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Leveraging the YUI – A Functional News Scroller Part One(updated)

Most of you will probably already know what the Yahoo! UI Library (YUI) is and what it can do, but for those of you that don't I'll give it a brief introduction.  The YUI is an extensive collection of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, that you can use to build rich, interactive and attractive web applications.   The scripts make heavy use of AJAX and DOM scripting, and are supported across a range of browsers making them ideal for use in many design situations.

The YUI can be downloaded from Yahoo and used free of charge for personal or commercial websites.  There is a wealth of resources and documentation for them on the Yahoo Developer Network site http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/#support so it's well worth having a look there.  Additionally, Yahoo also provides a service whereby you don't download the files yourself, but instead reference minimal versions of the files on Yahoo's servers.  This way, Yahoo will serve the files for you.

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Dan Wellman
1740

Styling Flex components

One common requirement for developers is to be able to change the appearance of the components in their applications. In Flex, there are lots of ways that you can do this including working with CSS, ActionScript and adding skins or themes.

In this article, I'm going to explore the first two methods. I'll show you how CSS styles work in Flex and how to write ActionScript to create, modify and remove style declarations.

Even though you could use any text editor, I've assumed that you're working with Flex Builder for this article. I've also assumed that you're familiar with Flex Builder and that you've already built some simple applications. If not, you may want to go back and read some earlier articles in this series.

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Sas Jacobs
2680

Creative Portfolio: Corporate Materials

A client’s stationery might seem like an easy project, but stationery defines a client’s image. You could consider stationery as a “cornerstone” on which other corporate and collateral materials are developed, because that stationery would hold a client’s logo, its corporate colours, and information about how to contact the client. In this tutorial, Linda shows how you might tackle a project that would include an envelope, letterhead, and a business card. Additionally, she uses examples from a designer’s portfolio that will help you to define your online and CD portfolio as well.

The Portfolio Project: Corporate Stationery

PORTFOLIO PROJECT: You will develop corporate letterhead, envelope, and business card. This is a two-pronged project, because you will also examine a designer’s Web site that holds a perfect example for an online or CD portfolio.

TOOLS: Any software that allows you to create a print layout, including software that allows you to work with images either as vectors or bitmaps.

WHAT YOU’LL ACCOMPLISH: You will learn the process by which you begin to create corporate packages. This bedrock, or initial corporate project, will prepare you for upcoming tasks – the corporate brochure and the annual report. In addition, the steps you’ll take here will help you to begin to look at all projects as coherent packages.

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Linda Goin
3092

Creative Portfolio: Collateral Materials

“Collateral materials” might sound stuffy and boring, but Linda offers a project that might turn your objections into excitement. You will create a T-shirt design, a postcard mailer, and a poster for a musician or for a band through this tutorial. And, you’ll also determine how you would box this merchandise to send to radio and/or television stations as a promotional package. This article will make you stretch your brain as well as your talents, and you’ll take away some ideas for other projects in the process!

The Portfolio Project: Promotional Package for Musician

PORTFOLIO PROJECT: For this project you will create a coherent collateral marketing package for a musician or for a band. This package will include a T-Shirt or sweatshirt iron-on design, promotional postcard or mailer, and a poster that will promote an already existing CD. In addition, you’ll need to develop a package for mailing these promotional materials to radio stations.

TOOLS: A software program that allows you to create print layouts.

WHAT YOU’LL ACCOMPLISH: This project will help you to pull together many of your previous lessons into one coherent package. The variety of materials involved offers many formats to test one design.

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Linda Goin
2700

Using Skins and Themes in ASP.NET 2.0

The advent of the .NET framework version 2.0 has brought along several radical changes in all aspects of development from desktop to web applications. Making the switch from ASP.NET 1.x to 2.0 is quite the undertaking as many of the core methodologies used in 1.x are no longer available in 2.0.

Along with change comes improvement, and in many ways ASP.NET 2.0 has changed for the better. ASP.NET 2.0 has changed the way web applications are developed much the same as ASP.NET 1.0 changed classic ASP, they are similar but in many ways they are worlds apart.

In this tutorial we will look at one of the new features available in ASP.NET 2.0 called “Themes”. Themes or skins allow a developer or GUI designer to create multiple interface appearances for the same application through the use of CSS stylesheets and .skin files. Skin files are a new type of file available in ASP.NET 2.0.

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Kevin Koch
4935

Using effects in Flex

For developers used to working with Flash, Flex provides some new approaches to adding visual effects to SWF files. In this article, I want to look at the effects that are available within Flex and see how you might apply them to components in your application. We'll finish up by building a simple application that allows you to apply some of the effects to an image. The application will allow you to select an effect and apply it to an image and it looks like the following screenshot.

