While listening to the 200th Boagworld show the subject of how to get into web design/development came up. It seems to be a perpetual question, "do I go to University and get a degree or do I try and get a job and teach myself while working"?

The options now

From what was said by Chris Mills, who contributes to the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, and others a large number of the degrees and other courses available are not really up to date with current best practice. These courses are still often teaching table based layout and missing things like semantic HTML and accessibility.
This leads to students coming out at the end of a three or more year course with a large amount of debt and skills that would have been fine in 2000, but are somewhat lacking now.

Trying to get a job without higher qualifications has it's own issues, especially in the current economic climate. Web design companies tend to be small to medium sized business. They quite often don't have the time, money, culture or inclination to take on a person just out of school and let them learn on the job.
It takes a lot of resources to train up a member of staff and with the short amount of time a large number of us spend with any single employer, it can be seen as an expensive option for the agency.

Therefore you have the choice of spending up to four years doing a degree where they teach you out of date skills or you try to impress someone enough with your portfolio to employ you and hope your not just making tea for the next two years.

Kiva.org is a charity website that allows individuals to provide the capital for micro loans to the working poor.

The Kiva Available Loans widget is a control designed to be used with the BlogEngine.Net blog platform. This control lists, via the Kiva API, a number of the latest loan requests that have not yet been fulfilled.

The available loans can display a developer specified number of thumbnail images. When selected, each image displays a pop up box containing details of the entrepreneur and a link to the loan details page.

Kiva Available Loans control with a basic Kiva styling.

Kiva Available Loans control with the loan description pop up displayed. The contol has a basic Kiva styling.

The Kiva Available Loans widget is released under version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

The latest version of the control can be downloaded here.

In September 1995 I started my first job in the IT world as technical support at a local university. The internet was young and I remember the first time I started a copy of Netscape, I was blown away. I just wanted to create my own pages, so I went on line and taught myself how to write HTML, JavaScript and classic ASP, and have been developing web sites and applications ever since.

I'm sure, like many other web developers and designers I'm often asked by people how to get started in this business. Obviously there is a lot more options and information around now than when I started out, but I think you can learn a almost all you need to know without paying a penny.

So here are 10 essential internet resources you should check out if you want to start a career in web development.

Converting HTML & JavaScript to an ASP.Net control

In the last post we created a image gallery control using HTML and JavaScript using the jQuery library. In this post we are going to take this control and turn it into an ASP.Net control that can be used in an ASP.Net website or web application.

There are number of steps we are going to have to go through to wrap the HTML / JavaScript construct we created in the last post and render it out from an ASP.Net control.

The control needs to allow the web site designer to be able to modify various settings, such as the period between image changes and the fade out time. It needs to allow definition of the different images within the array and, lastly, render the modified the HTML and JavaScript.

Why start using jQuery with ASP.Net?

I have been working with internet technologies now for over ten years and for most of those I have worked with Microsoft technologies, such as ASP or ASP.Net.

For most of this time there has always seamed to be a massive disconnect between the backend ASP or ASP.Net code and the front end HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I have often found that when people build sites using technologies like ASP.Net they ignore the power of JavaScript especially, instead either doing things through backend code or using another technology, such as Flash.

This is, I think, because:

• As most screen readers do not support JavaScript, any critical functionality that is implemented in JavaScript needs to also be implemented in backend code. This increases the development time.
• Documentation on how to access the HTML rendered by ASP.Net controls via front end JavaScript is very limited.
• Most people find JavaScript development tools limited in their functionality and therefore development is more difficult than backend development using tools like Visual Studio.
• Various browser implementations of JavaScript are massively different, this causes many compatibility headaches.

This is why I was very interested in the announcement announcement that Microsoft where going to start shipping jQuery, the JavaScript library, with Visual Studio. This should be a real boast to JavaScript integration with ASP.Net and means ASP.Net developers have no excuse now not to learn JavaScript.