Many a time you use the <a href'#' title='display a message' /> to display a message when you want some hover over text to display additional information, which is fine, but what if you want to display some more fancy text, lets say in HTML you are stuck.

So I went on the search to find something that was easy to implement.

I came across a number of different popups

• overLIB
• ToolTips by jQueryTools
• qtip
• SimpleTip

Here is how I have implement the library

overLib.zip (71.66 kb)

The latest fad is to create Carousels to display images, and allow for easy navigation.  I have not been able to find any .NET controls to enable you to create a Carousel on a web page.

So I set myself the task of generating a web page control to allow for easy, managed code, configuration of a Carousel Control in .NET

First I went on the hunt for a simple javaScript Carousel that I could use, I found a lovely Carousel by Doug Greenall, the information on his blog goes in to great detail of how the Carousel works, but this was not intention to go in to detail about the inner working of a Carousel.

So I downloaded Doug Greenall's Carousel and then went to adapt the javaScript code to create a single DLL Control that could be reused.

The end product is a small DLL that can be dragged and dropped in to your ASP.NET application or Website

Carousel.dll (21.50 kb)

The project solution was generated using Visual Studio 2008 Pro,with a Target Framework of ".NET Framework 2.0"

Carousel.zip (191.73 kb)

How to use the Carousel

Okay, so now I've built the Carousel Control, you now want to to know how to use it?

• First create a new WebSite
• Add the Carousel.dll or a project reference to your website
• On the web page register the control (or add it to your web.config)

• Then add the control to the page, as seen below

• Next in the code behind you need to add to the CarouselDetail collection, which will add the images, links to the Carousel

And that is it, the more you add to the CarouselDetail collection the more items will appear on the Carousel.

I've always been able to create a standalone DLL control that can be reused in other web applications.  I've never really found out how to embed other resources, or more to the point JavaScript files.

Until now

Here's how to embed the file:

1. Create a js file such as carousel.js
2. In Visual Studio, select the file in Solution Explorer and change the Build Action property to "Embedded Resource"
3. Build the project and the carousel.js file is now part of the assembly (you don't need to distibute the js file now it's part of the assembly)

Now to get the resource out using code:

So if we have a resource named Control.carousel.js we can use the following to include it in our page:

System.IO.Stream script = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceStream("Control.carousel.js");
System.IO.StreamReader sr = new System.IO.StreamReader(script);
Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptBlock(GetType(), "carousel", sr.ReadToEnd().ToString(), true);
sr.Close();