It's been a long time now since I've been doing any further blogging about the progress of our new website. Since then, a lot of things have happened, of which the most important thing is that we have now gone officially public!

And here's a sample of a screendump in PNG format, just for reference...

Added a 'Choose File' (from the server) listbox in the DownloadList section, so that one can re-use already uploaded files in different download lists across the site. It seemed a bit awkward having to upload a "new" file every time you wanted to put in a download somewhere...

Started investigating on the new WebShop. Found some open source on Codeplex, but they seem to be targeted more at a "mail-order" type of webshops. Since we are only going to sell our own software through the shop, I might actually decide to code a simpler shop framework from scratch: Maybe design an XML based datastructure (Products.cs ?) at the bottom and then probably some sections, like 'StoreShelf' and 'ShoppingCart' maybe?

And in the later stages of development we hook up the 'ShoppingCart' section to the ClearPark payment facility called 'ClearPark Redirect', which will do all the CreditCard stuff for us...

I finally managed to solve a nasty hovering issue on IE that has plagued my new menus lately. The solution was to properly modify the JavaScript for the menu in CSS Friendly Control Adapters to suit my own, specialized CSS menu structure.

My structure has some extra DIVs in it, to get at more sophisticated background image layout. As you can see, the menu now sports a full-coloured PNG background with alpha channel transparency for the shadow effect. I couldn't really figure out how to do it with a plain <ul><li> layout.

I also had to modify the ImageHandler.aspx to get the PNGs right. (PNGs are a special case in .NET. They need to be streamed first to a memory stream and then further to the the final output.)

Today I finally gave up my ambitions of fully AJAXing the site to get rid of the navigation-flickering :-<< Redesigning the site using AJAX UpdatePanels seemed the way to go to remedy this obvious weakness of ASP.NET - but it seems the redesigning job is simply too large to be worth the trouble.

Looking at other ASP.NET based sites, there is maybe no need to be very embarrased: Even many of Microsoft's sites suffer from the same flickering, so it seems this is more or less "the name of the game" with ASP.NET.

I concluded that my time will be better spent on developing the framework and features for our new website. And hopefully, there will be opportunities of getting rid of the flicker some time in the future without spending months on redesigning. Maybe the designers of "My Web Pages Starter Kit" decides to AJAX their base - or maybe Microsoft comes up with a better way!? (They designed the ASP.NET, so they really should take the responsibility here! IMHO, the flickering is a ridiculous design flaw...)