AspNetResources.com articles, news and updates

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

This is a short notice, but still… I'm giving my IoC and DI with WebForms presentation at the New York Code Camp tomorrow. Instead of walking away with a "this is only a demo; don't try it at home" excuse, I actually have a read-world example to go through.

There exists an entrenched belief that there's only one way to develop with WebForms, i.e. rely on the crunch of view state, postbacks, session, etc. I beg to differ. You can write cleaner, cohesive, more testable code, and I intend to prove it.

At my session, we will

talk about what it takes to write highly cohesive, loosely coupled code
see what Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injection (DI) are all about
look at appropriate ways of using an IoC container

If accepted, I also plan on giving this talk at the Utah Code Camp on March 27 and Richmond Code Camp on May 22. If you are "in the area," please stop by. ;)

ASP.NET consulting with imagination and passion. Hire me!

How to Read Auto-Generated MachineKey

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Whether it's tamper-proofing ViewState, form authentication tickets, or generating session IDs, the <machineKey> section is behind it all. Even if you don't generate it by hand, there's one auto-generated for you.

My rule of thumb is to almost always generate one (using my own tool) because:

I like to control the length of keys and the choice of algorithms.
I often piggy-back off this section to use it as a Key/Initialization Vector pair for various cryptographic scenarios. You can see this approach in my open source project Shinkansen.

I could never understand why Microsoft didn't provide an easy way to read the auto-generated keys. I fired up my trusty Reflector and followed their code as far as I could, until I hit calls to The Unmanaged Side.

As you can tell from the screenshot below, both the DecryptionKey and ValidationKey are set to AutoGenerate,IsolateApps while DecryptionKeyInternal and ValidationKeyInternal contain perfectly valid, auto-generated keys. Except that they are marked internal.

With a little bit of reflection magic dust, it's easy enough to get to them:

protected void Page_Load (object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  MachineKeySection section = (MachineKeySection) 
      ConfigurationManager.GetSection ("system.web/machineKey");

  BindingFlags flags = 
      BindingFlags.Instance | 
      BindingFlags.NonPublic | 
      BindingFlags.GetProperty;

  Func<string, byte[]> propertyReader = name => (byte[]) section
      .GetType ()
      .GetProperty (name, flags)
      .GetValue (section, null);

  string key = ConvertToHex (
    propertyReader ("DecryptionKeyInternal"));
    
  string iv = ConvertToHex (
    propertyReader ("ValidationKeyInternal"));
}

private string ConvertToHex (byte[] binary)
{
  return binary.Aggregate (
      new StringBuilder (), 
      (acc, c) => acc.AppendFormat ("{0:x2}", c), 
      acc => acc.ToString());
}

Note: this code won't work in partial trust because of reflection. Still, I plan on using this technique to abstract away the difference between auto- and manually-generated keys.

I just wish they made this ordeal less complicated.

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Transparent Database Encryption With SQL Server 2008

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

As I was beating my head against the wall with SQL Server encryption, I was envisioning horror scenarios of converting my columns to varbinary, calling ENCRYPTBYKEY all over the place and doing other unspeakable atrocities to my database, I was happy to learn about Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) introduced in SQL Server 2008.

TDE makes database encryption transparent, so you don’t have to change the schema. It also addresses the issue of protecting data “at rest” which is critically important to some companies.

I found two good MSDN resources on the subject:

Hope this helps! (Seriously, ScottGu needs to copyright this line).

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Is Nook Cannibalizing Store Sales?

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

As a newly–minted owner of a Barnes & Noble’s Nook, I experienced a weird feeling as I walked into a local brick and mortar B&N store the other day. I saw a particular book I wanted to buy, but just couldn’t get myself to take it to the checkout.

See, in my mind, having paid $280 for a single-purpose device (which I’m fairly unhappy with), I couldn’t justify an in-store purchase. It’s like buying a hybrid. Even if you’re not a tree hugger, you gotta live in that car to break even with the high markup for the new technology. This is why I don’t find hybrids appealing yet. Same with the Nook.

Turns out that relatively new book (Moral Minority, if you’re curious) wasn’t available in digital format. That’s a sale lost on two accounts.

I would imagine all this is different with Amazon. They don’t have “brick & mortar” stores, so I never had buyer’s remorse. You buy online from them, digital or not. Besides, they have lots more books digitized.

I’m curious to see how Nook affects B&N’s in-store sales. But one thing is clear to me: B&N should work harder to justify Nook’s price tag.

