ASP.NET Resources

May 2004

Writing Accessible Code In ASP.NET

A brand new article by Scott Mitchell entitled Making ASP.NET Web Site Accessible is available at MSDN. Scott gives an overview of Section 508 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and illustrates how to build a truly accessible DataGrid control.

5/31/2004 |

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Visual Studio.NET Fails To Copy ASHX Handlers

This is something I discovered today. After I uploaded changes with comment feeds and TrackBacks I noticed an HttpHandler implemented in an ASHX file was missing which is why I couldn't make heads and tails of why my handler was not accepting test TrackBacks.

5/29/2004 |

4 comments | No TrackBacks

TrackBacks Welcome

For the past couple of days I've been undergoing a self-inflicted crash course in TrackBacks. Their support was missing on my site and I put some time aside to catch up.

5/29/2004 |

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Code Coloring Tool Now Supports CSS

With the latest addition of 3 more languages my online code coloring tool now supports:

5/29/2004 |

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Why Is It Important To Validate Web Pages?

For years now web development has been based on browser tolerance. We're all guilty of pushing browsers to their limits to test how much abuse they can take. The abuse I'm talking about is bad code.

5/27/2004 |

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ASP.NET Bloggers Wanted

As part of my "offering" I list my favorite bloggers in the sidebar. I split blogs into Designer Reads and Developer Reads.

5/27/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

One Stylesheet To Rule Them All

Mikhail Arkhipov referred me to a post in his blog as a follow-up to my article, Bringing CSS2 to Visual Studio.NET. Apparently, Whidbey will support CSS1, CSS2 and CSS2.1 schemas. That's good news! Actually, his post got me thinking...

5/25/2004 |

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Opera 7.50 Is Out

Without much fanfare Opera has released an updated version of its browser, v.7.50. Compared to its predecessor, ver 7.23, has a redesigned user interface and comes with nice toolbar on the side with all the handy tools you use on the web. One of my favorite ones is Notes because I often feel prompted to write something down when I visit an interesting site. What I'm also impressed with is the built-in newsgroup and RSS readers! The Usenet reader is very slick and the RSS aggregator... hey, it's perfectly functional and it's beta than nothing. It'll get there. :) I'm excited, very excited.

5/25/2004 |

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Two More Languages For The Code Highlighter Tool

I've added two more languages to the code coloring tool: XHTML and ASPX. Please let me know if you see any issues with accuracy of coloring.

5/24/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

Microsoft Press-UK Got Hax0r3d

Oopsie, a small setback for the Trustworthy Computing... :)

5/24/2004 |

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Accessible Hyperlinks In ASP.NET

I wonder if there's anyone out there who enjoys pop-ups. Pop-ups have become a nuisance of the same magnitude as spam, except that everyone has learned to tame them. Google has a blocker. MSN has a blocker. WinXP SP2 adds a popup blocker of its own to the Internet Explorer. Both Opera and Mozilla Firefox have built-in pop-up blockers.

5/24/2004 |

18 comments | No TrackBacks

HttpModule And HttpHandler Template Generator In Beta

Every time I start a new HttpModule or HttpHandler I turn to MSDN for a code skeleton. When I help out someone at the ASP.NET Forums I do the same. Finally, I thought I would put together a tool for myself and others that would do exactly that—generate bare-bones modules and handlers.

5/22/2004 |

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Spell It Out For Your Users

Sometimes we get so caught up in geek talk that we lose readers in the maze of abbreviations and acronyms. Have you ever felt confused looking up information on mortgage rates, or car financing terms, or credit card agreements? They are replete with terminology that is hard to understand. How can we decypher cryptic words to users without cluttering content with too many inclusions in parentheses, square brackets, footnotes, etc?

5/21/2004 |

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Can You See Me Now? Good!

When starting a new design one of the toughest decisions you have to make is about fonts. How do you specify font sizes? How do you please every user and accommodate every (almost every) browser? There's no simple answer to this. There are a number of choices before you, and each one has its pros and cons.

5/19/2004 |

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The Price Of Floats

There have been published two great articles recently on tables as vehicles of presentational design: An Objective Look at Table Based vs. CSS Based Design by Andy Budd and Tables? Oh, the horror! by Dave Shea. For those who don't know these two guys are among the most respected people in the "designer community". All in all both articles are about seeking balance in using tables for layout.

5/18/2004 |

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Total Confusion Over ASP.NET 2.0

Does anybody get a headache from seeing contradictory statements coming from all possible directions, "experts", "insiders", etc, about ASP.NET 2.0? Or is it just me?

5/18/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

Trimming Fat Of MSDN Magazine

This is a silly one. Every time I receive an issue of the MSDN Magazine, which I regard to be the best resource for Microsoft-oriented developers, I rip out all pages that have full-page ads on both sides. I'm looking for technical information. If I wanted a Sears or Macy's catalog I would've asked!

5/17/2004 |

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Rewriting URLs And Validation Scare

Just recently I wrote about my affection for HttpHandlers and HttpModules. I wrote an HttpModule for this site which handles URL rewriting.

