A lot has happened since the last time I updated this site. New Years resolution will definitely be to create a new portfolio website.

The reason for this post however is to let you know about a new service I have launched providing premium themes and starter kits for Umbraco. Check out the site at www.uskinned.net

Its been a busy start to the year and we will be launching a few new websites over the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more information and remember to check out our website for all the latest.

In a previous post I spoke about error handling in the global.asax file and sending an email with the error details. To include the global.asax file in your Umbraco website with this code you need to delete the app_global.asax.dll from your bin folder or your website will crash. I haven’t found any issues with removing this file yet and it looks like it isnt needed.

Its the end of our first month in the new madebycrunch headquarters. We have been working away on our new projects and can’t wait to get them live so that we can show off our work. The next month is going to be very busy and we will be showcasing our new work on the new madebycrunch website very soon.

The expandable textarea feature that has been introduced in firefox can be disabled with the following CSS code:

textarea {resize:none}

Came across this issue today for a LinkButton I was using inside a repeater control which was inside an UpdatePanel. It turns out that a LinkButton does not automatically cause partial page rendering in this situation. To solve this issue you need to register the LinkButton inside the Repeater for Asynchronous Postback.

rptSearchList.DataSource = loPagedDataSource;
rptSearchList.DataBind();

//Initialize link button for ajax
foreach (RepeaterItem loItem in rptSearchList.Items){
   if (loItem.ItemType == ListItemType.Item || loItem.ItemType == ListItemType.AlternatingItem){
      LinkButton lbFavourites = (LinkButton)loItem.FindControl("lbFavourites");
      
       ScriptManager ScriptManager1 = (ScriptManager)FindControlRecursive(this.Page, "ScriptManager1");
       ScriptManager1.RegisterAsyncPostBackControl(lbFavourites);
   }
}

The above code first finds the LinkButton based on its ID within the repeater control. In my example I have added one further step as my Repeater was part of a UserControl sitting within a MasterPage. The MasterPage held the ScriptManager so I used a method for finding the ScriptManager from the user control. The below code is a useful method I used to find the ScriptManager.

public static Control FindControlRecursive(Control controlToStartFrom, string ctrlIdToFind){
   Control found = controlToStartFrom.FindControl(ctrlIdToFind);

   if (found != null)
      return found;

   foreach (Control innerCtrl in controlToStartFrom.Controls){
      found = FindControlRecursive(innerCtrl, ctrlIdToFind);

      if (found != null)
         return found;
   }
   return null;
}

Its been another busy month with website launches for the new Traverse Theatre website and Cafe Gandolfi redesign. Both websites were implemented using the Umbraco CMS. Check out my portfolio section for more info on these projects.

Phase 2 of the Scotland’s Islands website is now live. The new website contains more comprehensive information on the events happening in and around Scotland’s Islands.

Over the last week I have launced several new improvements to the Scotland Food and Drink website. The News Section has had a major facelift putting more emphasis on the latest news published and making it easier to get the news articles that are relevant to specific areas of interest. New functionality has been added to the Buyers Guide giving users the ability to generate and download PDF versions of the companies that have been returned from the filtered results. The News Archive, Events, Reports, How Do I Guides and Buyers Guide Sections of the website now have browser history functionality. This previously wasn’t available since all updates on these pages were happening via AJAX calls. All calls within these sections are now added to the browsers history using ASP.NETs ScriptManager History functionality.

Search engines will not crawl pages with single quotes (’) in the URL. Umbraco does not automatically remove these if your page name contains a single quote.

You can easily remove these from the automatically generated URL in umbraco by adding the following code to the umbracoSettings.config file.

<requestHandler>
<urlReplacing>
<char org="'"></char>
</urlReplacing>
</requestHandler>