Note: I’ve expressed my frustration with Nook on Twitter and do plan to write an in-depth review of its UX. One of these days…

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Shinkansen, My New Project, Is Up On CodePlex

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A couple of days ago I launched my latest project, Shinkansen, on CodePlex (overview and documentation).

Overview

In a nutshell, Shinkansen is a sever control + HTTP handler combo which allows you declare your JavaScript and CSS includes like you normally would, and have them:

HTTP compressed
Crunched (minified and so on)
Combined into a single download
Cached on the client

Most of these tasks you can perform on your own.

For example, you can configure HTTP compression in IIS. However, it's possible only if you have physical access to a web server and are allowed to edit the metabase (IIS6) or tweak IIS settings (IIS7) by hand.

You can minify JavaScript as a step of a build process, but how do you combine scripts, and how do you set cache expiration headers?

Having dealt with these disparate tasks before, I wanted to build a component to streamline it all.

Resources

As I mention in Resources, two books in particular were of great inspiration: High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. Much of the ideas from these books have been incorporated into the project.

Also, two Firefox add-ons were of great help: Google's Page Speed and Yahoo's YSlow.

Feedback

Feel free to download binaries or source code and play. I will definitely appreciate suggestions and bug reports.

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Help Improve the Markdown Port

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Almost an eternity ago, I ported John Gruber's Markdown to C#. The Markdown syntax is known quite well outside of the .NET community, so I wanted to bring it to this camp. Even though I've seen the port used here and there, I've never got to run it as a community project.

Well, it seems Jeff Atwood and Co at Stack Overflow picked it up to run as an open source project. The code from 2004 was based off a Perl source with lots and lots of regular expressions. If I were to write a port all over again, I'd refactor it heavily.

If you feel like contributing, please head to a the announcement post and go from there.

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Don't Blabber About Your Employer During Interviews

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

As I do phone screens and in-person interviews with candidates, it’s funny and ironic to me how much sensitive information they disclose about their employer just for the asking. The kind of inside knowledge most employers would hate to see disclosed about their operations, which is why they put draconian clauses about it in employment contracts. And yet, that knowledge walks out the door that easily.

When I ask someone to explain how he went about scaling a web app, I’m not asking how the manufacturing floor is set up or what goes on there. I’m talking shop. I’m judging the thought process and technical prowess.

Please be courteous to your still-current employer and don’t leak sensitive information.

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Book Review: In Pursuit of Elegance

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

While reading a fascinating discussion of inefficiency of traffic control systems—road signs, traffic lights, etc—in Matthew May’s In Pursuit of Elegance, I came across this interesting thought:

When you are fully involved in a process governed by very simple relationship rules, a natural inclination takes over, and a self-organized pattern emerges that is more orderly than anything legislation could produce. Under those circumstances, you’re connected and interacting with what’s around you. Lose that connection, and a mess ensues.

Immediately, one of the tenets of the Agile Manifesto sprang to mind:

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

Self-organization is better than prescriptive governance. Lucky are the companies that understand this.

We don’t need most of the things that surround us

Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a British urban designer, is quoted saying this about inefficiencies of traffic controls:

What’s wrong with how we engineer things is that most of what we accept as proper order of things is based on assumptions, not observations. If we observed first, designed second, we wouldn’t need most of the things we build.

I’ll go so far as to say we don’t need most of the software in existence.

To his point, in spite of the billions spent each year around the world on installing and maintaining traffic controls, there’s absolutely no comprehensive research anywhere to demonstrate the benefits of traffic signals—in either the context of traffic flow or safety—but there are a number of studies showing their detrimental effect.

Sounds familiar? All those CRM, ERP, CIM, etc, systems—just about everything with the word “Enterprise” in its name—aren’t worth the time, money, or headache.

Why?

Because the vast majority of software lacks elegance. The kind of elegance that actually solves problems.

We come to the table with assumptions, not observations. This, to a great extent, is why the “Big 3” American car manufacturers are in the red. This is why the Toyotas and Hondas of the world leapfrogged them. It’s a cultural issue, rooted on the power of observing and subtracting clutter.

[The core philosophy of engineers and executives of Toyota]: they both believe that the job, any job, simply cannot be done in an office, from behind the desk, drawing conclusions and making decisions solely on the basis of reading reports.

