By Fernando G. Overview First off, we need to have a quick overview of what REST means to the development community, and we can start by what does REST stands for?  It stands for Representational State Transfer.  Right, it did not help a lot, right? In the SOA era, we have Service Oriented Systems interacting between them exposing Services, some applications act as consumers and some as producers.  At the end, a Service Oriented Architecture allows an organization to create a well thought and organized set of libraries being used uniformly among all of the participants with no redundancy of business rules and specially having a single set of Services.  Well, not always the case.  It re...

By Cesar O. This is a topic that, as a web designer, I don’t like a whole lot, because compatibility for IE6 in websites costs time, effort and money; but this is not the main problem, the main problem is that you can spend more time (and I have seen this several times) making your site work for IE6 than actually creating the whole website; so, How can you minimize this? How can you reduce the cost of compatibility with IE6? There are some simple steps you can take to try and ensure compatibility and/or reduce the time you spend making it work for IE6. 1-      From conception, from the first line of html you start typing, remember that this is supposed to work for IE6. What I mean by ...

By Edith Colegio If you haven’t already, you should think about adding social capabilities to your website. This will help you attract new users, and keep them on your website for longer and get them to come back more often.  The use of existing toolkits like the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit can be very useful to achieve this. Using the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit You can use this toolkit to integrate presence, instant messaging, and contact information using the following interfaces Windows Live Messenger UI Controls       These controls are a set of UI building blocks. The UI Controls are easy to add to an existing XHTML page. They provide a professional UI ...

By Cesar Olivas There can be as many answers for this question as people who blog, but the growth of the internet has revolutionized communications, the way we get information across, especially in places where the media is property of the government. In these kinds of places, where people cannot freely speak their mind, blogging can be extremely attractive, this is their way to express their thoughts. For the rest of us, the answer will differ. Some people would say (and have told me) that blogging is a waste of time, that I cannot possibly get anything from it, but I know that they are wrong. In this age, blogs are used to inform, to teach, to spread the word about news, technology, a...

By Edith Colegio   When it comes to SharePoint site branding, you think about styles, pages library, web parts, etc. But then you realize your site has another “side”… the “_layouts” section where it involves all pages: 1) People and groups (site permissions), 2) All site content, 3) Site settings, and all of them use a different masterpage than the rest of your site!   Then you think you can “customize” those pages with a simple modification to your “Application” master page (using your site’s theme of course). That’s not as easy as it looks. According to Microsoft there are two ways to modify/customize the application.master page:   1.       Modify the application.master page in t...

By José Cortes   A little background: with SharePoint 2007 you had the option of installing the portal in WS2003 or WS2008, either in their 32bit or 64bit options, and you could choose between the core system WSS 3.0 or the full upgrade to MOSS 2007. In all of these cases you were able to use .NET framework 2.0 and 3.0, and with some patches you could even use the 3.5 version. Now with the new SharePoint 2010 (read as “SharePoint twenty ten”) we have a new name for WSS 3.0, and it is Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010. It is still the heart of the platform and provisions the basic services of SharePoint that allows you to deploy your custom templates and instantiate them in your list...

By Cesar Olivas When you start creating a website, you have to make some choices before you start. Some of these choices are using HTML or XHTML, Tables or Divs, Floats or Position, Inline Styling, etc. In this post I will give you some explanation of all the elements that you usually need to choose from. DoctypeEvery website needs to have a doctype declared, failing to do so may result on your page rendered ineffectively.  The best way is declaring a doctype like xhtml transitional, strict or html 4.01 and help meet standard requirements. As a personal experience, this has been an issue in SharePoint implementations, since default masterpages do not include a doctype. In a customizatio...

By Cesar Olivas CSS has been around for some time now, since 1996, and it completely changed the way people used to make websites, for good. First came CSS1, with some support for fonts, color text, backgrounds, spacing between words, alignment, margins, paddings and some other attributes; it looked really good for its time. Then same CSS level 2 in 1998, which introduced some powerful features like positioning, z-index, media types. Then came the revision we use right now, CSS level 2 revision 1(CSS2.1) which fixed some errors in CSS2 and removed some unsupported features. But the web is evolving, turning into a more interactive, user-centered design; the technologies were bound to ev...

  A long time ago, before Internet and Social Media, companies used Marketing tools that now seem a little obsolete. Today not only people, but companies, take advantage of Social Media's benefits to market their products or services. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Linked in, Blogging, and Interactive websites are just a few examples of Social Media tools your company can use to get ahead in the brand race.   One of the most important things you have to do is try to make your site SEO friendly as much as you can. SEO is a kind of marketing in which you can get new businesses and clients even when you’re asleep. Let’s talk about something you can do to improve your Search Engine Opti...