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Premium Content articles are the very best articles from the world's leading internet technology, subject-matter experts. We have many categories of content below on a wide variety of subjects that have all been commissioned from big name authors.

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Generating Dynamic Bar Charts with ASP.NET

This tutorial will walk you through how to generate a dynamic bar chart image for displaying numeric data to your users in an easy-to-digest format. During the course of this tutorial you will learn about the classes that reside within the .NET Frameworks System.Drawing namespace, and how these classes can be used to vastly improve the user experience of your pages.
 
The code presented in this tutorial can be used to generate bar charts, like the image shown below, that can be based on any type of numeric data; this data could be stored in a database, passed from the user via a form or any other source. This tutorial does not require any third party components; all that’s required is natively built into the .NET Framework.

As usual, ASP.NET expert supplies all the code for download in the C# language and  VB.NET
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Kevin Marshall
21332

All CSS Photo Album layout

If you have moved to using CSS instead of tables for layout, then you will probably find that you come up against problems that had a simple solution when using tables, but it is difficult to work out exactly how to get round them using CSS. A photo album – or other listing of images, with a grid of photo thumbnails with captions is one of these issues. In this article we will learn how to display these images using CSS and in a way that offers benefits over and above that which can be achieved with tables.

Advertisement Sliding Billboard

Discover the power of interactive presentations – the Sliding Billboard ! Organize your work greatly in a virtual book, which auto scrolls and enables your users to slide from page to page or chapter to chapter naturally. You can present any type of work this way: your portfolio, photo albums, products index, web shop, ads and much more. Choose from the 13 cool CSS designs included, so your billboard always looks great and suites your site perfectly.

 

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Rachel Andrew
41095

Database Design: Simple SQL Queries

In today's beginners' Database tutorial, we explore a sample database model for a relatively simple system. In it we  look at some good examples of the different types of relationships that tables can have in a database. We then look at a couple SQL queries based on this model.

Rob then gently takes you to the world of  SQL JOINs and how we can use them to create information from data. We also modify data in a table, through the INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE queries. We finish up with a unique example of how to filter data, through the use of the NOT IN keywords and a nested query.

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Robert Stuttaford
12625

The Screensaver: Dynamic Flash from PHP

In today's tutorial we continue working with the Ming PHP extension.  Besides seeing in more detail how to work with the resource objects that the extension creates and works with, we learn some more about the PHP language and see how variable variables are used.

Instead of a "hello-world" demonstration, we'll look at a  real-life project: A few months ago I built a screensaver for a client that was essentially a slide show.  Besides giving them different image packs, we thought it would be cool if they could build their own custom image packs from their corporate image bank to use in the slide show.  We used PHP and Ming to implement the solution, detailed in this tutorial.

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Allan Kent
8477

Creating Calendars in PHP part 3

In this article in the series, we look at using the PHP mktime() command which allows us to create Unix timestamps for a particular date and time. By using the PHP explode() command we can split a time or date that's been entered by a user into its component parts for use with the mktime() function. We then look at the PHP strtotime() command which can perform date and time based addition and subtraction, so we can easily add or subtract a period of time to or from an existing date / time.

In the final section, we create a custom function readCalendarData() which accepts a month number and year, and searches the database to find all events on or between the start and end of the month and using SQL to turn the datetime field into a timestamp field to make it easier to work with, and to allow us to easily sort the records into order of date and time. We then modify our existing calendar code so that it checks to see if each day number exists in the array, and if it does to turn the day number into a hyperlink to allow the user to see all events on that particular day.

Please note that this article forms part of a chapter in the DMXzone e-book PHP Web Applications for Dreamweaver: Juicy Solutions for the Busy Developer.