That’s what Police Chief William Bratton did in NYC: he focused on the statistically measly 3% of crimes perpetrated on the subway. It’s the Broken Windows Paradox at work. The only way to see it was to put cops on the streets and subways, observe what happened, and act on it (incidentally, good software helped centralize the knowledge base).

Stop trying to regulate risk

The more we try to control and regulate our risk, the more exposed and at risk we are, because the more protected from hazards we think we are, the less conscious of potentials dangers we become.

Even thought it has been said in the context of, again, traffic control systems, this quote reminds of the Chemical Burn scene from Fight Club.

Get the book!

In Pursuit of Elegance is an excellent book (and a blog). Its theme is finding that “elusive element behind many innovative breakthroughs in the fields of ranging from physics and marketing to design and popular culture.”

Who knew Jackson Pollock’s paintings were of highly fractal nature… even before the word “fractal” was invented?

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Comparing Strings Like It's 1995

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

While going through The Art of Unit Testing: with Examples in .NET this morning, I came across a string comparison notation, which always makes me cringe:

if (!fileName.ToLower().EndsWith (".slv"))
{
}

I’ve also lost count of seeing its closest cousin:

if (someText.ToLower() === "some test value")
{
}

This is how we used to roll in C++. I’m surprised anybody still does this.

For one, ToLower() doesn’t produce consistent results for several languages, e.g. Turkish (see The Motivation: The Turkish-I Problem).

The other problem is possibly calling ToLower() on a null, so you have to run null checks all over the place. Why not use string.Equals instead? It’s null-friendly.

In .NET, you should do culture-aware comparisons. With FxCop, every time you do otherwise, it will apply its Specify CultureInfo rule:

Because the behavior of ’string.ToLower()’ could vary based on the current user’s locale settings, replace this call in ’Foo()’ with a call to ’string.ToLower(CultureInfo)’. If the result of ’string.ToLower(CultureInfo)’ will be displayed to the user, specify ’CultureInfo.CurrentCulture’ as the ’CultureInfo’ parameter. Otherwise, if the result will be stored and accessed by software, such as when it is persisted to disk or to a database, specify ’CultureInfo.InvariantCulture’.”

Microsoft has an excellent whitepaper on MSDN, New Recommendations for Using Strings in Microsoft .NET 2.0. Read it and memorize it.

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How to Make crossdomain.xml Work with SharePoint

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Not long ago I worked on a web site which had all its content and media stored in SharePoint. At an early point in the project, Flash developers started to complain that none of their media played when served from SharePoint. The problem seemed obvious: the cross-domain policy file, crossdomain.xml, was missing. Here’s what it’s for (via Adobe):

A cross-domain policy file is an XML document that grants a web client—such as Adobe Flash Player (though not necessarily limited to it)—permission to handle data across multiple domains. When a client hosts content from a particular source domain and that content makes requests directed towards a domain other than its own, the remote domain would need to host a cross-domain policy file that grants access to the source domain, allowing the client to continue with the transaction. Policy files grant read access to data as well as permit a client to include custom headers in cross-domain requests.

The most common location for a policy file on a server is in the root directory of a domain with the filename crossdomain.xml (e.g. http://example.com/crossdomain.xml)—the default location that clients check when a policy file is required.

There are two things to note here.

“though not necessarily limited to [Adobe Flash]”. Silverlight, being a Flash knock-off, works the same way. See HTTP Communication and Security with Silverlight. In other words, this discussion applies to Silverlight just as much.
A cross-domain policy file must be placed in the root of your web site.

The challenge became how to put crossdomain.xml in web root. SharePoint isn’t your typical web site; you don’t just hit pages—there’s a level of indirection for all resources.

Just about every blog post on the web recommended using the now free SharePoint Designer to upload the policy file. Others were suggesting to “drop” it in the physical root (normally C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80).

We followed just about every bit of advice. Nothing worked. Hitting crossdomain.xml would always yield a 404.

Several days into this nightmare, my stalwart co-worker Eric stumbled upon a solution:

Copy crossdomain.xml to SharePoint’s physical root.
Open web.config from the same folder and disable custom error pages:
```
<customErrors mode="Off" />
```

Amazingly, that worked! Like all things SharePoint, it made no sense at all, but it worked.

I hope I can save someone several days of frustrating troubleshooting.

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Slides from the Boston Code Camp 12

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A big thank you to everyone who attended my two talks at the Boston Code Camp! Below are links to slides and sample code.

