.NET

ASP.NET smartie pants Scott Guthrie has linked to a really interesting article about supporting templated areas in ASP.NET controls. This is aimed at people doing user controls, but the same thing will work if you want to have a templated area in your own custom control. I’ve created a little sample that shows how to [...]

One of the coolest things I learnt lately thanks to Dino Esposito’s excellent Atlas talk that I went to in Nice was that you can register your user controls and web controls in one place in the web.config file rather than at the top of every page. You just need to add a <controls> tag [...]

My boyfriend Joe (who’s also an ASP.NET programmer) has a new techblog! Go read about how excited he is about his new Porsche. ;) Now he has to link back to me! Can you believe I had to tell him to?!

If you’re doing any work with the Atlas beta there’s a nice page in the documentation with tips on debugging atlas applications. Some of the tips are actually quite useful for general clientside debugging as well so it’s worth a read even if you’re not using Atlas.

I found a very interesting article about ASP.NET data binding that talks about exactly what’s happening when you call the DataBind() method on a templated control like the repeater. It’s got some really interesting stuff on how the templates are instantiated and how the child controls are built.

I don’t know if this will be useful to anyone else but I thought this was kind of a neat trick for messing around with ASP.NET page rendering for debugging purposes. My problem was I wanted to stop the rendering of a page at a certain point so I could see how the scripts were [...]

I ran into a weird problem with dynamically created ASP.NET 2.0 user controls yesterday. I was using the user control to populate a panel of a tab control which meant I didn’t actually have a reference to the user control object anywhere on my form. The only way I could get a reference to it [...]

There’s a lovely rant on property grids on the VirtualDub website. To be honest, I’ve never really thought that much about property grids but I can see where the article is coming from. Visual Studio is the only program I use that has them and scrolling through the grid trying to find the property I [...]

I’ve been going through my email finding all the interesting links that I’ve sent to myself since Christmas. Here’s a link I found in the depths of my inbox to a nice looking BitTorrent library for .NET called BTSharp. I actually heard about it through an interesting interview with its creator on DotNetRocks and it [...]

I have had such fun this afternoon! I’ve been creating a little sample application for something I’m doing and I was sick of the Northwind database so I thought I’d try hooking up to the Amazon web service instead (and make fun of David Hasselhof’s 80s movies). I went the VS2005 Web References route and [...]

On the subject of the ASP.NET 2.0 web resources, something very useful to know is they aren’t cached when debug is set to true in your web.config. My research suggests that regardless of this caching isn’t enabled at all on Cassini (aka the ASP.NET development server). It doesn’t seem to even cache static files and [...]

I really like .NET 2.0 and I’m liking it more the more I’m use it. Partial classes! How have I lived without partial classes all these years? It’s a fantastic idea where you’re using generated code like interface code. I’m absolutely itching to try this feature out with CodeSmith when I write my next data [...]

ASP.NET 2.0 has a really nice feature that lets you compile site or component resources like javascript files into your assembly file instead of deploying these shared files to the wwwroot/aspnet_client directory like in ASP.NET 1.x. This makes your component/website much easier to deploy because it means you can keep everything you need in one [...]

I was playing around with embedded web resources and was having a problem loading some javascript files. When I cut and paste the script link from the source of my page into the browser’s address bar I got the following error message: The resource cannot be found. Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking [...]

I found a pretty cool article on developer fusion with an overview of what’s new in ASP.NET 2.0. It’s a great overview with an overview of things like changes to page state, new design time functionality for server controls, new localization functionality and new page lifecycle events. I promise I’m not blogging this because I [...]

Step 1: Create a WebControl that implements the IPostBackEventHandler interface. In my example I’ve created a CustomButton control that is a HTML <span> element that acts like a real button by trigging a postback and firing a Click event. public class CustomButton : WebControl, IPostBackEventHandler { public CustomButton() { } public void RaisePostBackEvent(string eventArgument) { [...]

I’m using ASP.NET 2.0 today to actually try to do something. I’ve opened it up before and had a bit of a look around, but this is the first time I’ve actually needed to make a new project and write a bit of code. I’m trying to breath deeply and tell myself that change isn’t [...]

Saw an interesting looking refactoring tool called DevAdvantage that looks like it’s a cross between FXCop and Resharper. I haven’t actually taken a look at it yet, but I really liked the fact you could set rules for things in aspx files. I think the fact that aspx files aren’t really treated like “real code” [...]

If you need to convert a string to an enum option, you can convert it using the Enum.Parse() method: Day weekday = (Day) Enum.Parse(typeof(Day), “Wednesday”, true);

I might just be dense, but I can’t find out how to do javascript debugging in VS.NET 2005. It cheerfully informs me that “object is null or not an object” but there’s no script listing or running documents or even line information so I can’t really do much with the information. Does anyone know if [...]

I found this wonderful article that compares the performance of different methods of paging in SQL Server a while back, but it was either eaten when my database got corrupted or I forgot to blog it. The article compares six different types of paging and gives information about the strengths and weaknesses of each. Apart [...]

Saw this a few days ago. It’s a free ASP.NET training course from Microsoft. I’ve only had a quick look, but the content looks quite comprehensive and I think there’s a few things in there I’m going to find quite useful. If you’re interested, sign up soon because I believe it’s a time limited thing.

Found an article about how to create ASP.NET applications in VisualStudio without using a web project. You can still have all the neat web project functionality like the wizards, but it makes it much easier to move your projects around (as in a web project the solution won’t even open your web project if IIS [...]

Had an interesting time today looking at tools to watch memory usage. The most interesting thing I found was an article about finding memory leaks in .NET. It had some good information about how the memory allocation and garbage collection works and links to some good tools for monitoring it. The nicest tool I found [...]

Came across an interesting problem today. It turns out that WinForm modal dialogs are only hidden once they have been used. You need to explicitly call their Dispose method if you want to mark them for garbage collection. There’s a MSDN page with more information about this.