Read my simply fascinating posts about the wacky world of web development and programming.
This post deals with indexing and searching products in uCommerce (an Umbraco ecommerce platform) using Lucene .NET (a dot net port of the Java Lucene text search engine library). This first post is about how to create an index using Lucene and C#, and will be followed up by a post of how to use that index for searching in Part Two.
How to create a strongly-typed form in Umbraco 4 (WebForms) using pure Razor CSHTML scripting - without the need for ViewState, User Controls or any "web forms" gunk! You'll also see how you can perform both server-side and client-side validation (using jQuery validate) without cluttering your presentation layer.
Minification is the process of removing unnecessary whitespace and characters from your website assets without changing the functionality. This is desirable as it helps make your pages load quicker which, in turn, helps keep visitors happy and also can improve your SEO.
Here I look into the rise of "micro" ORMs for .NET and C#. The new generation of lightweight, single-file objects mappers are designed to be the answer to the "bloat" of the heavyweight Object Relational Mappers. Performance, speed and simplicity are the keywords - but can they live up to the hype?
How to display a paginated list of Umbraco pages using the new Razor scripting language added to Umbraco 4.7. I'll also show you how you can make use of extension methods and Razor helpers to improve your code and make it more reusable.
How to create a simple photo gallery for the Umbraco 4 CMS. The gallery will generate HTML using some custom XSLT and this will be enhanced by a jQuery lightbox plugin. Behind the scenes we also use the ImageGen package to create thumbnails of the photos in the gallery.
How you can use the new jQuery Templates plug-in to easily bind JSON data (returned from a simple Ajax request) to placeholders in your HTML to create rich, client-side templates.
How I created a very simple jQuery plugin that can be used to rotate a sequence of images as the background image on any element. I also explain how this plug-in differs from a standard carousel in its intent and execution. The post contains a demonstration, sourcode and a download option.