If you read my previous post , you would know that it is my time to give back to the community. So where should you start when creating the ULTIMATE REUSABLE UTILS CLASS LIBRARY ? (from now on called Über Utils )? Good question, and thats the reason why its taken me a while to start this series, cause I had to start it at exactly the right point. I thought back to the first utils class I wrote back in 2003 in .NET 1.1. It was a cryptography class that wrapped existing functionality that exists in...(read more)

A new release for the BlogEngine.NET community project with many features being added to this release , I was dreaming to accomplish the Arabic localization part of this project , but it seems that it has been done , thanks Talal Asubaie for your effort to localize this project to our Arabic language .

Really great effort (Y)

AdHawkMailer an ASP.NET Component for Sending Email in VB.NET

 

Nice little addition to my morning...

 

Dear Rob Chartier,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way of saying thank you for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry’s success every day. Your extraordinary efforts in Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET technical communities during the past year are greatly appreciated.

Firstly, I must thank Joe its invitation to write at the ASP.NET weblogs.

Until now, I only wrote in Spanish at my Spanish ASP.NET Blog (Google say’s that it’s one of the most popular), but I’m not afraid with writing on both languages, although my English is simple and far from perfect.

 

What I am going to write in this Blog?

Well, I’m obviously going to write some technical articles of ASP.NET, JavaScript, ASP.NET AJAX and C#, but I’ll also write about the external libraries and controls that I use, and others that I’ve created.

 

I wait you here.

 

Object Oriented AJAX class and objects structured for ease of use and maintainability for multiple requests.

This is webbased WhiteBoard. It uses C# and AJAX to communicate between the server and client. Data sharing between different users is made possible using AJAX. Drawings can be shared in Real Time over multiple clients.

Regular reader Serge Wautier asked over in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup:

By default, progress bar fill from left to right in LTR locales and right-to-left in RTL locales.

When I added support for RTL languages to appTranslator, I decided that it was not a good idea and I added code to defeat this behaviour in dialogs that contain progress bars:

Rather than simply addin WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL to the dialog layout, I also added WS_EX_NOINHERITLAYOUT and I added WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL to all controls but progress bars.

For reasons beyond my understanding, I never ever considered that a progress bar filling from right to left was the desired behaviour!

Time flew. I am now investigating a related problem and I realize I was most likely stupid and I should fix this stupid design decision. Before I do it, I'd like to make sure I was dumb hence my question to you RTL knowledgeable people out there:

What should be the filling direction of a progress bar in RTL locales: RTL or LTR?

Sorry for the apparently stupid question but I'm confused ;-)

(In this case, they should in fact be mirrored, for what it is worth....)

But this is not a stupid question, really. Well, at least if it is I wish people would be willing to risk acting stupid a bit more often, since I have seen my share of improperly mirrored dialogs and applications in my time.

In fact there were some pre-release versions of Vista that were incorrectly mirroring the datetime dialog and the clock gadget -- and believe me you will never feel as not-stupid about mirroring as when you saw a copy of Vista doing this:

or this:

Thankfully these bugs were fixed prior to ship. :-) 

The fact is that for each user interface component (be it a progress bar, clock, calendar, dialog, menu, or whatever) there is an expected behavior. And the initial builds of RTL user interface languages are almost guaranteed to have mistakes in them with things that are either not flipped when they should be or over-actively flipped like in these examples.

There is no one rule to follow, though the best bet when dealing with localized user interfaces is that rather than trying to solve the problems completely in code in some automated way, you make sure that the setting is exposed to localizers in some way, since they are the people who are being paid to bring their expertise to the situation and decide what to flip and what not to flip....

Then the second rule is to have people who know what the conventions are reviewing the user interface, so they can tell you when things are right and when they are wrong. Then if you know who did (or did not do) the flipping you'll know if it is your bug, a localization bug, or both.

And the third rule -- don't flip if you have to flip or not flip. If you know what I mean. :-)

 

This post brought to you by ☏ (U+260f, a.k.a. WHITE TELEPHONE)

This week on the Silverlight site Shawn Wildermuth presents three videos that demonstrate how ASP.NET and Silverlight work together, with a focus on using ASP.NET to generate dynamic, reusable XAML.