Transparent png's IE6

Wow what a messy job IE6 does with transparent png images!!! I haven't come across this before but after putting this in google I noticed this is a serious flaw in IE6.
I won't go into the exact issues as there is loads of info on the web.
However i thought I would just post some good links I found that helped me overcome this major issue. I warn you now ther is no 'nice' solution to this problem as it is an issue with IE6 outdated graphic rendering engine. However I recommend using Conditional Comments to include a new style sheet for IE 6, as this issue has been fixed in IE7 and this at least this the nasty bit is isolated.

This is how I overcame it
This is similar
I had this issue too and its is a good description of the problem.

UPDATE: This is now the easyist way to fix the transparent png issue. Full Credit goes to Angus Turnbull :)

Favicon

Just for my own reference really thought I would document how to add a favicon to a site

Creating the icon

Used this as a guide to creating my icon. I used photoshop with the mentioned Plugin from telegraphics

Adding to site

You can either add the new favaicon.ico to the home directory of your website and this will be picked up automatically by the browser.
or
(This is the option I choose) You can add a link to every page header (or the master page) like the following:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
This allows you to add the favicon to a folder such as images along with all your other graphical content.

Busy Busy

Been really busy lately with my first release at RVC. All settled down a bit now so I have a few blogs to do....

Hackers Vs Crackers

The terms Hackers and Crackers are so regularly incorrectly used and while reading The Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen a superb definition has been written.

At the core of our technological time stands a fascinating group of people who call themselves hackers. They are not TV celebrities with wide name recognition, but everyone knows their achievements, which form a large part of our new, emerging society's technological basis: The internet and the Web, the personal computer, and an important portion of the software used for running them. The hackers' "jargon file," compiled collectively on the Net, defines them as people who "program enthusiastically" and who believe that "information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise be writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible."

This has been the hacker ethic ever since a group of MIT's passionate programmers started calling themselves hackers in the early sixties. Later, in the mid-eighties, the media started applying the term to computer criminals. In order to avoid the confusion with virus writers and intruders into information systems, hackers began calling these destructuve computer users crackers.

Observe the distinction between hackers and crackers :)

Radio Buttons / UltraOptionSet

I am currently using data binding extensivly in a winforms application. This has proved to be very successful until radio buttons were required. The radio button control does have a databindings property but this means each radio button itself would have to be created and data bound to which is no good when the options are dynamic :(

Dynamic databound radio buttons were successfully acheived using the Infragistics UltraOptionSet. This control allows DisplayMember, ValueMember and DataBindings properties to be set and from this a dynamic number of correctly labelled radio buttons are created and on top of that they are all databound :)

Winforms DateTime Databinding

Winforms and databinding has significantly improved in .NET 2.0 and a line of code such as - txtName.DataBindings.Add("Text", DataObject, "ClientName"); - just works with both data and nulls :)

However, the DateTimePicker and its ability to handle nulls is not quite a simple. To handle nulls with the DateTimePicker a few extra lines of code is needed.

The format property of the DateTimePicker control needs to be set. I have chosen Custom and as such the custom format is also set.
dtpAppointment.Format = DateTimePickerFormat.Custom;
dtpAppointment.CustomFormat = "dd/MMM/yyyy HH:mm";

This next line is really the most crucial. Notice the only difference with the simple single data binding line above is now there is a true paramater at the end. This is the formattingEnabled argument and without formattingEnabled set to true the handling of nulls just does not work!!!
dtpAppointment.DataBindings.Add("Value", DataObject, "AppointmentDate", true);

Happy binding :)

Caricatures

We wanted to create a fun and geeky theme and DimpleArt supplied the goods :)