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Observations From The Field

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Cashiers at a certain brand new cafeteria have touch-screen displays littered with buttons upon buttons. Which button is pressed the most? "Credit," of course. The button is so small that a cashier pokes it with the eraser end of a pencil. And she has to aim every single time. Multiply this by a couple of hundred clicks per day, and her day must be pretty exhausting.

An EMT worker answers a 9-1-1 call. To my excited comment about his rugged–looking tablet, he says, These things are a pain in the butt, all the while poking the screen with a stylus. To his credit, he didn’t want to use stronger language in front of my wife and daughter.

Seriously, you don’t want to make it difficult for an EMT worker. He/she has higher priorities that fighting the UI.

Two elderly ladies at a local gift shop, walk each other through screens of a "new system" to complete a simple credit card transaction, apologetically saying, We’re still learning this system.

In cases like these I keep my mouth shut about being a software developer because, clearly, the technology failed these people.

Part of the problem is that the interfaces are usually developed by twenty–something folks who are shielded from that filthy medium called the real world and who haven’t been tainted by experiences with this real world.

None of this is about technology. It’s all about how people function. It’s about their height, weight (heavier people have thicker fingers), strength (try holding one of those rugged tables with one hand), motor skills, degradation of eye sight with age, level of education (pay attention, copywriters!) and on and on.

It’s so simple to avoid these mistakes: you just have to observe real people using the technology and correct the design. That’s all there’s to it. Consider yourself lucky if all this is done under supervision of an information architect and/or a usability expert.

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Paco Underhill and His Silver Bullet Technology

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Having recently read Paco Underhill’s fascinating book, Why We Buy, I’d like to share a story he cites about "computer programmers". To me, the story is quite educational and funny.

Over the years, we’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars and countless frustrating hours with computer programmers, trying to come up with a database that could handle the kind of work we do. The big problem is that while we crunch the same numbers in the same ways from job to job, each project usually requires us to do something a little differently—to collect different kinds of data or to devise new comparisons of facts we just uncovered.

We’ve hired fancy consultants who spend six months at a crack with us, trying to build a computer system. They ask us to list everything we want our program to do, but every week we add six new things to the list that negate all their work from the previous month. And, of course, our turnaround time has to be swift, so there’s no time to change the system completely for each job—we may need to do one new comparison for a project today and then not have to perform that function again for seven months.

So what was the ultimate solution, the killer app that solved their business problem? Wait for it. Wait…

In the early 90’s, Microsoft Excel came along. Where had it been all my life? It was designed as a spreadsheet program, intended for accountants to do the relatively simple calculations they require. […] Today, while we still use Excel, we’ve moved on to other programs like Access and SPSS—but for years, Excel made out work possible.

I’m sure, the said programmers and consultants pitched the latest, shiniest toys. I’ve seen a similar drama unfold far too many times to think otherwise.

But it all came down to Excel. Ironic, isn’t it?

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My Herding Code Podcast Is Now Available

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

I’d like to thank the Herding Code folks for inviting me on the show. Episode #59 is up. Here’s a rundown of the topics we discuss there:

Developing ASP.NET apps with web standards.
The merits of Silverlight.
Coping with the avalanche of new stuff coming out of Redmond.
Are wholesale conference of any value?
The role of Microsoft "evangelists."
Standing up to intimidation about the state of economy (hint: the economy functions as designed).
When will Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices group get their act together?
Has the MVP program lost its relevance?
The role of ALT.NET in developer education.

Enjoy!

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Zeldman Speaketh. Take Heed.

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve stumbled upon an interesting interview (HTML, PDF) with Jeffrey Zeldman, published in the .NET Magazine (hey, what’s with the name, really?)

The interview is a great complement to Zeldman’s Freelance to Agency podcast, a live recording of a SxSW panel.

Money quote:

“Just because the economy is bad, it doesn’t mean you have to be unhappy.”

I highly recommend both resources if you’re starting or running your own business, or if you’re still scared about the economy.

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The Best Time Is Now and Never

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Something I learned a long time ago as a parent is that there’s no perfect time for kids. The same is true for marriage, vacations, starting a new business… You get the idea.

Among the gaudy parade of the latest Inc 500 —the business equivalent of a high school prom—is a short article by Meg Cadoux Hirshberg who is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Farm. The title of the missive is Balancing Acts: If Not Now, When?

