overview with the intention of writing more about each of those areas. So this is one of those and is dedicated to the HTML5 canvas. It is quite long as I wanted to cover as many features as I could in the one article. As the canvas relies on JavaScript, I’ll also cover that as well as the basics you need for the HTML5 page structure. The HTML5 canvas allows you to specify a portion of a web page that you can draw