 

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Gareth Downes-Powell
8137

DHTML: Spicing up Data Tables with Highlighting Rows

In the scripting and programming world we find many intimidating terms like "function literals." What in the world is a function literal? In this article, we'll show you how a function literal will allow you to attach some functionality to an event for every row of a data table. In the end, you'll have a nice looking table where the row that is moused over is highlighted for the user - all with alternating row colors and less code than you might think!
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Tom Dell'Aringa
6627

Advanced Photoshop Layering

We hear a lot about layers and how they're so cool in Photoshop. This article will take you through all the different food groups; from fill layers right through to complex uses of adjustment layers. Sometimes you discover things in Photoshop that you never thought of using before - this article will plant a few of those seeds. It's a great way of learning how to make your pictures and photos look as good as possible - they're not only used for arty stuff - while always preserving the original image intact so you can return to it any time you want. Read More
Gavin Cromhout
8691

Centering Designs with CSS

One of the more frustrating aspects of CSS is centering our fixed designs effectively on the page. I know this because it’s a question people ask me quite often—and in fact the idea for this article came from a reader concerned about how to do just this.

While CSS offers a logical means to center designs, the problem is with browser implementation. No surprises there! It’s more than a bit frustrating because with table-based layouts this was a no-brainer. We’d simply use the align="”center”" attribute to center the containing table, and the entire layout would then be centered.

So how do we achieve the same effect in CSS? The good news is that we can. The bad news is that to center our content effectively, we have to employ a workaround in order to support multiple browsers. The good news is that the "hack" will display centered designs in all kinds of browsers, including Netscape 4.x, which is pretty cool.

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molly holzschlag
9072

Flash Gordon and the attack of the PHP Extensions

The basic PHP language is feature-rich and powerful enough for you to handle most web applications without any hassles. And if you’re working with PHP mainly by using the built-in Server Behaviors that come with Dreamweaver and a little bit of hand coding, you are missing out on a whole host of functionality within PHP.

This extra functionality comes through PHP’s use of extensions – libraries of code that can be loaded into PHP as and when you need them. In today’s tutorial we’ll take a look at the kinds of things that these extensions can do, talk a bit about a PHP data type that is often used when you work with PHP extensions, and then take a look at how one of these extensions work by looking at the Ming extension for PHP.

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Allan Kent
5881

Testing Accessible Web Sites

With Dreamweaver, you can check your mark-up using the built-in validator, or you can use the validators on the W3C site, because markup and CSS is either right, or it isn't. A web site can be technically accessible (that is, all the alt text is there etc) but still very difficult to use, so you need to test it. In this tutorial, Rachel looks at testing your sites with the free Lynx text-only browser, or a trial edition of a screen-reader and what to look for.

Rachel then demonstrates common errors that come to light at tetsing time, by looking at accessibility mistakes on big web sites such as Macromedia.com and The Register.

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Rachel Andrew
2361

Introduction to Database Design - Normalisation

In this tutorial, for beginners to database design, Rob Stuttaford writes on how to design databases that are normalised - the process of breaking data down into its most basic components. We do this to remove redundancy in data, and for a couple of reasons. Data is more flexible when in a granular format. Instead of using one big table, like with any spreadsheet program, we make distinctions between bits of data and then relate these bits to create meaningful information.

This means that you don't need to store the same data twice (or three times, or four times..) so your databases are smaller; there's less risk of incorrect or contradictory data breaking your apps or confusing reports and queries.

Many beginners don't spend long enough designing their databases before populating them with data, often because received wisdom is that database design is a discipline second only to Quantum Mechanics in complexity. It isn't, as Rob's self-contained normalisation tutorial shows.

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Robert Stuttaford
11294

Create a Parameter Error Checking Routine

The main reason for building template-driven sites is so that another user can amend the content themselves using Dreamweaver or Contribute without coming to you for small changes and advice - so you need to make the templates as self-explanatory as possible, to avoid having to field lots of queries on which template parameter takes which values, and ending up with just as many questions as you had before!

In this 17-page tutorial, Brad details how he went about a real-life project to intercept incorrect Template Parameter values and display a list of allowed values to prevent the Dreamweaver/Contribute content editors from causing page or Template engine issues using Template MultipleIf Conditional regions. This requires a little more front-end load time (in the sense that you have to actually build the functionality into the template) but provides the content editor with immediate feedback if they input an incorrect value. Be smart and incorporate this into your template development routine and your users will be happier for it.. and so will you!

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Brad Halstead
4809
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