Matt Berseth

If you use AJAX in your web app's, you no doubt have made use of some sort of progress/status indicator that lets the user know that some operation is currently executing.  In the app I am currently working on we use an animated gif for this.  It works great, but sometimes you might find it nice to have more control over the indicator - i.e. interacting with it via JavaScript and styling it using CSS. So I did a little research and found a nice example of one built using script.aculo.us.  The demo page looked great so I downloaded the source to get a feel for how it worked.  I liked what I saw so I thought I would create a new AjaxControlToolkit control based on this example.  My original goal was just to port it over to ASP.NET, but as I started playing around with it I thought I...

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I am working on a project that needs a new screen for bulk entry tasks.  We have a few business scenarios coming up where we have people inputting 5 to 8 records of data at a time.  I met with a few of our analysts last week and hashed out a rough outline of what they were looking for.  About 10 times or so during the 30 minute meeting some form of the phrase 'kind of like excel' was mentioned.  Our data entry personnel are familiar with excel and our analysts thought an excel styled grid would make a lot of sense.  'An excel grid with a Submit button' was the phrase I had underlined twice in my notes.  I wasn't too worried about the grid's styling, but I wasn't quite sure what the best way to handle the 'bulk insert' requirement.  Most of our other grids require an explicit...

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A while back I wrote a post describing how the DetailsView, GridView, UpdatePanel and the AjaxControlToolkit's ModalPopup controls could be used to implement the common Master/Details UI pattern.  I cheated a bit when creating my original example in that I didn't really complete the implementation - the Save button on the popup didn't actually do anything.  Since writing that post I have received a lot of email and a number of people left comments asking me to complete the example - so here it is.  If you plan on reading through this article, I recommend playing around with the demo site to get a feel for how the page works.  All data changes are only persisted to memory, so don't worry about messing up the data set. Live Demo | Download Scenario I am sure everyone is pretty familiar with Master/Details style of editing data, but just in case -...

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Here are three quick tips you might find useful when using the Toolkit's Tab control.  I included demo's for all three tips so you can get a feel for how it looks and behaves. Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF, Opera) | Download   #1: How To Change the Selected Tab When the Tab Header is MousedOver By default the tab control will switch the selected tab when a different tabs' header is clicked.  Depending upon the content you are displaying, you might find it useful to change the selected tab as the user mouses over a different tab.  I saw an example of this on designflavr.com.  This site has a tab control that displays the categories and tags and some other miscellaneous links.  These items are collected into a tab control that has been placed in the right hand sidebar.  You can get this mouseover style navigation by adding only...

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One of the new controls that shipped with ASP.NET 3.5 is the DataPager.  It's a flexible control that renders the paging elements data-bound controls that implement the IPageableItemContainer interface (currently only the ListView control).  The big change with the DataPager is that it is decoupled from the data-bound control it provides paging support for.  It can be embedded somewhere within the data-bound control's control hierarchy (like contained within the LayoutTemplate of the ListView), but it doesn't have to - It can exist on its own outside of the data-bound control as well. When I was writing my last post, I kind of wished the 3.5 GridView implemented the IPageableItemContainer interface.  It sure would have made things simpler for me.  So I thought I would take a shot at extending the GridView myself.  Read on for the details. Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF, Opera) | Download      Implementing IPageableItemContainer This is a...

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I received some positive feedback from my most recent post describing how to create a VS 2008 styled datagrid by using ASP.NET's ListView and DataPager controls.  A few people left comments, but I also received a handful of emails asking how to achieve this same look using the GridView.  So while this VS style skin was still fresh in my mind I thought I would write up a quick post on it.  Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF and Opera) | Download    Sorting To apply the custom sorting icon to the datagrid's header, I used the GridView's RowDataBound event to apply a custom CSS class to the header cell.  I then use the background image style to apply the sorting icon to the right of the header text.   Border Just like in my previous post, I use a series of DIV's to define the datatables frame.  I then use...

