F9 Group Marketing and Technology Blog

Apple.com adds F9 Group, Inc. widget “Countdown to Christmas” to www.Apple.com

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Last week’s article, Creating Charts with the Google Chart API , looked at how to use Google’s free Chart API to generate line, pie, bar, and other types of charts from an ASP.NET page. The Google Chart API is callable via a URL that contains the chart type, size, data, and other parameters in the querystring and returns the chart as an image. Displaying a chart using this API is as simple as adding an Image Web control to a page and setting its ImageUrl property to the Google Chart API URL with an appropriately formatted querystring.

This article discusses one of those programming topics that may be confusing at first but seems obvious once you know it. As you know, C# enables you to overload the same method in a class with different arguments.  But it’s also possible to overload a method with arguments that inherit from one another. Consider this simple example

I’ve always wondered how the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” came about. I like to think that it was coined by some mid-level manager viewing a sales figures report that consisted of metrics from the past 1,000 days. After scanning this long list of numbers, he found, at the bottom of the page, a line chart that summarized the numbers, and uttered that now well-known adage

I started my career as a web developer with Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP), the predecessor to ASP.NET. ASP was a very simple scripting engine and lacked the tools that ASP.NET developers today take for granted, most notably a debugger. Debugging an ASP script typically involved littering the code with Response.Write statements to output the values of variables at different points in time of the script’s life-cycle. Debugging an ASP.NET page is so much easier thanks to the Visual Studio debugger, which allows you to set breakpoints, step through executing code, use Watch windows to keep an eye on variable values as they change, and an Intermediate window to evaluate statements during debug time. While the Visual Studio debugger has greatly improved the debugging story, there are certain scenarios where a server-side debugger is of little or no help. In certain cases the problem is not in the server-side code but instead in what is being sent from the client to the server (or vice-a-versa).

In my job as an independent software developer I help a lot of small businesses enhance their existing company website or internal web applications to include new features or adopt best practices.