Page Breaks in HTML using CSS

Page breaks in HTML are very useful to produce meaningful prints of web pages. I was searching for some good material on this.

Found following information which may be useful.

'page-break-before'
Value: auto | always | avoid | left | right | inherit
Initial: auto
Applies to: block-level elements
Inherited: no
Percentages: N/A
Media: visual, paged
Computed value: as specified

'page-break-after'
Value: auto | always | avoid | left | right | inherit
Initial: auto
Applies to: block-level elements
Inherited: no
Percentages: N/A
Media: visual, paged
Computed value: as specified

'page-break-inside'
Value: avoid | auto | inherit
Initial: auto
Applies to: block-level elements
Inherited: yes
Percentages: N/A
Media: visual, paged
Computed value: as specified

Values for these properties have the following meanings:

auto - Neither force nor forbid a page break before (after, inside) the generated box.
always - Always force a page break before (after) the generated box.
avoid - Avoid a page break before (after, inside) the generated box.
left - Force one or two page breaks before (after) the generated box so that the next page is formatted as a left page.
right - Force one or two page breaks before (after) the generated box so that the next page is formatted as a right page.

For more detailed understanding go through the link below.

Source - http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/page.html

Good Luck with printing web pages !

Some useful ASP.Net URL Path code

System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironment.ApplicationVirtualPath
-Gets the root virtual path of the application

Request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath
- Relative path with ~/

Request.CurrentExecutionFilePath
- The virtual path of the current request

Request.ApplicationPath
- The virtual path of the current application.

Request.FilePath
- The virtual path of the current request.

Request.Path
- The virtual path of the current request.

Page.ResolveUrl
- Converts that is useful for requesting from client.

A Simple method for implimenting Ajax

- Author gave full source code
- 3 Vidoes give some introduction

Easy to study and make your own.

http://www.killerajax.com

c# Color to HTML/HEX and HEX to C# using ColorTranslator

Often we come across situations to convert html color to appropriate Color Object.

Here is the code to achieve it.

using System.Drawing;

Color colorObj = ColorTranslator.FromHtml("#8b4513");

String htmlColor= System.Drawing.ColorTranslator.ToHtml(colorObj );

Ajax:UpdateProgress Gifs

Ajax brings a fairly simple aproach to displaying page progress indicator to user either using a label or an image.

You need a script manager control on the page or master page you want to display the update progress. Update progress displayes templated web content (label or image) when any of the update panels on the page are submitted .

Found these real cool links for aninating images

http://mentalized.net/activity-indicators
http://www.napyfab.com/ajax-indicators

You can make your own using http://www.ajaxload.info

Scotts blog explains how to impliment this feature.

Podcast hosting - Cast your self.

As youtube has become symbol of identity for new generation netizens I was wondering what was happening around the podcast world as sound has its own unque place in the world of communication.

Found few interesting sites.
http://mypodcast.com/ allowing unlimited bandwidth for podcasting.
http://odeo.com/ a huge collection of podcasts
http://podcasts.yahoo.com/ podcast search

http://www.jasonvanorden.com/ Now podcasting seems to be a hot profession too!

But mainly to asynchronously catch podcasts and listen them at your comfort the following web site provides loads of products and compares them.

http://www.podcatchermatrix.org

Podcasting your self:

http://mypodcast.com
http://odeo.com
http://podomatic.com
http://odeo.com

1. Record your audio and Upload your audio file to your server
3. Manage RSS feeds with XML facility on the site
5. Publish your audio (podcast) at different podcasting directories
6. Tell your friends about the podcast

VSS Shell Extention

I was looking for VSS shell extention on net and found this wonderful tool equalant to SVN Tortoise for Subversion.

Epocalipse SourceXplore !

HTML DOM CSS Javascript - Debuggers

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page... Also visit getFirebug web site for more details.

For IE debugging Debugbar comes with COM Inspector, HTTP Inspector, Javascript Inspector and Consol, HTML Validator a great tool and must have for web developers.

Web Developer Tools

Just another day of work, but found some really nice tools that are poping up in the web development speare, thanks to great open source community.

I was probably out of the loop for some time, but now I realise the pool of new stuff that can help development so much.

Filddler

A typical web developer life involves many times with unexpected delays and crashes and confusion around http request/response flow. Here is a great tool from Microsoft called Fiddler.

There is an ability to extend fiddler to .Net environment, look at this msdn article for more information on this.

Coming to CSS and javascript the same world of client scripts have lot more to cause confusion and frustration in development.

Developer tools from chrispederick.com provides great features with what they call Web Developer Extentioned/plug ins that install on your browser to help debug and validate CSS, Cookies, Cache, Forms, Images, HTML, Frames and Links etc.

Great stuff check out at chrispederick.com/work/web-developer.

When it comes programming you need a source code editor and here is a free open source editor for number of programming languages and it has very useful features that help in opening files of various extentions and making quick changes there is a great alternative to default windows notepad, Notepad ++.

Notepad ++ supports number of languages and has lot of Code editing features comparable to other IDE's but for Free!!

Now once you have code, next challenge is with versions and comparisions. WinMerge is a Win32 tool for visual difference display and merging, for both files and directories. Unicode support. It is a great file/folder comparision tool and it is open source too.

Now the usual messing around the colors is a complex task. Here is a simple tool to help you pick exact color in either decimal or hex value to use in CSS or Html. Color Picker is a great tool for web designers and developers.

When it comes to source control, we microsoft guys have treditional ally Visual Source Safe. But in the new world of open source there are new options. Open source favourate CVS has got a new version which is Subversion.

SubVersion has been a silent revelution in the world of source control and now a dominent player.

Sub version comes with multi OS environments and has much more features than Source Safe. But the major difference is in the way it approaches versioning and checkin/check out mechanism.

Subversion works over HTTP/WebDev which makes it much superior to many other tools. On top of every thing it is for open source and free!

Though subversion can be used with command line client, to be realistic it needs a client tool yet again another open source software to use it which is Toirtoise SNV.

Tortoise SVN is a great Sub Version client which is implimented as windows shell extension. Yes the next immidiate question would be what about Visual Studio integration? yes there is another free pug in available which makes the total setup work almost like vss but with much more useful features.

This tool is called ankh and it provides most of the useful right click menu options to check out/get update, diff and commit etc.

World of Browsers

World of browsers has more choices now. Found a new browser " Flock - The Social Web Browser " which is with a single sign on and social networking focus. Looks pretty and must be a great tool for the very socially active people to hook up and use all so called web 2.0 web sites embedded into your browser with a My World view.

Apart from the regular FireFox the light wieght and friendly browser, Mozilla had some other browser (seamonkey project) to offer own baby aimed at corporate users for providing a suite of apps together with browser. An old style browser with window UI looking pretty win16 times. May not be a great choice any more.Which is again same as it looks to Mozilla All In One Suite.

The now treditional IE may struggle some times to perform some times, but IE 7 brings lot of features that are very useful.

Now in secondlife times a 3D browser may be future. The new 3D browser tries to add new dimention to browsing. iPod success has certainly got people thinking about Apple's browser, yes the Safari is available for windows now. That was the world of browsers that I came accross though my favourate choice is Firefox at the moment.