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I took a break from my recent Silverlight explorations to work on a new datagrid skin.  I thought the skin turned out fairly well so I figured I would pass it along just in case anyone else could find a use for it.  Like some of my other skins, it makes use of ASP.NET 3.5's ListView, DataPager and LinqDataSource controls.  Here is the run down of the features ...    VS 2008 style border blue border  Vimeo-ish style data pager Row hover effects (except for IE6) Sort icons Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF, Opera) | Download VS 2008 Style Border To create the border, I used a variation of the rounded corners technique Josh outlines here.  Below is the markup.  It is pretty much just a handful of DIV elements that are used for holding the images.  If you are thinking about using this technique, you should check out Josh's site...

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A while back, I wrote a post describing how to create a folder browser with ASP.NET 2.0 using the TreeView, UpdatePanel, GridView (customized to always display header row) and a modified version of the FileSystemDataSource as described on MSDN.  I have used this widget on a few different projects and I generally like how it works (you can view the demo here).  One thing my original implementation is clearly lacking is a professional look and feel.  So I recently had the opportunity to upgrade it to .Net 3.5 and in the process I decided it was time to overhaul the style.  Using the Vista folder explorer as my template, I made the following changes to the original sample ... Replaced the plus/minus icons with dark and light arrows Added soft blue rounded corners to the explorers container Added modified date column to the right hand pane Added a footer the...

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This past week I finally set aside some time to take a look at Silverlight.  I started with ScottGu's digg demo application and continued on to silverlight.net to check out what some of the early adopters have already built.  I didn't get too far before I bumped into a control on the Silverlight showcase homepage that thought was pretty interesting.  The control is a datagrid of sorts that allows you to filter the contents of the grid using a tag cloud.  So I took a crack at creating a similar looking grid using ASP.NET 3.5 (the screen shot is below). Notes: The icon images used in this sample are transparent PNG's, so the demo page looks a little goofy in IE6. Live Demo (IE7, FF and Opera 9.26) | Download (.Net 3.5) Update (3/4/2008):  Mark Grubner posted the following comment: A question about this one though - could you comment...

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Here are a couple more themes for the AjaxControlToolkit's Tab control based on the tabs found on LinkedIn.com.  Below the screen shots are a few bullet points discussing how I created them.  If tab theming is new for you - it might be helpful to check out these other samples as well ... Five AjaxControlToolkit Tab Themes created from DynamicDrive.com Dev.Opera.com Style TabContainer Theme JQuery TabContainer Theme with Tab Transition Animations Using CSS Image Sprites with the XP Themed TabContainer More Sample AjaxControlToolkit TabContainer Themes ... Creating a YUI TabView Style Theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's TabContainer Control As usual, here are the links for the demo and download ... Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF, Opera 9.26)  | Download (.Net 3.5 and AJCT 3.5.11119.0) Tab Header Images Different images are used all three tab states: {Default, Hover, Active}.  Each tab is made up of 2 images, the left edge and the...

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LinkedIn has a nice looking address book widget that displays all of your connections partitioned by last name.  To the left of the contact listing is an index that allows you to jump right to a section.  This control isn't overly fancy, but I was curious what HTML/CSS/JavaScript was used to create it.  So I took it apart using the IE Developer Toolbar and rebuilt it using ASP.NET 3.5 - making use primarily of LINQ to XML, the LinqDataSource and a couple of ListView's.  Feel free to browse the source code by following the download link.  And, of course I recommend checking out the live demo as well.  If you are interested in how I created the sample, a quick description of the implementation details can be found just below the screen shot.  And the best part - excluding the CSS, only 115 lines of markup/code are required to build...

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Last November Josh Stodola wrote a detailed post discussing how great looking fluid-width rounded corners can easily be created using Paint.NET, a handful of DIV tags and a small amount of CSS.  The basic technique Josh outlines isn't new, but he does a great job walking through the steps with just the right amount of detail.  I remember reading the article sometime after I struggled through creating an AjaxControlToolkit control based on NiftyCorners (being completely uncreative, I called my custom extender control the NiftyCornersExtender) and I found it very interesting.  I recently went back through and re-read Josh's article this past week and went through his tutorial again. It turns out this was great timing - I am working on a project where the client has requested a sleek, soft and simple interface - those were their exact words.  So I used Josh's tutorial to frame a couple of my...

