As of right now (26/08/2009 10:44 GMT) the world of uk.com domains is hurting.  It seems like someone in Microsoft Phishing has made a wee mistake.  In IE7 or IE8 if you visit a .uk.com domain and have your phishing filter turned on you’ll most likely be told “This is a reported fishing website”. 6 out of 10 of the top Google results for “uk.com” present this behaviour.  Let’s hope they fix it quick smart.

Update:
It seems to be all sorted now.

General Add a Comment.   

As one of the eggheads here at Sumac I’ll be putting up some technical posts from time to time. Hopefully these will prove useful to other developers.

A while back I had to jump through the hoops of getting some Ajax going using Json on an ASP.NET 2.0 web service. It was for a reality version of PredictorPro.

So for today’s recipe our ingredients are:

• ASP.NET 2.0 web site with web service
  We’re using a web site with the service inside. This should work for a similar web app or stand alone web service app.
• ASP.NET Ajax Extensions 1.0
• jQuery (currently 1.3.2)
• Ajax
• Json

The key areas to cover are:

• Setting up the web service to handle Json
• Making the Ajax call in jQuery

Setting up the web service

1. If you haven’t already got it, you’ll need the ASP.NET Ajax Extensions 1.0. They can be downloaded from the link above. Once installed, add a reference to System.Web.Extensions.

2. In the web.config ensure you have:

<system.web>
<compilation>
<assemblies>
<add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
</assemblies>
</compilation>
</system.web>

3. To handle the Json, in the web.config you’ll also need:

<system.web>
<httpHandlers>
<remove verb="*" path="*.asmx"/>
<add verb="*" path="*.asmx" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory" validate="false"/>
</httpHandlers>
</system.web>

4. Your web service class should look something like (important part is the ScriptService reference):

Imports System.Web
Imports System.Web.Services
Imports System.Web.Services.Protocols
<System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService()> _
<WebService(Namespace:="http://tempuri.org/")> _
<WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo:=WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)> _
<Global.Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.DesignerGenerated()> _
Public Class WebService
Inherits System.Web.Services.WebService
<WebMethod()> _
Public Function HelloWorld(ByVal ArgumentName As String) As String
Return "Hello World " & ArgumentName
End Function
End Class

Making the Ajax call with jQuery

As simple as:

$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: '/WebService.asmx/HelloWorld',
data: '{ArgumentName:"ArgumentValue"}',
contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
dataType: 'json',
success: function(msg) {
// Celebrate
}
});

Best of luck and drop any questions or comments below.

Geekery Add a Comment.   

Having a website these days is as important as having a mobile phone, especially if you own a business and want to grow. With this said, don’t rush in, design a website, put it up on the internet and hope for over night success.

Developers, designers, project managers and the especially the client need to understand the needs, goals, strategies and brand. This all sounds very obvious; however it’s not always completely understood from the start.
If you own and run a business it’s important to have an identity, this could be visual (brand colours and logo) and reflect how you are perceived by your clients, and consumers in general. Good design is very important and these days quite vital, especially on the web.

Before starting any design or planning functionality, we still need to understand the needs of the business and end user (consumer). What are we trying to do here? Market an existing brand, sell a service, a product or (subtlety) interact with users via a forum? These are the questions we need to ask before deciding on the project objectives.

Once we understand the needs it’s time to form a strategy. This could be a long term strategy for the business or (short term) just for this phase of website development.
To consider the identity of the website, we need to see the bigger picture. Once we understand all of these elements, we can form a solid brief.

The brief should contain information and defined criteria relevant to the project and the business. It should list all the people involved, including the client, suppliers, developers and designers. Then there are goals, history, objectives, milestones, deliverables, timings and budget. Designers, managers and developers work closely to make accurate decisions and come up with a solution.

After you win the pitch, then this brief is used for the design and development and also distributed to everyone involved in the project.  Working closely to the brief ensures everyone involved understands the project and minimizes any misunderstandings or scope creep.

Processes Add a Comment.   

Some general notes on speakers as much for my own reference as for anyone else’s benefit. Apologies for patchy and subjective nature.

Werner Vogels
Unpredictability of scale. Minimise infrastructure risk by utilising the cloud.