Money quote:

The reality is that when you are entangled in an entrepreneurial life, there’s never a right time – for anything. There’s no right time, because there’s no time (and usually no money, either). For having kids, for buying a house, for getting a dog, for taking a vacation, for going out to dinner. Planning becomes difficult when income (if it exists at all) is insecure and savings are usually (to put it gently) unsubstantial. No matter how loudly private life calls out for investment – of time and of money – the business screams even louder in its demands for both. An entrepreneurial life becomes all about postponing – “When we break even…,” “When we get that contract…,” “When we hire that salesperson…” – ah, yes, that’s when our lives can move ahead.

In the hyperactive (yet unproductive) and overcommunicated society, it’s refreshing to come across such uncommon common sense about entrepreneurship.

Enjoy the read!

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Recipe: An ASP.NET Roast

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Next time you invite your buddies to a cookout, how about making something special? May I suggest a roast recipe?

Ingredients

1 cup sliced CSS
1 teaspoon JavaScript
1/2 cup XHTML powder

Instructions

Grind tables.
Place ASP.NET in a roaster, stab with knife to allow view state to escape.
Fill layout with semantic markup.
Blend CSS with well-beaten JavaScript and pour over the top.
Continue making layers until all the ingredients are used.
Serve with modern browsers.

Enjoy!

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Hire me!

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

After years of being a business (co)owner and a “W2 consultant,” I’ve decided to put all my expertise to good use and go the route of independent consulting. It has taken months and months of research: reading, talking to fellow-consultants, reflecting, visiting an accountant, etc—to finally incorporate and get going. Hence the somewhat slow blogging.

You’ve seen an occasional post or two on this subject, and I intend to blog more about it. If you’re contemplating to strike out on your own, I do have something you say that will interest you. Please stay tuned.

If you visit my site in a browser, you will now see “Hire me!” in the menu. If you pull my RSS feed, you will see a “signature” which says the same. Both will lead you to my “Rules of Engagement”. The rules are simple but necessary.

If you have a project I can help you with, please email me, and we’ll take it from there.

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Wean Yourselves off View State From the Start

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Whenever I start a new project these days, I head straight to web.config and do this:

<pages
   enableViewState="false"
   enableSessionState="false"
   autoEventWireup="false">

The key here is the first attribute. If you knock out view state right from the start, I can guarantee you will approach your site differently.

You won’t be tempted to drag and drop DataGrids, which are view state hogs because they depend on it for paging and sorting. To me, the DataGrid control is the ultimate insult to aesthetics.

You won’t be tempted to stuff junk if view state simply because it’s a seemingly convenient practice.

You won’t be tempted to use autopostback with dropdowns and such.

You will do a lot of things differently without view state. Try it.

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Weather.com Broke Something

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It seems weather.com has broken the cardinal rule of never, ever, ever changing an interface exposed to the public.

Today, all of a sudden, the weather server control I wrote eons ago started throwing exceptions. Charles was very quick to find and post a solution. I’ve updated and recompiled the control just enough to get it to work again.

I’m amazed that this control garnered such a following over time. A couple of times a week I get emails from folks asking for source code of the Location ID resolver (which I’m happy to provide) or looking for the right location ID of their town. The latter happens because weather.com doesn’t have all towns of the world in their database, so I always recommend finding a neighboring city or landmark.

Bear with me. I will completely rewrite the control. Some time soon.

Charles, thank you again!

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Real-World Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection with WebForms (This Is Not a Drill)

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

An exercise in refactoring a real-world WebForm to a more maintainable and testable one.

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Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection with WebForms (In 2 Acts)

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

When just about everybody has written off WebForms as uncool and hailed MVC as the new Silver Bullet, I beg to differ.

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Why So Averse To Exceptions?

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Having done a number of code reviews with our team, I’ve noticed one common theme through all projects: developers weren’t sure what to do about unhandled exceptions.

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Keeping Pulse on Your Site With ASP.NET 2.0 Health Monitoring

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

One of the best, yet often overlooked, features of ASP.NET 2.0 is health monitoring. I believe it is absolutely essential to be notified of any problems with your web application, and this is where health monitoring comes in handy. A few years ago I wrote an article about custom error pages and demonstrated various ways to tap into error details. Health Monitoring is a natural progression of that approach.

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The Dark Side of File Uploads

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I saw a December MSDN article, entitled Uploading Files in ASP.NET 2.0, and wanted to offer my comments on some gotchas with uploading files. I’ve spent countless hours and tried numerous hacks to tame file uploading and have enough bruses from hitting my head against the wall (figuratively speaking).

