Web.Stuff.Is.Tuff.Stuff

Was busy learning how to customize web pages on a SharePoint site and developing webparts for the past two weeks. As you know, I'm not a very web-savvy person and doing all that means is a struggle for me. Being a framework developer, I really have no "design-sense" for web pages and I certainly don't understand why rounded-corners are so important, not to mention how to make them. So that's one big problem for me.

I have also not been keeping myself updated with the latest web technologies *no time lah*. I actually planned to skipped ATLAS and dive straight in to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) when it is ready (which will be soon). But then, when I discovered that I need to develop a rotating banner ad that automatically refreshes after a certain interval, I knew I had no choice liow.

The out-of-the-box AdRotator control that comes with ASP.NET doesn't auto-refreshes without posting-back the whole web page. Sigh! Armed with 2 days of ATLAS knowledge, I managed to hack-up a rotating banner ad on a plain web page but the implementation was nasty, I had a web service running behind. That's a bit overkill for a banner ad right?.

After seeking some wise-guidance from my colleague, Foo Shen, he provided me with a near end-to-end sample that uses plain AJAX concepts with no dependencies on any external libraries. I couldn't visualize how the client scripts work with the server methods *Where's ma delegate man?!* Everything is like wire-up here, wire-up there and I'm going *Tayar-Short-Wayar* already. The occasional manual output of HTML tags and Javascripts is also driving me nuts. *Where's ma classes? Where's ma Generics?!*

Aiyo... why must I be doing all these leh? I sure miss my component development and framework days. *Sobs*