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As I said earlier, we didn’t test our solution to using the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint in all situations. Today we made a start to do so. To indicate our successrate: we now use window.showModalDialogwith some extra pages… Lets go through some of the problems we encountered. Placing an UpdatePanel around the entire UserControl (with default settings) makes that the entire UserControl is posted back, even when it is a control inside a nested UpdatePanel that posts back.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

It is now possible to get updates from this blog through e-mail (nice feature, feedburner{.}). Updates will be sent once a day, but only when new items are available. Curious? Subscribe here!

One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this postat The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn’t very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him.

As a reaction to this articleat Peter Ritchie’s MVP Blog, I thought I’d give my two cents on having a single exit point for methods. Here we go… When writing code, I always create only one exit point except for the occasional throwing of an exception. Most important for me is to always know where your code (really) stops. In case of long and complex methods there’s a chance you’re going to miss a return statement when scanning through a method.

One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder) would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!

This weekend we got back from a skiing trip we went on with the school my girlfriend works at. We had a great time! The kids were great, and so were the teachers and the Huski people who were there to teach the kids how to ski and snowboard. If they need an extra pair of hands next year, I hope they’ll consider me: I’d be happy to join them.{.}

I won’t be blogging for the next week. Tomorrow evening, we are going on a ski vacation! I was invited to join the skicamp my girlfriend is going on with her work. A nice opportunity to brush up my skiing skills. Let’s hope we’ll come back in one piece, but I’m counting on it 😉 I’ll catch you guys later.

Just a quick post: Windows Live SkyDrive is now available. It left the beta stage yesterday. You can now store 5Gb of data online, choose who has access to each folder you create and more. There is a maximum filesize of 50Mb. Interested? Have a look at https://skydrive.live.com/

In a quick AJAX demo I had to create today, I ran into a (somewhat cryptic) PageRequestManagerServerErrorException. I needed a simple form of the Cascading Dropdown{.}, one that doesn’t use a (web)service for its data, but gets it from a simple method. Here’s the setup, and the cause… Lets start with the exact error message: Microsoft JScript runtime error: Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException: An unknown error occurred while processing the request on the server.

With the official release of Visual Studio 2008 coming closer and its release on MSDN last november, there are more and more people asking what the impact of migrating from VS2005 to VS2008 will be and if it will have as big an impact as switching from VS2003 to VS2005 had. The answer is pretty simple: no it won’t. Let’s see why, and what impact it will have. VS2003 > VS2005

Until the Zune is available in Europe (when will that be, if ever…), I’m using an iPod. To be honest, I’m pretty satisfied with the product although iTunes still doesn’t feel like a solid piece of software… (understatement anyone?)After lots of hours playtime the original earphones of my iPod died, or at least the right one did. I went through the Apple store and found the ‘original’ earphones over there. Because of the annoying squeaky sound the cord makes in the inside of the lower part of the earphone, I wanted to try different ones.