Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Mon 13 Oct 2008

CRM Sandpit
Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides flexible and familiar business software that allows your organisation to streamline sales, marketing and service based operations. Powerful integration features with other Microsoft Product families enables your organisation to leverage previous investments in Microsoft Technologies.

Dynamics CRM can be used by a wide range of organisations, ranging from small start-up companies wishing to journalise customer activity in a centralised location to large multi-national coprorations seeking to segment different parts of their business processes.

Ok…so that’s just sales talk like every other company out there. Don’t take our word for it, drop us an email using this link and try it for yourself using the CRMSandpit.

What is the CRMSandpit?

In short its a no obligation trial of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We can set up a user account for you, and you can do anything you want within CRM that you would be if you had installed it for yourself. The only difference is that its already set up and running for you and you don’t have to deal with the administrative headache of ensuring you have backups and a secured network.

If you decide to go ahead with an implementation of Dynamics CRM we can easily export the customisations and data you entered and import them into your live environment.

So what are you waiting for?

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Tue 07 Oct 2008

Say you have two columns, a left and a right column. The left column is to be the navigation are and the right column the content. This is standard for most web sites.

What happens when you want to add a footer to the left column? for example your contact details? sure you could add lots of padding and margins etc but that would break your accessibility. I had a customer that wanted this exact feature in SharePoint 2007 recently.

To be able to have two columns you have to have three divs, the container then the left and right columns.

To maintain accessibility standards and have a screenreader be able to see the navigation, then the content, then the footer you need to do something a bit more sneaky than just pad the navigation.

create your html as below

[code lang=HTML]
<div id=“Container”>
<div id=“LeftNav”>...</div>
<div id=“Content”>...</div>
<div id=“LeftFooter”>...</div>
</div>

Now that you have the html you can style it using CSS.

#Container
{
   height: auto;
   width: 150em;
   margin: auto;
   clear: both;
   position: relative; /* you will see the importance of this shortly*/
}
#LeftNav
{
   width: 35em;
   float: left;
}
#Content
{
   width: 115em;
   float: right;
}
#LeftFooter
{
   position: absolute;
   left: 1em;
   bottom: 1em;
   width: 13em;
}

By setting the position of the container div to relative, you are then able to override any of its child containers using absolute values RELATIVE to the bounds of the container. This means that the left footer will always be at the bottom left (with a 1em margin) of its parent.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Tue 30 Sep 2008

You’ve developed a brand new site. It’s great; there is lots of good content; it’s standards compliant; And as it’s in .Net you have used the customErrorPages features of the framework. Brilliant. So why does your error page get indexed when you delete files from the site?

The .Net framework detects that your page is no longer there and so sends an HTTP Status Code 302 to the browser along with a redirect to the error page. The error page is then successfully served within the framework and as such sends an HTTP Status Code 200 to the browser. A user may well be able to read the text on the screen that says their file was not found but the bot crawling the site will think the page is still available as it received an HTTP Status Code 200.

To resolve this you need to do two things:

 
1. Check the page exists - if it doesn’t server the error page.
 
2. Send the correct error code to the browser.

Check the page exists

In your global.asax you need to check the request is a valid one so within the application_BeginRequest code block add the following:

protected void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//get the url
string url = Request.RawUrl;
//check the document exists on the file system
if ((!System.IO.File.Exists(Server.MapPath(url))))
{
//if the document does not exist serve the error page
Server.Transfer("/Error/FileNotFound.aspx");
}
}

Send the correct error status

Now that you can tell whether your page exists you can send the correct status, in your error page page_load event simply add:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Response.StatusCode = 404;
Response.Status = "404 Not Found";
}