Please, for your own good, preload your CSS images.

It’s becoming more popular to use the :hover pseudo-class to toggle a background-image in a <div> block to simulate various visual effects, but many developers are making the mistake of not preloading the :hover image. It looks unprofessional when a user hovers over an image and has to wait for a new background-image to download and display.

As you can see above, there is a small, awkward delay, which isn’t always so small, that occurs when a :hover background-image is not properly preloaded.

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In response to my article on Custom Binary Serialization in .NET, a visitor asked me for a specific example of a custom serialization class of .NET’s MailMessage class.

As I mentioned in the article, I struggled with the MailMessage and MailAddress class because they cannot be serialized unless you use custom serialization (which can be a big pain because it takes quite a bit of time to create a custom class). I spent days trying to serialize the MailMessage class using conventional methods, only to find that there is no quick workaround for it other than custom serialization.

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If you’re developing on a laptop with a smaller screen, you can use all the screen real estate that you can get. I have recently optimized my Firefox in order to maximize the amount of screen space available for web pages.

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In .NET, serialization is the process of converting a complex object into a bit stream or XML string, which can be saved into a file or sent over a network connection. Serialization is extensively used in web services to transfer information from client to server, and for saving .NET objects into an SQL database.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to implement binary serialization in .NET; you’ll quickly find that many objects in .NET are not natively serializable, so I’ll also show you how to customize an object to manually make it serializable.

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I use the same machine to do development and to do all of my web surfing/school work/e-mails. Often times I don’t want MSSQL server and IIS running when I’m not working because it wastes resources and slows down my computer.

Customize your environment
Windows makes it simple to customize your environment so services like IIS, MSSQL, WebClient, etc. can be started and stopped just by running a small BAT file. To create your own development environment BAT file: Read the rest of this entry »