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YUI recently added another button type to their control library - they call it the Glowing Button Control.  The Glowing Button Control allows you to add a glossy, glass like effect to your buttons along with a glowing background.  The YUI documentation says the inspiration for the design came from the Aqua buttons found in Mac OS X.  Below is a progression of screen shots that try to show the glowing effect, but you should really check out their demo page to get the full effect.       A project I am working on could use something like this to liven up a few of our screens.  We are prototyping a new design for our landing screen and of course we want it to be as sexy as possible.  The purpose of the landing screen is to let the user know about what our product is about and have them sign...

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Lately, I have been playing around with ASP.NET's new LinqDataSource.  Most of my data resides in a SQL Server database, so I always configure the LinqDataSource to work with the LINQ to SQL DataContext and Entity objects.  These components are still pretty new to be, so I am still kind of in awe at how it all works together so seamlessly.  I guess maybe I am a little paranoid, but I don't like that using LINQ to SQL seems like magic.  Sooner or later something is not going to work, and I am going to have to figure out why that is.  Maybe it's a performance problem, maybe it's a data integrity issue, but sooner or later I am going to have to understand (at least a little bit) about how LINQ to SQL works so I can effectively debug my problem.  I found that displaying the SQL statements the...

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One of the projects I am working on is on the verge of failure.  For a while now the writing has been on wall, but this was the week that everyone finally realized it.  Its a rotten feeling and I hate it.  So to cheer myself up and to keep the creative juices flowing I thought I would play around a little bit with ASP.NET 3.5's new ListView, DataPager and LinqDataSource controls.  A while back, I came across a really nice looking data grid that I wanted to create a ListView skin for.  Besides the nice soft blue color scheme, I liked the data grid's sorting icons, all caps headers, alternating row styles as well as the simple text-based data pager.  So I used the ListView and DataPager controls to build the visual elements of the data grid and used the LinqDataSource to source the grids data.  I have written...

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I found a few images on dynamicdrive.com and thought they would make a nice theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's Tab control.  Check out the live demo page to see if it is something you can use.  If it is - help yourself to the download. Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download If you haven't worked with theming the Tab control before, here are a few links ... Creating a YUI TabView Style Theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's TabContainer Control More Sample AjaxControlToolkit TabContainer Themes ... Using CSS Image Sprites with the XP Themed TabContainer JQuery TabContainer Theme with Tab Transition Animations Dev.Opera.com Style TabContainer Theme Below are the style rules I used for these tabs.  And here are the rules for the red tab.  The rules for all of the other colored tabs are exactly the same, only the background image url changes. That's it.  Enjoy!...

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I haven't played too much with ASP.NET 3.5's new LinqDataSource control yet - so I figured it was about time I did a little research and checked it out.  Typically, I like to document my research by creating a small prototype application focused on a handful of the new features that I am investigating.  I find building a reference application is helpful because it tends to drive out some of those nasty implementation details that somehow remain hidden if I just browse the documentation or read a reference book.  So for a recent research project, I decided I would look into the LinqDataSource's control GroupBy and OrderGroupBy attributes to see if they could be used to help me build a grid that supports grouping.  Below is the final screen shot for my reference application.  The grid shows the rows in the Northwind Orders table - grouped by the customer that...

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I was browsing ajaxrain's catalog yesterday and I cam across a pretty nifty jquery plugin called liScroll that allows you to turn an ordinary HTML UL/LI into a scrolling ticker.  Besides scrolling the items from right to left, the liScroll plugin supports two additional features It allows you to specify the scrolling speed by changing the value of the travelocity parameter The scrolling automatically pauses when you mouse over it After seeing the liScroll demo, I was certain that this was something I could use for some of the sites I am working on.  So I decided to see what it would take to implement a scrolling ticker control using the AJAX Control Toolkit.  In addition to the liScroll features listed above, I also wanted to incorporate a few other enhancements, including Support both left-to-right and right-to-left scrolling directions Support applying a CSS class to the item when it is...

