End Your If

Learn some great web development and web design tips and techniques through recipes that clearly define the problem being solved with a working solution.

Semi Rant: Absolute Position when it's relative

Published on Mar 21, 2019 by Jamie Munro

I have long been against absolute position. I always felt it the "lazy" way out. Until recently, I've seen the light. Absolute positioning works extremely well inside of a relative position. In fact it works so well, that it reduces my browser testing time because IT IS actually consistent!

Tags: CSS | Rants | CSS

Entity Framework's Code-First with an ObjectContext

Published on Mar 20, 2019 by Jamie Munro

If the following blog interests you, it's probably because you're using Entity Framework with a Code-First approach and whatever it is you are trying to do *must* use an ObjectContext instead of the standard DbContext. I'm sure, like me, you thought this shouldn't be too hard. Then you started hitting roadblocks like, Metadata is required in your connection string. What's metadata? This is only needed in Database-First so you can tell the framework where your edmx and other definition files are, so why do I need this with Code-First, I don't have these files?

This was definitely my first reaction as well. So after much trial-and-error and research, I have the solution!

Tags: ASP.NET | c# | entity framework

Checking if an element exists with jQuery

Published on Mar 19, 2019 by Jamie Munro

You want to do some conditional processing depending on if an item or items exist in your DOM (Document Object Model). By default, jQuery doesn't have a function that performs this; however, there is a very simple way to extend jQuery to do so.

Tags: jquery | extend | JavaScript | jQuery

Creating Diagonal Lines with CSS

Published on Mar 18, 2019 by Jamie Munro

The hr tag has been around for quite some time to provide a nice horizontal line to visually separate content. To achieve a vertical line, it's typically been accomplished via border-left or border-right. However, this is when you can get into height issues or columns that don't extend the whole way, etc… Instead CSS3 allows for the rotation of elements and allow for vertical or diagonal lines to be created with some basic CSS. This is accomplished with the transform property.

Tags: CSS | CSS

Posting form variables that are not strongly typed with MVC

Published on Mar 17, 2019 by Jamie Munro

In a lot of the MVC 3 examples that are available on the Internet today, they are quite typically strongly typed to a model, e.g. public ActionResult LogOn(LogOnModel model, string returnUrl).

This is extremely useful for the validation abilities and many other aspects; however, there are times when some or all of the data is not strongly typed; then what do you do? Read on for two different approaches.

Tags: ASP.NET | mvc