Month: April 2007

Free ASP.net Shopping cart & a simple web site

During Last two days I was engaged with some charity work or rather IT related charity work, doing a Shopping cart using ASP.net. I had to use VB.net which i was not familiar with before, SO i got the chance in feeling the VB.net environment. VB is not a hard language to catch up when you do know the principals of programming plus when you have plenty of online help.

Also Visual Studio is one great development environment to engage in any kind of development (large or small). Database connectivity, data handling and debugging is amazingly easy using this powerful CASE tool.

Since I did this project for my own satisfaction I thought of uploading it for the use of anyone who needs a shopping cart or a related example.

You can download it and use it for your own purpose…
cheers

Sinhala-Hindu New Year Greatings !!!

Sinhala-Hindu new year is one of the fascinating events around the globe, a ceremony which is celebrated in grand scale mainly in Sri Lanka. Unlike the western new year celebration this new year is very much bound with the eastern astrology, solely based on the route of the SUN.

when the sun moves from the Meena Rashiya (House of Pisces) to the Mesha Rashiya (House of Aries), Sinhala and Hindu people begin celebrating their New Year or Aluth Avurudhu (in Sinhala). There is no exact time every year as the western new year (December 31st), The Time and maybe the date sometimes is determined by the astrological signs.

The Sinhala – Hindu new year is tightly bound with the Sri Lankan culture where in most faming villages it is celebrated with their Harvest. People are happy, everything is new during this period. There is a belief that old enmity between families or individuals has to be ended with the new year. So that All the sri Lankans celebrate this day with harmony, and wishes every one a prosperous new year.

Suba Aluth Awrudak Wewa !!!

read more about Sinhala Aluth Awrudda at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhalese_New_Year

Placing DHTML layers over the FLASH content

Adobe (Macromedia) Flash is one of the technologies we use to add fancy eye catching animations to our web sites. But after the resent development of Ajax, developers tend to blend CSS and JavaScript effects with those flash animations making their sites look more new or rather web 2.0 (ish).

For some time i was searching for a method to place DHTML layers over the Flash objects, yet i couldn’t find an article regarding this matter or rather i didn’t spend much time sweeping the NET regarding this. How ever For a web site I was doing recently I had to use the lightbox.js effect But again I met the problem of laying the DHTML layer over my flash content, Luckily in the troubleshooting part in the lightbox web page i found the path directing to the Adobe official site where this problem is wildly discussed.

As it says “Use the WMODE parameter to allow layering of Flash content with DHTML layers. The WMODE parameter can be ‘window’ (default), ‘opaque’, or ‘transparent’. Using a WMODE value of ‘opaque’ or ‘transparent’ will prevent a Flash movie from playing in the topmost layer and allow you to adjust the layering of the movie within other layers of the HTML document.”

You can gather more details at http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_15523

Cheers..

Is it AJAX or FLASH ?

Today I was integrating some eye catching AJAX effects to one of the web sites I was developing, and one of my friend Told me “Nice Flash Effect”….. I smiled for a moment and thought it really is…

AJAX is Growing So fast that I feel sooner it will beet Macromedia FLASH animation what you include in your website. There are many AJAX frame works available to take use of and play with some great Javascript effects. What I was Using today for this perticular site is Adobe Spry framework , simply designed with great animations. This framework is so much trying to catch the flash like effects. It’s a wonderful situation that Current owners of Macromedia is doing such a thing and making the 1st move…

Again we are recognized as the world’s 11th

For the proposal we have submitted under the category of web development (The earlier post was about Software design Category) we were ranked as the world’s 11th. this is done using community voting process in  the imagine cup community. It is time to compete for the second round developing our idea of AcSO (Academic status organizer).

http://imaginecup.com/Competition/Leaderboard.aspx

Thanking you all for the support.

Create Your Web template as an Image and export it to a HTML

Well web designing is not my field though, I was engaged in few designing stuff whole last week. Mainly contributing in molding a theme to a web site . The stuff I am going to write is not so new to professional designers but for beginners it will be some help.

In web designing the most important task is to design the site template. In this case some beginners tend to do this by editing and writing HTML codes for all the stuff they want to include, for an example if you want to use some images or a small spacer image to add the shadow effect, what mistake you do is include them using tables or div tags manually. If you are using some kind of an IDE this task will be bit more easy. but yet there is an easer way.

What you have to do is, using Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia (Adobe) Fireworks design the template as an image. Add the pictures as you want. keep space for flash headers/banners. Basically create the whole page as an image. What you have to do next is using the “Slice” tool., Slice the image in to the separate areas where you want to edit.

Example : text areas, banner areas

Then Export the image as an HTML page. (FILE -> Export) and there you get the HTML out put as well as the sliced image peaces. Open the HTML page with you favorite IDE and remove the unwanted image areas and fill it with the same background color as it was in the image. leave the images which you want to add to your page and edit the rest of the page. The exported page is created using a table, so you can easily edit and add what you need in the deign process.