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I just voted for Multiple web.config Transforms for ASP.NET. What do you think? I just voted for Silverlight on XBOX 360 for Silverlight. What do you think?

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is recently made generally available to try and it has ASP.NET MVC2 Preview 2 out of box. In ASP.NET MVC2; there is a breaking change from ASP.NET MVC 1. The ASP.NET MVC’ built in JSON support will only serve for POST request and discards GET requests due to JSON Vulnerability. Michael Campbell has written a detailed ...

I started using IE again after IE7 mainly because of its speed and the fact that it has copied all the nice features (Tabs) of Firefox <smile /> IE8 has got some nice developers features (JavaScript debugger with Breakpoints, Native Json support, CSS3 selector to name few) and this video from MSDN Channel 9 is must watch to learn about ...

Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio installs the Silverlight SDK; the Silverlight 2 SDK featured System.Web.Silverlight assembly that had Silverlight ASP.NET control through which you can host your Silverlight application. The Silverlight 3 SDK doesnt has this assembly…If you have used this control and upgrading to latest tool…before uninstalling ...

ASP.NET provides wide spectrum; you can develop reusable interface components using User Controls, Server Controls and Web Parts (WebForms world). There are three ways to develop ASP.NET Server Controls. Render Contents You can override RenderContents and using the writer can flush out the HTML text you want. Its more or less the same Classic ...

Here is my attempt to transform Google Search Results into a RSS feed. This functionality is missing from Google. Test it out and provide some feedback. I have published the feed as a web service at http://www.ecubicle.net/gsearch_rss.asmx There is a single function called GetSearchResults with the following signature GetSearchResults(byval ...

Extension methods allow developers to add functionality to the existing .NET types without recompiling the source, or extending (deriving from the type) the type. For certain types, such as String, these cannot be extended because they are declared as Notinheritable (Sealed). For such scenarios, create an extension method to add custom ...

I have published some tutorials on YouTube on LINQ and ADO .NET Data Services. ADO .NET Data Services allow creation of REST based services which is simply a fancy way of serializing data as XML and returning it over HTTP. You can view these tutorials on my YouTube Channel at http://ca.youtube.com/rafaybinali    

The important part is to retrieve the KML file (XML based standard) from Google Maps (refer to urlString). Once we have the KML file, we create an XMLDataSource control, retrieve the XmlDocument's InnerXml. After that, we parse the elements to retrieve the directions which are placed in the <name> element ...

Also, have a look at the youtube downloader web service that I have recently published. As you are probably aware, YouTube Google GData API allows replication of the entire YouTube functionality from within your application. However, the only piece missing from this API is the ability to download videos - which is understandable. By using my web ...

I have finished creating a complete YouTube clone in .NET. The most complex part of the whole project was to find out how to convert media into FLV after upload. This research took the better part of my project time. Nonetheless, it is complete in terms of functionality, though UI needs some major rework. Anyhow, what you need is FFMPEG.exe. It ...

Here is an interesting web service that allows applications to download youtube videos. Applications that require interaction with youtube can obviously use the YouTube API's to provide exhaustive youtube functionality right from their web sites. However, the only API function that is missed is the ability to download from Youtube.The Youtube web ...

http://weblogs.asp.net/stephenwalther/archive/2008/10/17/a-guide-to-learning-asp-net-mvc-beta-1.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2008/10/20/asp-net-mvc-for-live-applications.aspx

As Nasir has pointed out that Microsoft has unveiled more information about upcoming .NET Framework! I believe unlike .NET v3 and .NET v3.5 which were architecturally ''addon'' releases above .NET v2.... .NET v4 might be side by side release, and if it is...then i think this is great opportunity for Microsoft to simplify things a bit.... Few days ...

Download Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, its a big download and takes some time to install...but when you are done with it, you will be seeing an option ''Web Application Project'' in ''New Project'' dialog. This new option provides same feature as ASP.NET 1.1 projects in Visual Studio 2003. Furthermore after Service Pack 1, you should be able ...

View this 16megs video from Dan Wahlin; in which he shows how easy things are with LinqDataSource! You get a filter; master/detail form and full editing/deletion/insertion; with almost no line of code! I personally dont like such declarative style programming; because the code generated with such approaches is not maintainable; however these ...

