On May 26th a new EU directive comes into force requiring website owners to provide clear and comprehensive information to site visitors about cookies used and how they may refuse them.

To help site owners with compliance, we've written a simple customisable jQuery plugin called Cookie Guard which can be embedded into sites to list, block or allow cookies.

http://cookieguard.eu/

The code is free for you to use or adapt and you can pre-populate it with known cookies on your websites.

If you'd like help with installing Cookie Guard or would like us to build a custom-designed version for you then get in touch for a quote.

I have struggled with a couple of issues with some fairly old classic asp sites that we still look after but the client is in no mood to upgrade because of the time and cost element (fair enough).  However technology moves on and one big issue I discovered to my peril is that the SOAP toolkit I had been using in classic ASP to consume remote web services was thrown out by microsoft in windows 2008 (and Windows 7) - great!!

It's not the end of the world of course as you can use direct http requests to send and receive SOAP requests but you have to go to all the lengths of building a soap envelope and decoding the results.  Now I have been programming in .NET for sometime now and because of the ease of including web services into any application I looked into using .net as the solution.  But how to use .NET code in classic ASP.  Well COM of course.  So I went off and built my .NET class that cosumed the web service all well and good, next to turn this into a COM object so that classic ASP can access it!

Now, none of the steps below are undocumented but it's quite a trawl to find this information so I have put it down (mostly to remind myself) in simple steps to make it easy to follow;

1. Create a standard Class project in visual studio (I have done this in 2008 and 2010 but can't comment on 2005)
2. In the properties tab of your project click on the "Compile" tab and make sure you tick the "Register for COM interop" flag
3. Under the "Signing" tab click the "Sign the assembly" tick and follow the instructions to create a signing key for the project.  You will need this if you want to install your dll on production server (which you probably will do!)
4. Build you .NET project.  In the location that you built your project you should have a .dll, .tlb and .dll.config file.  You will need these if you want to make the dll available on any other machine, which I did to the rest of the instructions are about making this COM library availble on another machine
5. Copy the .dll, .tlb and .dll.config files over to the production machine.
6. Find the regasm.exe file in order to register this file on your production machine (NOTE: your production machine will need to have the matching .NET assembly installed and the regasm.exe will need to be appropriate for the OS - 32-bit of 64-bit).  You can find the regasm.exe in your .NET Framework root (on you dev machine) - something like C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\regasm.exe 
7. Copy the regasm.exe over to the production machine in the same dir as the .dll file
8. Open a cmd prompt window and navigate to the directory with you dll in and register the code in the assembly as follows:
   regasm /tlb /codebase somename.dll 
9. That's it.  You .Net library should be ready to use with the classic asp code 
   
   server.createobject("somename.someclass")

I hope this information is helpful to someone out there!! 

Congratulations to Fleckney-based Fiona Cairns on being chosen to bake William and Kate's wedding cake!

Fiona Cairn's website was designed by Enderby-based Six with HTML build by Ultimateweb.

We hope they save a slice for us.

We're very pleased to have won the tender to rebuild the website of LCB Depot where our office is located. We will be partnering with new graphic design agency 19 Grams (also at LCB).

The site that will act as a brochure for LCB Depot and units at Phoenix Square and also provide resources for existing tenants of both venues.

As well as presenting general information, we will integrate a number of social media platforms into the site to improve connectivity and to reflect the buzz within the buildings.

The work is due to commence in April and will be ready for launch in early summer.

We're pleased to announce the launch of out latest multilingual catalogue site for Invicta Plastics with styling and layout supplied by design partners Soar Media.

The site allows teachers from across Europe to view Invicta's products and request further information.

The site is powered by Ultimateweb's eStreet ecommerce platform with real-time translation into five languages supplied by Translution.

We've just launched a beautiful new ecommerce site for designer products firm Great British Designs.

We took a classy bespoke design provided by Northbound, converted it into HTML then integrated our ecommerce platform plus lots of blogging and social media goodies to help the owners promote their site.

In partnership with design agency Firebox Create, we recently launched our latest ecommerce-powered website for NAAS Ltd here in Leicester. NAAS provide a number of services from training and installation through to actual sale of units and components and wanted a site that covered all areas. Our ecommerce package was the ideal solution as it includes not only a complete end-to-end online retail system but also a flexible content management system (CMS) for the non-ecommerce aspects of the site. All of this is skinned by a completely bespoke design created by Firebox Create.

The new site is now up and running and taking orders and we are assisting NAAS with a number of online marketing features including data feeds to Google Products and email newsletters.

Visit the NAAS site here