problems changing a readonly text box

Just ran into this problem today. I had a page which was running under .net 1.1
This page had a textbox which was set in the aspx page to readonly=true. there was a 2nd page which was changing the value of the text using some javascript. This all worked.

When i upgraded to .net 2.0 though i ran into problems. The text of the box would appear to change, but the value that actually came through was the original default value. My client side validation passed, but the server side did not since it was still seeing the default value. Turns out that setting the textbox to readonly really is readonly :)

You can work around this issue by not setting readonly in the aspx file. Instead go into your codebehind and use TextBoxID.Attribute("readonly") = true - you'll now have a text box that the user can't (easily) change but you can still change the value of the textbox in your code using javascript.

New microsoft commercial with Jerry Seinfeld & Bill Gates

I'd say this is a good commercial for vista - it leaves me with the same feeling i get when thinking about vista - *shrug* eh.

cool service to test website on multiple browsers/os

I discovered a cool little service that you can use to test how your websites behave on many different browsers and several operating systems. It's called CrossBrowserTesting.com. The service starts off free, limiting you to 5 minutes each session but unlimited sessions. This is usually good enough to give a website a quick once over or to test some specific functionality of a site.  

You log into the site, request a session, pick which operating system you want to work in which determines which browsers you'll have access to, and then using a VNC like interface directly in the browser window, you get access to the system desktop where you can open which ever browser you like and load up your website. 

If you need more then 5 minutes a session, you can buy 5 minute block intervals starting at $1 each. If you buy them in bulk (starts with 6 or more) the costs go down.

I think this would be an invaluable service for any web developer/designer.

Chrome - the google web browser

So some of you may or may not have heard by now that google, somewhat suddenly, announced availability of a browser they developed. I'm typing this blog post using it. You can download it from www.google.com/chrome - it will live side by side with IE, FF etc.

It does have some rendering quirks on various sites, but for the most part it works. And when it does work, it works fast. It renders pages noticeably much faster then IE6 does. And perhaps even a tad bit faster then FF3. It has tabs which sit all the way at the top of the window. And one nice thing about them is that each tab runs in it's own process so if one crashes, only the one tab goes down. It comes with it's own task manager to monitor the tabs (shift-esc to bring it up) which will show you the cpu, memory and network usage of each tab, plus plugins.

Another nice little feature when you first start it (and it starts as fast as it renders) are medium sized icons on the start page of the most frequently visited sites. I also noticed it will let you resize a multi-line text box it make it easier to type.

And for those of you who prefer to surf anonymously, it comes with an incognito mode, which will basically erase the history, cookies etc of that session once you close the browser. 

I also just noticed one other little feature. The little icon in the corner of the tab will turn grey and rotate counter-clockwise if its trying to connect to a website, and it will turn blue and rotate clockwise if it's downloading content from a site.

If you are using it and notice anything else cool (or not cool) about it, please feel free to let me know in the comments.

competition for google?

I heard them mention on the radio today some new search engine called cool, although it's spelled cuil. They boast that they have indexed 3x as much content as google has.

I've tried 2 searches on them so far and I'm not impressed. Search results took a while to show up on my first search, which was for the maximum memory card size for my camera. It returned just 3 results. The #1 result was for a website which doesn't appear to exist anymore. The 2nd result was also for a website which doesn't exist anymore. Just some parked domain name with a bunch of ads on it now. The 3rd and final result was at least almost on topic. It pulled up a page selling a similar model camera with a bunch of user comments on it. Although no where is my particular model mentioned on the page.

I tried a 2nd search at random for some information related to an online game. Cuil returned ZERO results. Google returned pages of results, although I admit I didn't look past the first page since the first search result was all I really would have needed.

In both searches i typed in the exact same words. I used it without any quotes since I think the average user doesn't use quotes when searching.

There is one thing about cuil I like - if you happen to actually get a page or two worth of results, they display the results in 2 or 3 columns, so you can see more results on the page then with google. You get more a little more sumary text and you get a small image displayed next to each result. Although it would probably be a good idea for them to offer an option to turn off the little image in favor of speeding up the page and having more room for text.

With cuil's layout, I got 8 results in my 3rd search on the top of the page without scrolling, compared to 7 results on google. And cuil gave me a little more text for each result compared to google as well.

In my opinion, Cuill.com isn't ready for prime time yet. Their search results are too sporadic and inaccurate. And their site takes way too long to return the results. Although it's possible this slow down is just growing pains. If they just recently got a lot of press, maybe their servers are getting hammered right now.

I would give them plus marks for the display of the information when they do return relevant results. They do give you a choice of displaying 2 or 3 columns, however, the size of the columns does not change, so it's rather pointless.

I'd say wait 2-3 months and check back.