Like any CMS, Ektron’s CMS400 has it’s positive elements and negative. For instance, a free one such as Joomla. Wow, I found that complicated and I find .Net easy. Sitekit, such an attractive CMS, but they don’t exactly supply an API for you to build your own pages. CMS400 does. And that’s what we needed, so great! Right? Ummm… No.

Read on to find out! And leave us a comment if you’ve had similar problems with Ektron or other CMS systems.

What are Callbacks?

There’s always a situation in ASP.Net that every developer would find Callbacks useful. Imagine you have a simple person search using forename and surname text boxes and a button to initiate the search. When the button is pressed the whole page is then sent back to the server for processing and then a new page is downloaded back to the client containing the new information. This is what you may already know as a Postback. But what if you could cut that process down and only retrieve and update the parts of your web page that actually need updating without sending the whole thing back to the server? Well, that’s what Callbacks do!

Read on for an easy to follow tutorial on how to implement them.

We love WordPress – it’s a fantastically written and extremely useful tool! That said, today I noticed that our Tweet This plug-in’s Tweet functionality didn’t actually work! Therefore I requested it’s removal and supplied some new graphics for our own custom sharing links. While we were working on design, we also added the popular Facebook Like box to the bottom of each post.

More design improvements are on the way! Let us know what you think in the comments.

Update: We accidentally lost some of the files during our WordPress backup and update yesterday, but we’re just about back to normal today

We recently got asked to make a tool that merges individual Excel workbooks to one ‘master’ workbook. I did have to scour my Excel 2010 interface because I was certain that this feature would be built in.

I then google’d it and there are plenty of custom add-ins already out there that do this. However, most I found were not free. I did find a particularly good free one, but it was overly complex for the task at hand.

This tutorial demonstrates how to use the Interop libraries to create a simple tool for merging Excel Workbooks. We’re only going to be providing C# code snippets to perform the merge here, the form will have to be your own invention!

This tutorial will cover creating a simple class and adding a function to it that serializes its properties and values to an XML string.

What Is Serialization?

Serialization is a way of outputting a class to a file or to memory. We’ve used it plenty to export our classes to XML. The reverse process is ‘Deserialization’; allowing you to create an instance of a class based on a file / memory stream. It’s clever stuff and very useful for such tasks as importing and exporting data.

If you’ve seen the SeaBuyer Admin project in our portfolio, you may have noticed the Order Notes form we created. It has no Windows title bar, but it has rounded corners, a gradient fill background, a drop-shadowed title and can still be dragged around the screen. This tutorial will focus on showing you how to remove the title bar, add the rounded corners and set the form (or a control) to allow form movement. Read on to find out more!

We couldn’t make a shopping application without making the accompanying admin application. Without it would be too much like hard work for some poor folk over at Oceanlink.

We created an app to decrypt the orders coming in, manage them through the ordering process and with the ability to create and edit catalogues. Totally bespoke yet again, but we didn’t stop there…

Want to see more? Read on!

SeaBuyer from Oceanlink is an innovative shopping application for seafarers, allowing them to access various catalogues and purchase items via an intermediary business.

This app is an extremely lightweight, fully functional shopping experience and completely available offline. Read on to find out more!

One of our works in progress is a handy app for estate agencies. We creating this on behalf of one of our clients who kindly agreed to let us showcase it. The idea of the app is fairly basic. Enter the details of a property in to the app and the app produces the agency brochure with the ability to send it straight to the printer company.

Our solution uses C# and the .Net Framework 3.5 and implements lots of great features in a cool, sleek user interface. Read on for screen shots and more details…

We have quite a lot going on and our time is constantly consumed by long projects, so we decided to share with you what we’re up to. We are currently have 4 live projects. 3 of those are bespoke desktop applications and one is an ASP.Net website. Our clients wouldn’t want us telling you what these projects are so we can’t go in to specifics, but we can tell you some of the cool stuff we’re coding in to them.

The website we’re creating is probably the most time consuming and largest of them all. We have a very slack deadline on it so we’re taking every opportunity to make it great. We’ll be posting a live preview next month when we have it nice and secure. It’s written in C# and ASP.Net 3.5 and uses MSSQL as its back-end database. Some of the things we are implementing are…