Sunday, December 6, 2009

Web Server projects (90's IBM commercial)

I've been trying to find the English language version of this 90's IBM commercial.

They basically are blame-gaming (server blames network, network blames developers, etc.) and I think the last lines are roughly:
"Who's job is it to make sure all this stuff works together?"
{uncomfortable pause}
"that would be yours"



The look on the lady's face at the end... Reminds me of every web-facing project. There are so many tiers and providers/teams to go with them. The most challenging part, and lengthiest (by duration, if not by effort) are 'making it all work together'

PayPal buttons in ASP.net 2.0

Getting a simple PayPal Buy It Now button working in an ASP.net 2.0 site was trickier than I thought. Because the entirety of an ASP.net 2.0 'page' essentially becomes the content within a HTML form tag ( <form>), the PayPal Buy It Now, with it's own HTML form conflicts.

Just placing the PayPal code within a basic ASP.net page, then clicking the PayPal 'Buy Now' button would refresh the current page. I was chasing popup blocking and cross-domain issues for a few minutes before I realized the page was just posting back to itself.

Ended up using the 'IFrames' solution described at
PayPal Button (Pay Pal Button ) SOLUTIONS!!!! - ASP.NET Forums
just cause I could bang it out in about an hour tonight. Maybe will look at the devloper kits in the future.

Also added in the hyperlink as a backup (if a customer does block pop-ups, or some other strict security setting in the future)

Also, the post to paypal didn't work when debugging locally. The page would open, but none of the post parameters were going across. Figured it was a local browser setting, and it worked when running from the live host, so I didn't dig any further on that one.