Arianna Huffington
Use technology to facilitat new models and expose resistence of stakeholders in established power structures. Huge investment in USA lobbying has failed.

Clare Lockhart
Applying new models, networks and processes exposed and facilitated by new technology to bring reconstruction and stability to failed states.

Nick Bostrom
Look at recent developments as part of a bigger picture in which humanity may or may not survive. We are young and very small.

Gavin Starks
Monitoring energy consumption in detail on an organisational and individual level using new technology, smart devices to avoid peak<service>.

William Heath
Placing responsibility and access to personal data back in the hands of the individual who manages their profile and allows organisations access as appropriate.

Steve Papa
Information uses up attention resource which prevents citizens from processing important information such as the incredibly duplicitous behaviour of our institutions.

Umair Haque
Positive effects of viral growth are countered by overwhelming negative effects which result in a failing society. A new constructive capitalism is needed for the 21st century.

Matt Locke
Youth campaign facilitated by new broadcast mechanisms raise questions about “value” in youth audience/producers.

Andy Baio
Elements of game play can encourage engagement and interaction with positive activity such as fundraising.

Gerry Jackson
Broadcasting radio from UK to counteract appalling repression and atrocity in Zimbabwe.

Matt Webb
Small design company with broad ranging activity, discussed macroscope whereby individual view seen in larger context. Illustrated by curved diagram of New York showing whole city and immediate surroundings.

Jay Parkinson
Bringing medical services online, specifically the relationship between patients and their doctor, to allow better access to healthcare.

Ian Neild
Amusing introduction to the evolution of man gradually becoming upright only to end up crouching over a computer. Speculated on where we go with mobile devices.

Derek McAuley
Introduced the concept of the digital economy.

Nigel Shadbolt
Described web science as a natural successor to computer science as the entity itself becomes worth studying. Spoke of the semantic web and how it is still taking shape.

Charlie Leadbetter
Made an assertion that the issues around the future of education are most explicit in the world’s poorest urban habitats and suggested that simply making technology available could help.

Richard Baraniuk
Discussed the Open Education project which aims to make text books available under licensing based on creative commons like model.

Sugata Mitra
Fantastic presentation on his research into whether children can teach themselves with a computer and no tuition. Amazing results from his hole in the wall project and giving Tamil speaking children English data on microbiology/genetics.

Iqbal Quadir
Demonstrated a relationship between commerce and distribution of power in the formation of English parliament and how new models could empower developing populations.

Ian Lipkin
Demonstrated how communication technology was playing a huge part in furthering the understanding of how illness spreads across the globe by combining data from different sources including google web trends.

R K Pachauri
Discussed global warming and the significance of the internet as a contributor.

John Van Oudenaren
Demonstrated library of congress multi billion dollar project to make historical documents from across the world available online.

Bradley Horowitz
Discussed evolutionary nature of web technology (and companies tha toperate within it) in a survival of the fittest way and how that relates to google’s approach to applications.

Thomas Gensemer
Obama campaign was very carefully managed top down to provide a sandbox for all the activity that essentially got him elected.

Adam Afriyie
Shocking sound-bit laden prepared speach on how the tories are embrassing new technology.

Tom Watson
Spoke of all the positives that have emerged within government despite his obvious frustration at the pace of change. Making data available to the public is high on the agenda.

Some key themes of the day
Data availability. Raw information versus curated or editorial. Technology as a facilitator for changed behaviour.

Events Add a Comment.   

This blog was originally intended to document one small development company’s investigation and potential adoption of an open source development methodology after several years of reliance on and expertise in Microsoft technologies.

However, between the time it was conceived and the time we got some thoughts together, the whole debate around openness in general has taken off.

So what shall we do with opening up? Well, it seems to me we need to engage with more people in order to put our company in a stronger position. We’re constantly busy here but we’d like to be able to take on more jobs that inspire us. In order to have more control over the kind of work we engage in, we need more people who want to work with us.

We’ve never been particularly interested in presenting ourselves in a polished kind of way so this blog is going to show Sumac in its open and messy glory. We may embarass ourselves a little occasionally but what the hell?

Let’s see what happens.

General Add a Comment.