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I spent some time playing around with the AutoComplete control to see if we could use it to provide smarter filtering capabilities for our data tables.  The general idea was that I would allow the user to select a filter column from a drop down list.  Then as they key in characters into the adjacent textbox I would use the AjaxControlToolkit's AutoComplete extender to suggest some values to filter by.  You can see this in the screen shot below.  I selected 'City' in the drop down and then typed 'be' into the textbox and like magic the 3 cities in my data set that have start with 'be' appear.  Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download (.Net 3.5 and Toolkit 3.5.11119.0) If you are interested in how I created this sample, the details are below. The AjaxControlToolkit's AutoCompleteExtender If are familiar with Google Suggest, the concept behind the AutoComplete control...

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A few weeks ago I wrote a post explaining how the AjaxControlToolkit's Slider control could be used as a data pager.  One of the teams I am currently working with has adopted this approach and is implementing it throughout their site.  While this technique seems to work well, one feature the team would like to add is a custom tooltip that not only displays the typical paging statistics (i.e. page X of Y), but also gives the user a hint as to what can be found on each page of data.  It's this last bit of information that increases the value of the tooltip.  Not only are we showing the user the typical paging statistics, but now they can get an idea of what data can be found on the page before actually navigating to it.  Below is a screen shot of how this looks.  Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and...

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One of the designers on our UI team requested a screen mockup with a page layout that is similar to your typical email client.  The page is divided vertically into 2 panes.  The left pane contains a 2 level hierarchy of categories and subcategories.  As the user selects different subcategories the designer wants the right pane's content to be updated with the corresponding information.  Just like Outlook, the designer wants the subcategories to be displayed within expanding and collapsing panels. I am familiar enough with the AjaxControlToolkit's Accordion control to know that it should be the right tool for the job here, but I haven't actually used it before.  So I did a little research on the Accordion and created a small demo page that we used to get a feel for how the control behaves and what it takes to build and style it. Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and...

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I was browsing through the YUI developer site and came across another component that I thought would make a nice addition to my ever growing toolbox.  It's their Logger Control.  The YUI guys have created a floating debug console window that displays messages as they are written to the YUI log object.  You can check it out for yourself on their demo page.  Besides just displaying the messages, the Logger Control also supports a few of the other standard log browsing features, including Viewing messages by severity (info, warning, or error) Viewing messages by source (global or LogReader in their sample) Pausing and clearing the trace Collapsing the trace console window Repositioning the trace console window by 'drag and drop' Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download (ASP.NET 2.0 and Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0) I think this Logger Control could be quite useful.  ASP.NET AJAX has a similar concept, however...

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As far as web development goes, I came a little late to the party.  I started life as a developer working on the absolute guts of a fairly complex object persistence engine.  At my next stop I hand-coded an obscene number of business objects that fed our presentation layer (which is pretty ironic considering I just worked on an ORM!).  Needless to say I didn't stay at that place too long.  From there I finally took a stab at user interface when I took a gig as a WinForms developer.  I did that for a little over a year and it was OK.  Finally I ended up where I am now, about 60% of my day to day activities includes web developer on Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 platform.  I did a little bit of web development with 1.1, but nothing substantial.  Hands down, I enjoy web development the best (I have never once been complimented on how nice...

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As I mentioned in a previous post, I am currently researching what advantages ASP.NET 3.5's new ListView control would have over the GridView.  To continue down this path, I thought it would be a good idea to look into how paging work with the ListView.  To direct my research, I created a sample data table that supports paging via the standard paging buttons as well as with a slider bar.  Below is a screenshot of the table.  As usual you can follow the links below to view the live demo as well as download the code. Download (.Net 3.5 and AjaxControlToolkit 3.5.11119.0) | Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) If you are interested in the implementation details, they are outlined below. Overview of the DataPager Control Before today, I had not yet worked with the DataPager.  So to start off, I went out to MSDN's documentation and read through it.  To summarize MSDN, the DataPager can be used to display paging navigation controls...