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Session_Start or Session_OnStart?

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Ever since I started to develop with ASP.NET, I’ve been wondering why global.asa from the ASP days quietly moved over to ASP.NET as global.asax. When you look at it, it just feels so outdated, so VBScript-ish, so loosely–typed. And what is the right way to name event handlers?

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Crafting Lightweight Page Templates with CSS

Sun, 19 Sep 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Giving your web application a consistent look and feel is a task of paramount importance. Yet, templating in ASP.NET has been complicated, to say the least. Learn how you can craft lightweight, efficient page templates with CSS.

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Weather Custom Server Control

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Need a quick and easy way to display weather on your site? Templated custom server controls to the rescue!

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Adding Variables To Style Sheets

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Even though the spec defines CSS as a style sheet language, this language is missing one of the essential features: variables. Every time I've seen people in newsgroups ask how to implement variables in CSS a typical advice was to build the style sheet on the server. Luckily, it is easy to do in ASP.NET with the help of HTTP Handlers.

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Building Dazzling Charts With Office Web Components

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Need to create eye-popping charts in real time and do it at no cost at all? Give Microsoft Office Web Components a try.

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Make Every Web Page Printer-Friendly

Wed, 02 Jun 2004 00:00:00 GMT

You found an article online and want to print it to nicely punch thee holes on the side and store it with other useful stuff. Almost every site nowadays provides a printer-friendly page of this and that, but some sites don't and you're still stuck with staring at their printed navigation bar, footer, ads, etc, for ever and ever. All this online decor means nothing on paper. How do you strip page parts that are irrelevant for print?

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Beware Of Deploying Debug Code In Production

Wed, 05 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT

You have spent several months developing a killer web application (a web site, perhaps) and the long anticipated release day has come. You deploy the application and take it for a test drive. As you navigate from page to page you notice that each page “thinks” before rendering. What’s going on? Didn’t Microsoft folks promise code compilation and ultra fast execution? Isn’t it why we beat ASP, Java and PHP by such a wide margin?

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Bringing CSS2 to Visual Studio.NET

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Even though the CSS2 Specification has been around since 1998 its support in the Visual Studio line of products has been rather weak. In this article you’ll learn how to enhance IntelliSense in Visual Studio.NET to display CSS2 properties.

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Remastering Web Form Templates

Sun, 18 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Visual Studio.NET comes with a number of templates for all kinds of coding occasions. The one I'm going to talk about in this article is the one you probably use most often (provided you are an ASP.NET developer): the Web Form template. Default templates suffer from being stuffed with needless markup. In this article we'll analyze what is supposed to be there and learn how to clean them up.

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What's In Your DOCTYPE?

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT

When you create a web form in Visual Studio.NET using the canned "Web Form" template you might ask yourself, "What is this DOCTYPE declaration about?"

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >

What is this strange-looking beast?

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ASP.NET State Management: View State

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT

ASP.NET view state is a great feature and an essential tool for web development of today. It maintains the state of a page as it travels back and forth. There is no more need to worry about restoring values of page controls between postbacks. In this article you will get an in-depth perspective on view state. We will talk about ways of reducing unnecessary payload and protecting view state from prying eyes.

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Skinning Web Applications with CSS

Sun, 22 Feb 2004 00:00:00 GMT

The common approach to skinning web applications lies in reshuffling controls on a page. Traditionally developers define templates with different color schemes and/or control positioning, tables and inline font tags. While this used to be a perfectly viable solution the overhead of run-time application of these skins is staggering. A much better way is to separate skin structure from presentation and let CSS take care of the layout and typography.

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Producing XHTML-Compliant Pages With Response Filters

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Programming with web standards in mind, although vastly ignored, is becoming more and more important. It almost seems it took too long to promote ASP.NET. Now that we're over the hill and "this stuff works" it is about time to start paying attention to web standards. In this article you will learn how to implement a response filter and plug it into the ASP.NET pipeline. The filter will transform outgoing HTML into XHTML 1.0-compliant markup.

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ASP.NET Custom Error Pages

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 00:00:00 GMT

ASP.NET provides a simple yet powerful way to deal with errors that occur in your web applications. We will look at several ways to trap errors and display friendly meaningful messages to users. We will then take the discussion a step further and learn how to be instantly notified about problems so you can cope with them right away. As a geek touch we will also track the path 404's travel.

ASP.NET consulting with imagination and passion. Hire me!