label_Folder.Text = "Converting documents to PDF.";

If additional code follows the label_Folder statement, it may not update the Text property. You can force the property to update with the Refresh method:

label_Folder.Text = "Converting documents to PDF.";
label_Folder.Refresh ();

The label will then be updated with the new content. If your using a ToolStripStatusLabel, you don’t have the option of using Refresh this way, i.e.

toolStripStatusLabel_ProcessingStatus.Text = "Status: 12 of 19 documents processed.";
toolStripStatusLabel_ProcessingStatus.Refresh ();

Instead, use this.Refresh () to force an update:

toolStripStatusLabel_ProcessingStatus.Text = "Status: 12 of 19 documents processed.";
this.Refresh ();

The first thing that need to change is the library references. It uses a Java style code which may have been used in an older version of iText for .NET.

using com.lowagie.text;
using com.lowagie.text.pdf;

should be written as:

using iTextSharp.text;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;

If you cut and paste the code from the examples to VS, you will see multiple errors. Change getInstance to GetInstance, open to Open, add to Add, close to Close. If your not sure about the function being used, delete it (include the period), type a period and the available functions will be listed.

The code will then compile correction in VS 2010. I recommend purchasing iText in Action because it will save you time in learning how to use iText. A knowledge of Java is beneficial, but not necessary to port the examples to .NET.

The following is a simple example of using iText with C#.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

using iTextSharp.text;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;

namespace Chap0101
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main (string [] args)
    {
      Console.WriteLine ("Chapter 1 example 1: Hello World");

      // step 1: creation of a document-object
      Document document = new Document ();

      // step 2:
      // we create a writer that listens to the document
      // and directs a PDF-stream to a file 

      PdfWriter.GetInstance (document, new FileStream ("Chap0101.pdf", FileMode.Create));

      // step 3: we open the document
      document.Open ();

      // step 4: we add a paragraph to the document
      document.Add (new Paragraph ("Hello World"));

      // step 5: we close the document
      document.Close ();
    }
  }
}

1. JSFIDDLE (http://jsfiddle.net/)
   This site can be considered a sandbox for JavaScript. You can write code in HTML, CSS, and of course, JavaScript and run, test, and tidy up the code with automated tools.
2. JSHINT (http://jshint.org/)
   Debugging tool for JavaScript and enforcing coding conventions. More powerful that JSLINT.
3. JSONLint (http://www.jslint.com/)
   Specialized tool for validating JSON.

There are many good books on JavaScript and jQuery, but if your pressed for time and don’t feel like doing a lot of reading, you can watch a series of videos that will get you up to speed. These learning videos were recently released by .appendTo and will have you coding like a pro in no time. The videos range in length from 23 to 43 minutes and teach the basics and advanced concepts in JavaScript, to DOM manipulation and effects/animations in jQuery.

The videos loaded a little slow when I tried them, but this was because I was viewing them during the heaviest Internet traffic hours. Its a good idea to master JavaScript and jQuery since these will be important development tools for building Windows 8 applications. This knowledge will also make your web sites stand out from the competition. Learning new things broadens your mind and these videos will only take an evening to go through them.

If this doesn’t fix the error, then add System.Web as a reference to your project (see image below).

The error should be corrected after these changes are applied.

This update gives intellisense support for HTML 5 pages, CSS 3, and additions to JavaScript (i.e. geolocation and DOM storage). The only problem is that when you create a new web page or form, it doesn’t give you the HTML 5 DOCTYPE and html settings.

This is what is created in a new web form:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>

and this is how is should be formatted for HTML 5:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

This isn’t a big deal but hopefully future versions will have this fixed.

HTML 5 is important to learn because the web is moving towards it and it will be heavily used in Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system. Microsoft recently showed applications for Windows 8 written entirely in HTML 5 and JavaScript.

I found many solutions from searching on the Internet, but most of them didn’t work very well, if at all, and very few were designed for use with an asp:CheckBox. Many of the solutions used JavaScript or the JQuery framework. If I was using standard HTML controls (i.e. PHP development) I would use JavaScript to validate the controls.

After much trial and mostly error, I decided to find my own solution for validating if at least one checkbox was selected in a group of controls. I used C# code to determine if any one control was checked, followed by code to redirect the page to an anchor (i.e. <a name=”checkbox_controls”>Required</a>) on the current form. This code is placed in the form submission method (i.e. submitButton_Click) and placed before page validation (Page.IsValid), as in the following example

bool bIsValidChecked = CheckBox_Pickup_Option1.Checked || CheckBox_Pickup_Option2.Checked;

if (!bIsValidChecked )
Response.Write (“<script type=\”text/ecmascript\”>window.location.href = ‘#checkbox_controls’;</script>”);

// Set order time and session variables from the order form.

if (Page.IsValid & bIsValidChecked )
{

// form processing code

}

This isn’t the best solution, but its one that works quickly. I need to develop a custom control for validating checkboxes.

The problem with this control is that the first panel is always open. This doesn’t matter if you have multiple panels in the control, but if you just have one panel it doesn’t work well. With a single panel, it should be initially closed until you click on its header.

You can get the Accordion to default as completely closed by setting the SelectedIndex property to –1. The default setting is 0 which opens the first panel when the page is loaded. When you set it to –1, all of the panels will be closed until you click on its header. This setting makes it ideal for single panel use of this web control.

I was looking at creating a custom component to do this, but while looking at the jos_content table, which contains the articles in Joomla, I noticed a urls field. None of my sites used that field, so this would be a good candidate to hold an article’s URL. The URL text box will look the following:

If you enter a URL here, it will be saved and can be used to build a link to the page content.

How To Add a urls Field

Adding a urls field to a Joomla article is not an easy task for a novice webmaster. A good free tool for editing PHP content is Eclipse. Start your editor, and do the following procedure:

1. Open admin.content.html.php in the administrator/components/com_content/ folder.
2. Find the _displayArticleDetails function.
3. Add the following code at the end of the function before the </table> tag:

   <tr>
     <td valign="top" align="right">
       URL:
     </td>
     <td>
       <input class="text_area" type="text" name="urls" id="urls" size="40" maxlength="254" value="<?php echo $row->urls; ?>" />
     </td>
   </tr>

A URL field will now be displayed when you are editing an article. Anything you enter here will be saved in your Joomla database. Part 2 will show you how to use the URL that was saved with the article.

The solution to make videos cross platform is iframe embedding. This will allow a device to choose the right player for a video embedded on a web site.

iframe Embed on YouTube

A video can be embedded in YouTube with the following code:

<iframe class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="640" height="385"
        src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu06YnJlmiQ?fs=1&amp;h1=en_US" frameborder="0>
</iframe>http://www.youtube.com/v/bu06YnJlmiQ?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US

The URL in red is the URL of the video on YouTube. You need to include ?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US after the video URL otherwise the HTML page will be embedded in the page as opposed to just the video.

The following is an example of iframe embedding.