Did you know that you can move sections of your Web.config file into other files? Whether it's to keep things tidy or simply to make it easier to find the settings you change often, it's easy to do and yet few people even realize you can.
As a developer, repetitive code is your enemy. It takes longer to write, leads to larger files, and is harder to maintain. Which brings me to the point of this tip. Did you know that you can tie the same event handler to multiple objects? It's easy to do, but most people never think to try it.
This sample builds upon our original Checkbox sample by showing you how to
display boolean data as a checkbox and then how to save the state of that
checkbox back to a database.
Determining a person's age given their date of birth seems simple enough, but I get a lot of email from people who can't seem to get the code working as it should.
Microsoft just published a series of 46 -- that's right 46! -- tutorials that provide step-by-step
instructions for implementing the different controls in the ASP.NET AJAX
Control Toolkit. If you've been putting off messing with AJAX, what can
I say... sometimes procrastination does pay off!
There are times when it's nice to have a full blown development environment like
Visual Studio to mangage your site with, but there are also times when a simple little
web app fits the bill perfectly.
For those of you who like to live on the bleeding edge, Microsoft has released beta versions of the forthcoming Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1.
People really love Microsoft Excel. Many users are so comfortable with Excel that they want to use it for everything. That's probably one of the main reasons I get so many requests about using Excel with ASP.NET. As it turns out, the real question most users want answered is how to store data from a Web page in an Excel-readable format?
This sample shows how you can use ASP.NET to query a database table for multiple search terms. Whether you want the results that match any of the search terms or you just want results that match all of them, the process really isn't as hard as you might think.
Last week while I was talking with a friend of mine, he asked me a couple questions and then told me when I could expect my economic stimulus payment. This sample does the same thing. It's nothing fancy, but it does illustrate some basic form handling, conditional branching, and a good use of a Select Case statement. Give it a try... hopefully your payment is coming soon!
Why do people insist on using mm-dd-year or dd-mm-year when creating
log files? Are you really trying to see what happened on the same
month of every year or the same day of every month? You might want
to try this alternative, which when sorted numerically actually puts
the files into chronological order.
This sample shows how you can query a database table for multiple search terms.
Whether you want the results that match any of the search terms or you just
want results that match all of them, the process really isn't as hard as you might think.
When people talk about new features in Visual Studio 2008, you'll usually
hear them talk about improved Javascript Intellisense and debugging, amazing
advances in CSS support, huge gains in the IDE's responsiveness, and the fact that Microsoft
has given us mere mortals access to the actual source code of the .NET Framework libraries.
But for the working developer, all those pale in comparison to a simple little
feature called multi-targeting.
I recently started getting some odd characters appearing when
working with an old classic ASP application. I'd been using the
same scripts for years and while I knew that nothing in the
application had changed, we'd recently started using Visual Studio
2008 to create the application's data files.
As I'm writing this, I'm not even sure what the official name of the
event I attended today actually was. The phrase "Heroes Happen
Here" was used a lot, as was the term "Launch Event". Well,
whatever you call it, if you're interested in what Microsoft is up
to these days and you're able to find one close to you, do yourself
a favor and check it out.
While Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) has been available to MSDN
subscribers for a while now, everyone else has been forced to wait to receive
what Microsoft is calling "the benefit of a year's worth of improvements."
Well that wait came to an end today...
While everyone knows that you can manipulate text files and their
contents via an ASP.NET Web page, did you know that you can actually
modify a file's timestamps just as easily? Why would you want to do
that? Read on to find out...
While you can append text to the end of a text file, there's no easy
way to insert, edit, or remove text from a file. To do things like
that, you'll need to read the text from the file, edit it, and then
write it back out.
One of the most common questions I receive about our RSS consuming code
is how to limit the number of items displayed. Luckily, it's relatively
easy to do. Best of all, you can do it without any changes to the code
by simply modifying the style sheet used to transform the RSS
feed's XML to HTML.
Last week we published a tip about using the DefaultButton and
DefaultFocus properties of the HtmlForm object. A reader quickly
informed us that he was having trouble using them on a site which
uses MasterPages. Not to fret... you can still use the properties,
you just need to do things a little bit differently.
ASP.NET 1.x made great strides in simplifying form management and processing, but it did miss a couple points when it came to filling forms out using the keyboard. Fortunately these oversights were quickly noticed by users and Microsoft responded in ASP.NET 2.0 by adding the DefaultButton and DefaultFocus properties to the HtmlForm object.
While ASP.NET server controls make developing Web pages much simpler,
sometimes they don't output their HTML exactly the way you'd like them to.
That's where the Literal Web server control comes in. Unlike most
other controls, it doesn't add anything to the output.
Last week, Microsoft quietly released .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 and
.NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1. If your servers aren't configured to
install updates automatically, now might be a good time to check and
make sure you're up to date.
It sure took Microsoft long enough to add decent style sheet support
to Visual Studio, but man was it worth the wait. This article
examines the new CSS capabilities available in Visual Studio 2008.