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Now that .Net 3.5 and VS 2008 have shipped, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the new ListView control.  I use the GridView quite frequently, and I am curious what the tradeoffs I would encounter if I used the new ListView control for rendering our tabular datasets.  I figured a good way to learn would be to create a ListView that generates one of my favorite looking HTML tables. So I re-implemented my existing YUI DataTable Styled GridView using the ListView.  My main goal for this task is just to get a better feeling for how the ListView control works.  Unfortunately my asp.net hosting service won't support .Net 3.5 until sometime next week so until then there isn't a demo.  But you can download the code for this sample. Live Demo | Download ListView Overview If you aren't familiar with the ListView control, here is a quick overview from MSDN.  I...

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I use Yahoo! for my email client.  The main screen has the standard email client three section layout.  One area for selecting a folder (Inbox, Drafts, Sent Items, etc...), another area that displays the messages in a table or grid, and the last region shows a preview of the selected message.  You can select messages to delete, forward, move by clicking a checkbox to select the messages, and then by clicking the button that corresponds to the action you want taken.      Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download (This includes the complete AjaxControlToolkit solution plus the code for my patch) I am currently building a new screen for a project I am working on and I would like to use a similar design.  I want to allow the user to use checkboxes to select rows.  Once one or more rows are selected, clicking a command button (Delete, Copy, Export) will execute the actions...

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While doing some research this afternoon I ended up on dev.opera.com.  Its a nice looking site.  The combination of colors, fonts, and images make browsing the sites content enjoyable.  I was especially impressed with the tabbed menu that sits at the top of the page.  The tabs are rounded, have rollover states and are very professional looking.  So during some downtime this afternoon I created a new theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's TabContainer control using the same images and styles as dev.opera.com.  Because I have created a few themes before (jquery, yui and technorati), I was able to reuse the general structure of one of my previous stylesheet's and just plugged in my new images.   Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download (.Net 2.0 and Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0)  Tab Header Images This tab theme uses images to form the rounded corners.  The original images on dev.opera.com didn't have transparent background, so I used Paint.NET to set the background transparency (if you haven't used...

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A few posts back I described a technique you could use to add Animation effects to your ModalPopup controls.  A similar technique can be used to implement a JQuery style fade animation that runs as the user navigates between selected tabs.  While the technique I used is very similar to the one I blogged about before, I thought I would pass along the stylesheet for the JQuery tab theme as well as a quick overview of how I implemented the transition. Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download (Uses Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0) JQuery Tab Theme Creating this JQuery theme wasn't too difficult.  I grabbed one of the stylesheets from a theme I had created before and tweaked the style attributes to what was required to look like the JQuery tabs.  My JQuery themed stylesheet is divided into 3 sections: common styles, styles for the inactive tabs and finally the styles for the active tab.  Just...

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When I was in college I took a course on Software Construction.  With 3 weeks left in the semester, the professor assigned us a project that he knew would take close to 6 weeks to implement.  To meet the deadline he allowed us to leverage 3rd party components where possible.  He encouraged us to think about a solution that was constructed from other components as opposed to one that we developed from scratch.  This professor was good.  This is exactly the same type of problem I encounter everyday. Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download (Uses Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0) I took this construction approach on a recent project.  Our team is looking to soften some of our UI elements by using the toolkit's RoundedCornerExtender control.  The toolkit's rounded corner implementation does not include anti-aliasing and as a result, the corners look pretty rough. (Anti-aliasing is a technique that is used to make graphics and text easier to read.  Here is...

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Like I mentioned in my last post, I have been researching ways to make our web application a little more user friendly by including a handful of personalization features.  This research was oringally spawned from one of our more savvy users that was tired of always confirming deletes via our delete confirm dialog.  Our standard thus far has been to include this confirmation step at every place within the application where we allow the user to perform a delete.  For some users this confirmation step has become a little annoying.  So I nominated myself to look into what it would take to include the typical 'don't ask me this question again' checkbox to our confirmation dialogs. Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download (Uses Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0)        Notes on the Demo: Use the 'Reset Profile' button if you want to see the confirm dialog again I removed the connection string from the download's web.config.  You will need to point to your existing...

