.NET
The other really cool thing that I learned this week was an easier way to install components from assemblies into the toolbar. In the past I always thought you had to do the slow and frustrating right click on the toolbox and then “choose items” to eventually bring up the “choose toolbox items” dialog after [...]
Published in .NET on Saturday, June 10th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in Server controls on Saturday, June 10th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in ASP.NET on Monday, May 1st, 2006
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?!
Published in ASP.NET on Sunday, April 16th, 2006
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.
Published in ASP.NET on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
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.
Published in Javascript, Server controls on Monday, April 10th, 2006
I’ve managed to make a bit of a mess of the permissions in an SQL Server database for a personal project that I originally created through my web host’s web interface (before I could locate a copy of Enterprise Manager). One of the things I’m trying to fix at the moment is the user who’s [...]
Published in SQL server on Sunday, April 9th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in ASP.NET, Javascript, Server controls on Friday, April 7th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in ASP.NET, Javascript, Server controls on Thursday, April 6th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in .NET on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in .NET on Friday, March 31st, 2006
Another great thing about SqlExpress is it comes with a great management tool that seems to have a much nicer UI than the evil incarnate that is SQL Server 2000′s Enterprise Manager which has all those horrible modal dialogs. The new management tool is set up much like Visual Studio with a tabbed area containing [...]
Published in SQL server on Monday, March 27th, 2006
I’ve had Sql Server Express installed on my machine since I installed VS2005 about six months ago, but I’ve never actually been able to get it running. Today I actually managed to get it working on my machine. My problem was I was getting error messages whenever I tried to connect to it. The first [...]
Published in SQL server on Monday, March 27th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in ASP.NET on Thursday, March 16th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in ASP.NET, Server controls on Thursday, March 16th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in .NET on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in ASP.NET, Server controls on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in ASP.NET, Server controls on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
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 [...]
Published in ASP.NET on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005
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) { [...]
Published in Server controls on Monday, October 24th, 2005
I just wanted to blog a link to a cool tool that someone posted a link to on the MSWebDev list. It’s called prompt sql and provides an intellisense style dropdown menu to SQL Query analyser and the SQL editors in VS.NET.
Published in SQL server on Wednesday, October 12th, 2005
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 [...]
Published in ASP.NET on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005
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” [...]
Published in ASP.NET on Saturday, October 1st, 2005
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);
Published in .NET on Thursday, September 1st, 2005
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 [...]
Published in ASP.NET on Friday, August 12th, 2005
