Thanks John. Both look good. If anyone has any other suggestions I'd be glad to hear of them so I have as many options as possible to explore! Martin

Hi Rama, I've dabbled with WSS a bit and suspect that it would require quite a lot of configuring and custom libraries/workflows to use WSS as opposed to something prebuilt written particularly with these tasks in mind - Please correct me if I'm wrong or if you have any particular site template in mind? Also I haven't looked into using WSS on an internet server yet. Mainly because I'm not sure if doing so will open up any security issues. Do you run your WSS site on the internet or just an intranet? If the former are there any issues that I should know about? Martin

Anyone got any recommendations for reasonably priced (or free) software that can do the type of things mentioned in the subject line? Something suitable for at most 10 people if I can get the whole office using it or 4 if I can't! The kind of thing I would envisage as being useful would be a system that allows work items to be created either internally by us or externally by clients raising support requests through a web interface (e.g. message board) and that it should allow time tracking for work items along with basic reporting functionality. It should also allow us to attach internal documentation to issues and hopefully do a whole load of other useful stuff.

Thanks all, I'll get to grips with the basics first then come and revisit this thread for the further reading/viewing suggestions. It's not really to benefit my programming directly but more for my own interest. As I program a computer all day every day I figure I should at least have some idea how it works! @sibrowne I did see a few of the the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures series. Coincidentally I saw the one on processors just after reading Jon Stokes "inside the machine" and found it excellent for covering very simply some things that had been bugging me throughout reading that. (like how on earth one can physically manufacture chips containing millions of transistors) @mi5ke Chris Bishop in his lecture above did also include a water pipe demo to demonstrate logic gates. At the time I just assumed that it was a simplistic analogy bearing little relation to actual hardware implementations - I clearly should have been paying more attention!

Thanks all, I've ordered myself a couple of general text books on physics and electronics, I'll see how far they go in bridging the gaps. I'm quite happy to treat some of it as a black box (or magic!) especially if it starts veering into hard core maths as really I'm just trying to reduce the size of that gap in my knowledge and have at least some sort of conceptual overview. I'd still be grateful for recommendations of any particular texts that I should be looking at.

After programming for a number of years without coming from a comp sci background. I've recently been spending some time reading some more theoretical books about how processors work, how networks/data communications work etc. So currently I'm learning from top down and it's going OK. I feel though that as I didn't take physics at school beyond age 13 there are some fundamental foundations that I still don't have a handle on, that would help me understand the whole picture. Particularly the absolute basics of electronics. What electricity is, What voltage is, how logic gates are physically implemented in a way a layman can understand. Also I'm flaky on things like the physics of sound waves and how it relates to various audio formats. Has anyone come across any good book that explains basic physics for computer science from the ground up?

Sussed it! It happens when the View is on "Normal (Slow)" changing it to "Message" fixed it.

Now I'm in work again and getting the same issue. Is Chris just messing with my mind? :suss: I can only assume either that the code is written server side conditionally according to something about the Request and for some reason at home it gets written, at work it doesn't. Or some of the servers on the web farm have out of synch pages.

Hmm, Just logged in from home and SwitchMessage seems to be there now. It's inline in the page so I can't have been seeing an old version of the page or I wouldn't have been seeing any new messages. Maybe it's been quietly fixed?

I can see your point for readability. I think it would be nicer if VS had better support for manipulating these though such as colour coding all instances of a selected parameter or allowing automatic re-numbering if you want to insert another parameter in the middle of a list (or delete an existing parameter)

IMO You should use String.Format for this. string.Format(@" ... var expandedCtrl = document.getElementById(""%{0}""); ... ", hdn_expandedLinks.UniqueID)

Good Points. I'd better dust off my LogParser queries!

I'm getting the same error in Firefox as well. Not that it bothers me there as I don't get the modal dialogue but just FYI. If you have firebug installed and click anywhere on the div repeatedly you'll see the errors creeping up and up. Opening firebug shows the same problem with "SwitchMessage not defined".

Strange. I can't see it inline in the page at all. Searching for "SwitchMessage" only gives one result (in the onclick event) and no function definition for it

Actually. I've just thought. If I use Firefox to browse CP I won't get this problem as the javascript debugger is an IE option. Problem sorted (for me at least)! Cheers.

IE6

Being a web developer I have javascript debugging switched on. This means that for almost every action on the message boards I have to end up closing this message box! --------------------------- Error --------------------------- A Runtime Error has occurred. Do you wish to Debug? Line: 245 Error: Object expected --------------------------- Yes No --------------------------- This is pretty tedious and presumably will affect a lot of developers using this site. Could you please sort it out? The offending bit of code is this:

I don't think that the SwitchMessage function exists.

Thanks for the responses so far. We're not trying to support IE4 and NS4 explicitly, we don't test our sites in them and I know for a start the code I've written won't work in them as well as very likely things like our tree view and menu controls and pages that use AJAX! Related to Shog's point actually and going off on a bit of a tangent does anyone know where I can get reliable browser usage stats for the web as a whole? I know the w3c stats page but it's not a representative sample. Do any of the mega sites (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) make their stats available anywhere?

I work in a web development team of 2 people. I always just use document.getElementById('blah') My co-worker always uses a "getLayerObj" function and includes a reference to a 24KB javascript file (dynlib.js) just to use this. function getLayerObj(LAYERID) { if (ie4) return document.all[LAYERID]; else if (ns4) { var tempLayerObj = null; var tempParentObj = (arguments.length == 1) ? document : arguments[1]; for (var tempLayerLoop in tempParentObj.layers) { var tempObj = tempParentObj.layers[tempLayerLoop]; var tempConstructor = tempObj.constructor + ''; if (tempConstructor.indexOf('function Layer()') != -1) { if (tempLayerLoop == LAYERID) return tempObj; else if (tempObj.document.layers.length > 0) tempLayerObj = getLayerObj(LAYERID,tempObj); } } return tempLayerObj; } else if (dyn) return document.getElementById(LAYERID); } My opinion is this is unnecessary. I'm trying to get a feeling for whether mine is a minority or majority view so I'd be grateful hearing what everyone elses practice is? Cheers.

I have a class of UserControls all of which need to implement the same method. I can achieve this with an abstract method public abstract void foo(); However this has a disadvantage: (A) There is some commonality in the code that it would make sense to extract and put into the base class. I know that I can achieve this by //Base public virtual void foo ( BaseCode(); ) //Derived public override void foo ( SomeCode(); base.foo(); ) But then that gives me 2 disadvantages (B) It doesn't force a derived class to do it's own implementation of foo (C) if the derived class doesn't explicitly call base.foo(); my common code doesn't get called. Is there some other modifier or pattern I can use to achieve A, B, and C? Or. Is there a good reason why I should not be trying to achieve this?