Button Creator

I found a website that lets you create web 2.0ish image buttons. It seems to create very nice looking buttons.

http://www.mycoolbutton.com/

Design Ideas for that "New Look" on your website

A previous coworker pointed me to a design website that has free website designs that you can use to create a template for your website. Some of their designs are aren't great but they have quite a few good designs. The site is http://opendesigns.org/.

My coworker's original post was http://ckcmoss.com/blogs/ckcmoss/archive/2007/05/02/looking-for-a-new-design-for-your-website.aspx.

Corners with JavaScript

I found a cool JavaScript library that allows you to create rounded corners to objects dynamically.

http://www.netzgesta.de/corner/

Stripe Generator

I'm not sure how handy this will be but I found a website that allows you to customize and create your very own striped background:

http://www.stripegenerator.com/

Javascript Modal Boxes

I found a JavaScript library that has a lot convenient functions for creating modal boxes for your website:

http://livepipe.net/projects/control_modal/

Cool Password

Here's a cool way of signing into your computer:

http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6171054.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news

How Small We Are

I found this link the other day. It's a flash site that shows perspective of the universe down to the atom. Kind of humbling:

http://www.nikon.co.jp/main/eng/feelnikon/discovery/universcale/index_f.htm

Using VB keywords as Variables

This is something I figured out awhile ago but haven't bothered to post it until now. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, I have started using VB.Net at work. As I was trying to convert some sample from C# to VB.Net, I ran into a problem. In C#, a name of a get/set accessor was not a keyword but in VB.Net it was. No matter what libraries or how many different online code converters I tried, I could not get it to work. I finally resorted to google and found out that you can surround a keyword with brackets ([ ]) and than you can use that keyword however you need. In my case it allowed me to use custom sinks in .NET Remoting. Here's an example:

Dim [New] as String
New = "Blah"

As a very BIG note: Be careful when using it. When you can name something other than a reserved keyword, do so. It can cause many issues if you use this unwisely.

Rounded Corners

Every time I start a new web project I want to have create tons of little rounded corners for my web site. It's a pain because I'm not great at PhotoShop and it's a hassle if I want to change colors. I found a JavaScript library that does all of the rounded corners on the fly. It seems to have a lot of customizations that you can add and play with. The only bad thing is that it is a JavaScript library and you have to add a command to initiate the rounded corner creation. However, I think that you could very easily customize to pull the parameter from the div tags parameters and automate everything without any custom JavaScript in your HTML page. Anyways, check it out and use it however you can.

http://www.ruzee.com/blog/shadedborder

Typed Datasets

I've heard of typed datasets before but I just started using them on my current project. Wow, they're cool. Typed datasets are cool because you predefine the structure of the dataset (tables, columns, relationships, etc.) through Visual Studio 2005. Once defined, Visual Studio generates the code to create the class for the typed dataset. Now you get all the nice features of typical dataset but you can now also access the data in a type safe way. Instead of accessing the value of a column in row using:

currentColumn("ColumnA")

you can do this:

currentColumn.ColumnA

This is nice because a change of the data structure will cause compilation errors instead of runtime errors (runtime errors bad). Typed datasets are very cool. Microsoft has a very good tutorial on typed datasets: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa581778.aspx