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On my work and home PC's I have my browser's homepage set to google.com.  Like the rest of the world, for about the past 7 years or so I have been using google as my starting point for Internet searches.  Sometime within the past year I took the time to setup google's personalized homepage - igoogle.  I configured my homepage with a nice blend of sporting and tech related gadgets.  I like this because it gives me a nice dashboard to the content that interests me most. Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download (Uses Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0) One of the silly features I have found that I like about igoogle is how the pages color palette changes depending upon the time of day.  So as the day progresses from morning to afternoon to evening the colors on the page change as well.  Like I said, I know this is a silly feature, but I like it.  And I have asked...

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I recently wrote a posting showing how GridView mouseover effects can be added to your existing GridView's through the use of a AjaxControlToolkit extender control.  In the last portion of the post I mentioned how I thought it would be useful to add other features into this extender to support column and header cell cell hover and select effects.  So on a recent road trip to Orlando FL I added a couple new features to this extender control and built a handful more grids to show off the new enhancements.  One of the new GridView themes uses the Sharepoint 2007 calendar color scheme and the other is derived from the ExtJs Data Grid.  All of the grids can be viewed on the demo site and of course you can also download the full source.   Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download The GridViewControlExtender now includes support for applying column hover and select CSS classes to cells that are in the same column...

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In a recent post, I created a GridView that with the help of some JavaScript and CSS rendered similar to the Tablecloth style table shown here.  I like the Tablecloth sample because the presentation of the grid changes as the user interacts it.  It does a good job of keeping the user focused on the data elements the they are currently working with.            Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download   The design of the Tablecloth grid is fairly simple.  It boils down to adding and removing CSS classes to the individual HTML Table elements (mostly TD's and TH's) in response to a four different DOM events (mouseover, mouseup, mousedown and click).  For example, when the mouse cursor is positioned over a particular cell in the table, the mouseover event fires and a bit of JavaScript runs and applies a CSS class to all of the cells that share the same rowIndex or cellIndex.  The image below shows how this works.  When the mouse is positioned over...

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The calendar control that my team is using in our current web application is terrible for three reasons: it is ugly.  Viewing the control reminds me of the first time I went back to Window's 95 after having upgraded to XP it opens the calendar control in a new browser instance (something our users hate) it has a lot of supporting, custom JavaScript that has had its fair share of bugs If I am not mistaken, somehow the control survived the port from classic ASP to ASP.NET 1.1 and then again from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0.  I have no idea where the control orignally came from, but it is time to get rid of it. Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download So my latest research tasks was to look into replacing this legacy control with something a little hipper.  I took a look at the AjaxControlToolkit's Calendar control to see if it was something we could use.  Sure enough...

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If you follow my blog, you have no doubt noticed that I have been taking a tour through the Yahoo! User Interface Library (you can read my previous posts here, here and here).  Well, I think I have finally made my way through a majority of the content and feel like I have come out with a few new UI components that I can incorporate into my current web app.  But before I move on, I thought I would write one last brief post describing how you can incorporate the YUI style progress panel into your existing ASP.NET AJAX web application. Live Demo (FF, IE6 and IE7) | Download The markup for the progress panel is below.  <asp:Panel ID="pnlPopup" runat="server" CssClass="progress" style="display:none;"> <div class="container"> <div class="header">Loading, please wait...</div> <div class="body"> <img src="img/activity.gif" /> </div> </div> </asp:Panel> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode...

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The codebase for the web application I am currently working on is pretty new.  We ported our legacy application from .Net 1.1 to .Net 2.0 and in the process we did a complete redesign of our presentation and business logic layers.  However, we did not do the same with our data model.  We upgraded from SQL Server 2000 to 2005, but for the most part we kept the exact same datamodel.  So while from a technology standpoint we have a completely new platform, our data model is about 5 years old.  Over those 5 years most of datamodel changes have been the addition of new columns to existing tables.  As a result, a number of our core tables have become quite wide.  And as the tables in our underlying datamodel get wider over time, so do the grids that present the data.         Live Demo (FF, IE6, IE7) | Download So during a recent visit to the Ajax Rain site, I came across a sample that had a few...

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