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Sas Jacobs
4722

Implementing Custom Role Security in ASP.NET 1.x – Part 2

Welcome to Implementing Custom Role Security in ASP.NET 1.x Part 2. In this second and final part of this tutorial we will build upon the code and framework developed in Implementing Custom Role Security in ASP.NET 1.x Part 1 and finish off the sample applications requirements.

During Implementing Custom Role Security in ASP.NET 1.x Part 1 we began implementation of a sample application that was designed to create a permissions “aware” custom button control. The purpose of the application is to allow a user to log into an application and have that user’s Role dynamically bound to their user security principal, thus giving a custom button control access to that role and determining if the user is authorized to access its functions.

By creating a separate project of type Web Custom Control Library we added the ability to create a separate assembly to contain the custom button, which can then be used as a reference within our sample web application and also within any other project, allowing for greater code-reuse. It also allows you to create a linkage within the Visual Studio Toolbox for drag/drop operation in the Visual Designer for Webforms.

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Kevin Koch
1801

Using MooTools to Fix a Cluttered Layout

Simple is in.  Clean is cool.  And amidst the increasing number of home brew web designers, the issue of a simple, clean layout isn’t just in and cool it is important.  Whether these designers admit it or not, clean websites make money and increase usability for the user.  The examples are limitless:  Google, Blogger, CSSBeauty, 456 Berea St, YouTube, Joomla, Flickr, and my personal favourites: BaseCamp, MezzoBlue, TextLinkAds, RubyOnRails, and MooTools.

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R B
4215

Creative Portfolio: Evaluating Your Design Goals

Many of you have read the articles posted to date in this portfolio series. Some projects might take more time than others, so this article is a “breather,” or an evaluation point in the portfolio process. Here, you’ll learn exactly what you need in your Art or Creative Director’s portfolios. You’ll learn how to define your projects by eight different categories so that you can begin to create a flowchart for your online and CD portfolios.

The Portfolio Project: Evaluation

PORTFOLIO PROJECT: Most college courses that focus on visual communications degrees contain a class or a time frame – usually in the senior year – when the student must evaluate his or her strengths and weaknesses and likes and dislikes within his or her design experience. The result is a goal. This goal is focused on a “senior project” which mainly consists of portfolio presentations online, on a CD, and in print. While the projects published to date in this series all include items that would fit into your portfolios, this article will help you to define where you want to go from here.

TOOLS: Imagination, ability to grasp reality, energy to finish the projects that you’ve begun to date and to tackle further projects that are more detailed and complicated.

WHAT YOU’LL ACCOMPLISH: This task will help you decide your goals. Upcoming projects might not appeal to you, but if you want to grasp a well-rounded design experience, you will at least read the material and decide after you read the articles whether you want to tackle the project or create more projects contained in previous articles.

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Linda Goin
2462

Creating a metric conversion calculator with Flex

In this article, I want to show you how to create a metric conversion calculator in Flex Builder 2. We’ll be able to use this calculator to convert from miles to kilometres, feet to metres, pounds to kilograms and back again. You’ll see how to create a simple application in Flex and I’ll show you how to use different types of layout controls. We’ll even add a validator and a small ActionScript 3.0 function to the file.

We’ll work through the following steps:

  • Creating the project
  • Creating the interface
  • Populating the ComboBox
  • Adding a validator
  • Calculating the result
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Sas Jacobs
3683

Yahoo! Ajax Toolkit: Autocomplete

Some time ago good folks at Yahoo! have put together a whole toolkit of UI components called “UI Library” and made it available to the developer’s community for free.
In this article we will take a look at one of the tools from this great collection – the AutoComplete component.

Since you are reading this it would be safe for me to assume that you know what AutoComplete is. That’s right, it’s the handy dropdown populated with automatic suggestions that appears when you start typing in a text field.

If you are a savvy developer (and even if you aren’t) you can go right ahead and download the toolkit, install it, read the documentation, look at the examples and finally set it up to work with your application.

Check also DMXzone's own Ajax AutoComplete Dreamweaver extension to get field auto completion right out of the box! 

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Alex July
4532

Implementing Custom Role Security in ASP.NET 1.x – Part 1

Security is of course an integral part of any application. It is usually designed as part of the abstract application framework during the design phase. There are many different aspects of security in a web application, and most developers, especially network administrators focus on the unknown public portion of security when it comes to design.

You can have firewalls, IP filtering, load balancing, DMZ’s and more when it comes to physical infrastructure with security. Keeping hackers and the general public out of private information and sensitive servers is of course one of the biggest security concerns.

The type of security this tutorial refers to however, is regarding internal user access security. Aside from the obvious security concerns already mentioned, there is often a definite hierarchy of privilege in any company. The different types of users that make up an application can be many. From administrators, so supervisors, to department managers, to regular field workers, all of whom require different levels of security access in your application.

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Kevin Koch
998
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