In many web applications, almost half of the code in “UI layer” is about dealing query strings, forms and other such thing trying to pass data between one pages to another. With new MultiView control in ASP.NET 2 and using user controls (optionally) you can avoid that whole junk.If you can interpret the whole UI in a single ASCX/ASPX you don’t ...

ASP.NET 2 AJAX  Extensions1.0 (code name Atlas) has recently been released. Go get it from http://ajax.asp.net It’s a must have extension for web application developers. ASP.NET AJAX has two major components, new ASP.NET server side controls and a client side JavaScript library. Even if you are not using ASP.NET, you can still use client ...

ASP.NET v2’s SqlDataSource is great; but for small apps or while doing prototyping / inception. It starts creating problem in later stages of mid to big level projects. In such cases; we might want that with each release; all SqlDataSources being used are documented so that you can track which database objects are being used. Its a tedious ...

This is for a friend, showing how easy it is to use JavaScript in ASP.NET apps. Note how the inline code is used to get the element id. To make it more runtime error prone; simply create a method in code-beside file and use that…     <script language=''javascript'' ...

Web Service http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2006/09/20/Calling-Web-Services-with-MS-AJAX-using-Code-Vs.-Declaratively.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/wallym/archive/2006/08/31/Prioritizing-web-service-calls-in-Atlas.aspx   Client Side ...

Data binding features of ASP.NET is awesome; the only pitfall with this technique is that most of the code tends to be “declarative” and you loose compile time checks which increases chances of error in maintenance. However using ObjectDataSource you can resolve some of the “page maintenance” issues resolved but it increases the code ...

This took considerable time to fix! Gotcha: If a page hides and unhidesDetailsView/FormView controls, it may produce a bogus “Failed to load viewstate…” error message Fix: Set “EnableViewState” property to False for each of the DetailsView/FormView controls Even if you wrap the FormView in some Panel and tries to set its visibility; same ...

As time to market is becoming important factor; we the developers usually get very low time to make things the right way. We have to rely on frameworks, runtimes and libraries to do the heavy lifting. While designing the app in such scenarios you have to do certain trade offs; at the end of the day; you usually ends up with a code that you don’t ...

If you are using ASP.NET v2; and you are medium to advanced developer; you must read ASP.NET 2.0 MVP Hacks and Tips. I have just read its three chapters and have already learned many cool things. I will try to post'em as well.

LINQ gets cooler when it can be used in web apps… Microsoft has just released RC1 of Web Application Projects (WAP); and with this; one can now use (*)LINQ in web projects. Here are the steps. Install WAP Download the LINQ Preview; and install it in its default location. Download this Project Template I have created using the steps given ...

Last few days had been of full of fun! We are having a refactoring week in our current project; in which we want to improve the overall code base before moving forward. One of the activities was to straighten out the projects in the solutions. We have two web applications as part of the current project; which are VS2005 based. (ASP.NET v2; lots ...

With Data Source Controls in ASP.NET v2; things are turning into declarative programming style; more code is being pushed to UI (ASPX/ASCX) and with that; runtime errors increases; especially in maintenance phase of the software. If you want to learn how object data source controls can help you develop web apps rapidly; read Nasir's Introduction ...

Today I updated few internal Sharepoint based applications to ASP.NET v2. Before using ASP.NET v2 with Sharepoint; you need to install Service Pack 2 of Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS). I was using SmartPart to use ASCX based user controls in Sharepoint. You need to use “Son of SmartPart” if you are using ASP.NET v2. It took considerable time to ...

Few days back, I have informed about my article, SumColumn published on codeproject. Now It has been updated incorporating the users comments. You can visit it here. Your comments are welcomed.

IIS6 features multiple application pools; an application pool is basically a process that handles the web requests. These application; also loads the runtimes and script engines to server dynamic content; like ASP, PHP, Microsoft.NET for ASP.NET and so forth. This is quite natural; that only one version of one engine/runtime can get loaded into ...

Two useful things for ASP.NET developers were made available from Microsoft this week; first is the January CTP of Atlas; that now includes the support of progress while some AJAX action being performed (something like GMail’s Loading thing) and support of special button that you can place to cancel that Ajax action. There is also ...

''A normal requirement in any asp.net application is to sum up the values in a DataGrid column to the footer. In this article we will try to compare the normal methods of achieving this task and later we will do this by creating our own custom DataGrid column “SumColumn”, derived from BoundControl column so that we don’t have to write the same ...