5/17/2004 |

6 comments | No TrackBacks

DOCTYPE In FrontPage?

I hate FrontPage. I despise FrontPage. Even though the latest and greatest of FrontPage 2003 is much better than it's predecessors it's still not good enough. Although I was glad to see an article about DOCTYPEs in FrontPage at MSDN.

5/17/2004 |

3 comments | No TrackBacks

Code Highlighter Is Now In Beta

My set of online tools has gained an addition—a code highlighter. I've looked around for a decent code highlighter for quite some time now, but each and every one I found produced a tag galore a-la 1997, i.e. with inline font and color tags, etc. Needless to say this code doesn't validate as anything and it bloats your pages beyond belief. Therefore I set out to write one of my own.

5/15/2004 |

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Code-Behind For HTTP Handlers

I love poking around HTTP Modules and Handlers in ASP.NET. You can also see me quite often in HttpHandlers and HttpModules at the ASP.NET Forums. HTTP handlers and modules allow you to achieve something you were banned from in classic ASP (unless you were a hardcode C++ developer and could write an ISAPI with your eyes closed). Thanks to the power of the ASP.NET pipeline pretty much the only limitation is one's imagination.

5/15/2004 |

22 comments | No TrackBacks

How Non-Standard Web Code Hurts The Bottom Line

Keith Robinson, the man behind Asterisk*, one of my favorite blogs out there, wrote an interesting post: Non-Standard Code Hurts The Bottom Line. He discusses proc and cons (well, mostly pros) of sticking to web standards-compliant code whenever possible as opposed to working with the outdated tag soup.

5/14/2004 |

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Happy Birthday, CSS!

CSS2 has turned 6 today! Time flies. CSS has definitely come a long way despite slow acceptance in the collective minds of both designers and developers alike. I really hope we will be seeing more meaningful designs with stylesheets longer than 10 lines of basic stuff. A year ago my stylesheets were 10 lines long!

5/12/2004 |

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New Online Tool - Password Hasher

This is something I've done a number of times. I'd step on the same shovel and it would hit me in the face with its handle. Each time I needed to configure authentication and authorization in a new web project I needed a quick and easy way to hash my password(s) and store them in web.config.

5/11/2004 |

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Help Improve This Site and Receive a FREE Book

This site has passed a remarkable milestone this month. Approximately 43% of all user agents are blog readers and streamers(SharpReader, RssBandit, BlogDeamon, and BlogLines). In addition to this, some users visit the blog directly through their browser. Overall, the blog's main page is visited 3.5 times more often than any other page on this site! Interesting stats...

5/10/2004 |

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Why Small Web Design Firms Should Think Big

No, I'm not plagiarizing on this truly awesome article at SitePoint. As a rule, I read articles of this kind nodding my head along the way, but this one is powerful. Make sure you find a minute to read Why Small Web Design Firms Should Think Big by Andrew Neitlich.

5/8/2004 |

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Microsoft.com Backstage

A while ago I stumbled across some interesting reads from Microsoft Backstage. I don't remember how I found it but I'm glad I did. Few people know it even exists and I still can't find direct links to it. Yet Backstage provides an interesting insight into how Microsoft.com operates.

5/8/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

Standards or Quirks?

Composing a correct DOCTYPE declaration could be a daunting process (see DOCTYPE Switch Browser Comparison). Miss a fully-qualified URI and your browser starts doing something you didn't expect.

5/7/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

ASP.NET Adaptive Rendering and Validator Controls

After Scott Mitchell published an article on adaptive rendering I couldn't help wondering what happens to client side validation. You can change the HMTL writer class so server controls would emit the same code for Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Opera, but validators won't work. There's a simple reason for that: Microsoft folks utilize their own proprietary way of referring to controls on a page via document.all ["xxxxx"].

5/7/2004 |

3 comments | 1 TrackBack

IIS6 Doesn’t Serve Encrypted JavaScript Files

We've encountered this problem at work several times and fixed it several times, too, because each time we'd forget what we did about it. :) We rely on a third-party ASP.NET custom control which comes with an encrypted JavaScript (.jse) file. What puzzled us was the fact that the control would seize to function on certain servers.

5/5/2004 |

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Fixing SQL Logins

If you ever restored a SQL Server database you probably ran into an issue that the database had a user defined with the exact same name as a login that already exists on your instance of SQL Server. I'm no SQL guru but my gut tells me it has to do with the fact that the SIDs of both users where different—quite naturally—while the names were the same. Also, the fact that you have SQL users and then also SQL login adds up to confusion immensely.

5/2/2004 |

15 comments | No TrackBacks

Site Update - Search Is Up

Something that I've meant to do for some time now was add a search feature. I've finally found time to brush up on SQL Server's full-text search and implement it. I also wired ranking of search results based on the relevancy of each find as determined by SQL Server. If you notice any weirdness please let me know. ;)

5/2/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

I've been anxiously waiting for the release of this guide. Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability is a tremedous guide and is a must-read for every advanced .NET developer.

5/2/2004 |

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Web talk

May 2004