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ASP.NET Custom Error Pages

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 wi...

Producing XHTML-Compliant Pages With Response Filters

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...

Skinning Web Applications with CSS

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 i...

ASP.NET State Management: View State

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 ...

What's In Your DOCTYPE?

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...

Remastering Web Form Templates

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.NE...

Bringing CSS2 to Visual Studio.NET

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 youll learn how to enhance IntelliSense in Visual ...

Beware Of Deploying Debug Code In Production

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 n...

Make Every Web Page Printer-Friendly

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 th...

Building Dazzling Charts With Office Web Components

Need to create eye-popping charts in real time and do it at no cost at all? Give Microsoft Office Web Components a try.Any time you need to add killer 3D charts to your web application you probably ju...

Adding Variables To Style Sheets

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 ...

Weather Custom Server Control

Need a quick and easy way to display weather on your site? Templated custom server controls to the rescue!About a month ago I started looking around for a server control I could simply drop in my page...

Crafting Lightweight Page Templates with CSS

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, effici...

Session_Start or Session_OnStart?

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, s...

The Dark Side of File Uploads

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 ...

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

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 he...

Why So Averse To Exceptions?

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.One project in particu...

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

When just about everybody has written off WebForms as uncool and hailed MVC as the new Silver Bullet, I beg to differ.Act 1, Scene 1: The Devil’s Advocate That’s right—WebForms. Si...

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

An exercise in refactoring a real-world WebForm to a more maintainable and testable one.Suppose we have a Contact Us page. Old school, with all the logic in code-behind. I borrowed it from an old proj...

Site Migrating. Comments Temporarily Closed.

I’m almost done with the site redesign and therefore have to close comments for a (hopefully) short while while I migrate it over. In the meantime, shoot me an email if you need anything. ...

Inconsistencies in Health Monitoring Between WebForms and MVC

As I have written and spoken on numerous occasions, Health Monitoring happens to be one of my favorite features in ASP.NET. In WebForms, it's a path well trodden. However, while building Morts &a...

Shinkansen for ASP.NET MVC Now Available

While building Morts and Elvises with MVC2, I cut over Shinkansen to support MVC syntax within views and master pages. I’ve included a sample MVC project, which you can either download from Co...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

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'...

How to Read Auto-Generated MachineKey

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...

Transparent Database Encryption With SQL Server 2008

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 ...

Shinkansen, My New Project, Is Up On CodePlex

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...

Help Improve the Markdown Port

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 se...

Comparing Strings Like It's 1995

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"))...

How to Make crossdomain.xml Work with SharePoint

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 whe...

Slides from the Boston Code Camp 12

A big thank you to everyone who attended my two talks at the Boston Code Camp! Below are links to slides and sample code. Professional Client-Side Development with Microsoft AJAX Library and jQuery...

Observations From The Field

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 ...

Paco Underhill and His Silver Bullet Technology

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 fun...

My Herding Code Podcast Is Now Available

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. T...

Zeldman Speaketh. Take Heed.

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 Ze...

The Best Time Is Now and Never

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 ga...

Recipe: An ASP.NET Roast

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 Instructi...

Hire me!

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 ...

Wean Yourselves off View State From the Start

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 ...

Weather.com Broke Something

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 throwi...

Delta, Go and See For Yourself

One of the key ingredients in Toyota’s not-so-secret Toyota Production System sauce is Genchi Genbutsu, which literally means “go and see for yourself” (not to be confused with the p...

Load Testing vs. Profiling

A fellow geek asked me the other day, “What’s your take on load testing and profiling?” Incidentally, this question comes up once in a while, so I figured I’d explain my positi...

IIS7 Resource Kit Rocks!

I’ve never been much of an “infrastructure guy” which is why Microsoft’s Resource Kit books always induced sleep on me. However, the IIS7 Resource Kit by Mike Volodarsky, et...

Getting to the Bottom of JavaScript Includes

I get frustrated when an outside vendor insists that I include their JavaScript file all the way up in my pages. Usually they want it right in the <head>. I have a couple of issues with that. I...

If Only They Tested It on Themselves

The company I’m on a contract with has moved to a new building in NYC. Actually, it’s an old building, but fully remodeled. Since day one we’ve all noticed weird “bugs” a...

SuperPreview Blew Me Away

A fellow user group attendee pointed me to a preview of SuperPreview for Expression Web (no pun intended). Testing a web site in various browsers has been such a headache over the years! Either you ha...

Slides and Code from Hartford Code Camp 2

A big thank you to those of you who came to my presentation at the Hartford, CT Code Camp 2. A special thank you goes to the organizers and sponsors of the event. Feel free to grab the slides from my...

Temporary Fixes Are Permanent Fixes

A somber reminder that temporary (aka “quick and dirty”) fixes almost always become permanent: /* * Note: this problem may have been fixed already. * I stopped using the session array met...

Geek Marketing Done Right

Although I’ve been reading his blog for some time, I’ve never met Billy McCafferty. And yet I’m fascinated by his latest brainchild: IT Samurai School. The front-end is all Flash. I...

Visual Studio Full Screen For Presentations

Visual Studio has one very obvious but little–used feature which helps presentations go much smoother: the full screen view. Most of the time I see presenters struggle with the Solution Explor...

ColoRotate Is Cooler Than Kuler

Michael Douma sent me a quick introduction to a very interesting project he’s involved in: ColoRotate. In Michael’s own words: Since color is inherently three dimensional, it’s a...

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