Few days back, there was a task that I have to get/parse data from html pages on a site. I first tried to use System.Net.HttpWebRequest class to make the request, get the data. <code> Dim objRequest As System.Net.HttpWebRequest = System.Net.WebRequest.Create(Url) Dim result As String objRequest.Method = "GET" Dim ...

Great detailed post comparing the two http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2006/01/31/437023.aspx http://aspadvice.com/blogs/rjdudley/archive/2006/01/18/14755.aspx

From management and/or architect perspective; using ObjectDataSource is preferred; but from developer’s view; SqlDataSource is much easier way to go. Give me 5 good points that can be used to motivate developers to prefer using ObjectDataSource. <smile />

Today while winding up my current project; I wanted to export everything as a single user control that can be used in any ASP.NET v2 web application; by just dropping the control on the page. For this I needed to implemented nested user controls; that is my exposed user control loads other helper user controls as the visitor flows across the ...

As said before; ASP.NET v2 compilation model is slightly different than its previous versions. In ASP.NET v2; assembly for each page is generated; thus; theoretically speaking you can have each page written using its own language. However its not yet achievable in ASP.NET v2 implementation; the only thing you can get right now is to define ...

To implement master-detail using ASP.NET v2's new DataSource control; we can have two DataSource control; lets assume first is retrieving summaries and the second retrieve the detail information. The second data source will be parametric. Lets assume there are two GridViews bound to these two data source controls. Then in the ...

Last month; when my team started working on a very exciting new project; we all decided that we will use .NET v2 for all aspects of the project. We still are trying to make SQL 2005 available for this project; its new features like Service Broker will definitely help us. Anyways; last week I disconnect myself from that project to complete couple ...

If you are using Data Source Control and receiving the exception, Procedure or function <YourProcName> has too many arguments specified; this can be due to the reason that in your data control some child control is binded to some column which is not available in the Select command of your data source control. E-g in a template following ...

If you are using SqlDataSource [ASP.NETv2]; and you need to pass on certain parameters not accessible using Form, Cookie, QueryString or Session, use simple Parameter and data-bound control’s even like Inserting, Updating or Deleting. In the even you can write a code like protected void FormViewModels_ItemInserting(object sender, ...

Well wishes to all the Hajj pilgrims and Eid wishes for the rest. I got very few time for my PSK2 endeavor, due to Eid shopping and some pending work that needed to be done at our place. PSK2 is now called SilverBulletPortal (SBP). Why Silver Bullet? I will post about it some other time <smile /> I have completed implementing and ...

Happy weekend to everyone… Today we went to receive the report card of our son. He has received certificate in Enthusiasm, and his teacher has advised us to buy Abdullah more books; as he has tendency to explore new things. I am feeling great, but my wife wanted some certificate in Speaking or Writing skills <smile /> Abdullah has gone ...

Today I again worked on my PSK2 thingy. I wanted to make a proof of concept by implementing a custom membership and role provider on ASP.NET v2 platform to show how easy things can get and how one can integrate it even with existing applications. I took some time, at my work and implemented these two custom providers. I preferred Portal Starter ...

A Saudi Arabia based e-news/stock company wants to outsource an application dealing with SMS/MMS. The bird's eye view of the application is like.   1) User can subscribe to the SMS/MMS service through the website or by sending SMS with a given code to a given number           E.g. SMS 195 BN ...

First let me confess; I am not good in UI programming. I am not in touch with it anymore. In my PSK2 project; I implemented ASPNET2’s Master Pages; and the problem I faced that if your page has any master page; the control’s ids get changed and FindControl(controlid) doesn’t work anymore. The following code doesn’t work string controlToFind = ...

It’s getting colder day by day… In evening; I had been thinking about the little project I have planned to keep myself engaged for days to come. I will refer to it by name PSK2 (Portal Starter Kit v2). My goals are To experiment with SubVersion; I want to use its branching and merging options; and want to show how its being used in this ...

My younger brother has moved back after completing his graduate studies. He is in phase of deciding what-to-do-next. My son got pneumonia last week; we took him to our home town at grand parents place, they being doctors; are treating him; and this week he will be staying there with them. So; this week; we (me and my wife) are all alone ...

So what a good portal platform should provide you? Add new things and vote listed item on scale 0 (no need) to 10 (it will not be a portal platform if it does not have this) User Management System Security System Extendable Mobile Support Online help/documentation of portal platform[F] Community Support, Lots of controls/add-ons available ...