Categorie: ASP.Net

ASP.NET Runtime Cheat Sheet: HttpRequest, HttpRuntime, AppDomain and friends

This article has cheat sheets for retrieving various bits of ASP.NET runtime information. For each bit of info, there is:

* A code snippet for retrieving it in a page, with a link to MSDN
* Description, sometimes explanation
* The value for the live ASP.NET app backing this site”

ASP.NET Runtime Cheat Sheet – HttpRequest, HttpRuntime, AppDomain and friends

Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications

In no particular order, here are the top ten things I’ve learned to pay attention to when dealing with production ASP.NET applications. Hopefully they will help you save you some time and headaches. As always, your thoughts and additions are welcome.

Daptivate & by Kyle Beyer – Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications

Troubleshooting Expired ASP.NET Session State and Your Options

I have a love/hate relationship with the ASP.NET Session. It’s such a convenient place to put things, but when you start putting applications into production there are a number of less-than-obvious edge cases that can come up and bite you.

Most often the Session is used when managing state over a long process like a multi-step wizard or questionnaire. However, when people use the Session, they often lean on it a little. They’ll bake it into their design so deep that when it doesn’t work, they’re screwed. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be able to lean on it, I’m just saying that there’s a lot of things going on with Session (not just on ASP.NET, but other frameworks as well) in order to get it to look seamless.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Troubleshooting Expired ASP.NET Session State and Your Options

Log4net: simple way to use in your Asp.net application

Log the actions of your applications is very important especially when you develop new features or develop very difficult logical business.
But it is also important when users use your applications to understand the critical issues or problems.
To implement quickly the log operations Apache developed an opensource library for .Net developers.

Emanuele’s Blog: Log4net: simple way to use in your Asp.net application

Creating an Outlook Navigation Bar using the ListView and Accordion Controls

Matt Berseth explains how to create an Outlook like navigation pane in ASP.Net with a combination of an Accordion Ajax Control and the ListView control.
Nice example of how the new Ajax controls in the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit can extend the user experience of regular ASP.Net applications with a minimum of code.

One of the designers on our UI team requested a screen mockup with a page layout that is similar to your typical email client. The page is divided vertically into 2 panes. The left pane contains a 2 level hierarchy of categories and subcategories. As the user selects different subcategories the designer wants the right pane’s content to be updated with the corresponding information. Just like Outlook, the designer wants the subcategories to be displayed within expanding and collapsing panels.

Matt Berseth: Creating an Outlook Navigation Bar using the ListView and Accordion Controls

Copy project files to another location after build

For a (web-)project I am working on, I needed to copy the content of 1 website to a sub-folder of another website after the project was built. This enables the 2 projects being separately developed and deployed, but also allows the one project being deployed as a sub-site of the other one. Got it? 🙂

This is how I did this:
In the project file of the sub-project:

  1. In the project file I defined a few variables to make things easier 
    <PropertyGroup>
        <MyOutputFolder>C:ProjectOutputFolder</MyOutputFolder>
        <OutputSubFolder>SubFolder</OutputSubFolder>
    </PropertyGroup>

  2. I defined what files to copy, with the binary output (dll) separately from the website content: 
    <ItemGroup>
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.aspx" />
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.htm?" />
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.js" />
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.gif" />
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.jp?g" />
        <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.png" />
        <MyCopyBin Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)bin***.dll" />
    </ItemGroup>

  3. I created a new target that performs 2 copy commands, one for the binaries and one for the content: 
    <Target Name="MyPostBuildTarget">
        <Copy SourceFiles="@(MyCopyItems)"
            DestinationFiles="@(MyCopyItems->'$(MyOutputFolder)$(OutputSubFolder)%(RecursiveDir)%(Filename)%(Extension)')" />
        <Copy SourceFiles="@(MyCopyBin)"
            DestinationFolder="$(MyOutputFolder)bin" />
    </Target>

  4. I added this target to the BuildDependsOn property so that it is executed everytime the project is built: 
    <BuildDependsOn>$(BuildDependsOn);MyPostBuildTarget</BuildDependsOn>

This gives something like:

<!-- Copy project output to defined folder -->
<PropertyGroup>
    <BuildDependsOn>$(BuildDependsOn);MyPostBuildTarget</BuildDependsOn>
    <MyOutputFolder>C:ProjectOutputFolder</MyOutputFolder>
    <OutputSubFolder>SubFolder</OutputSubFolder>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.aspx" />
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.htm?" />
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.js" />
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.gif" />
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.jp?g" />
    <MyCopyItems Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)***.png" />
    <mycopybin include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)bin***.dll" />
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name="MyPostBuildTarget">
    <Copy SourceFiles="@(MyCopyItems)"
        DestinationFiles="@(MyCopyItems->'$(MyOutputFolder)$(OutputSubFolder)%(RecursiveDir)%(Filename)%(Extension)')" />
    <Copy SourceFiles="@(MyCopyBin)"
        DestinationFolder="$(MyOutputFolder)bin" />
</Target>

Some references on copying project files with MSBuild:
MSDN MSBuild Reference – Copy Task
Channel 9 Wiki: Copy Built Output Of A Visual Studio Project
SharpDevelop Community – Copy config post build
How To: Insert Custom Process at Specific Points During Build
How To: Add Custom Process at Specific Points During Build (Method #2)

How To Create A Custom Control

  1. Create a new ASP.NET Web Application, Windows Forms Control Library or Class Library project
  2. Create a new class and inherit from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl or from a specific control (like TextBox)
  3. Override the Render method and call writer.write() to write raw HTML to the page. ASP.Net server tags won’t work
  4. Use WriteBeginTag(), WriteEndTag(), RenderBeginTag(), RenderEndTag(), AddAttribute(), AddStyleAttribute() and WriteAttribute() to create HTML tags and attributes
  5. Add design-time attributes to properties, like:
    [Category(“Appearance”)]
    [Description(“The text to be shown in the control”)]
  6. Define a tagprefix attribute:
    [assembly: System.Web.UI.TagPrefix(“Anthoro.WebControls”, “awc”)]
    namespace Anthoro.WebControls
    { …
  7. Add a toolbox icon:
    1. Create a 16×16 pixel bitmap (BMP 16 colors) with the same name as the control.
    2. Add it to the root of your project
    3. Set its Build Action to “Embedded Resource”
  8. Add additional resources (stylesheet, images, text files, …) and mark them as “Embedded Resource” also
  9. Add an Assembly attribute for each resource to your AssemblyInfo.cs:
    [assembly: WebResource(“Anthoro.Controls.style.css”, “text/css”, PerformSubstitution = true)]
    When the PerformSubstitution parameter is set to true, the resource will be processed and other webresource URL’s inside it will be parsed and replaced (works only for text-based resources:
    background-image: url(‘<%= WebResource("Anthoro.Controls.back.png")%>‘);
  10. Pay attention to the full namespace and folder structure where your resources are stored. The resource name is build as: Namespace + Subfolders + filename
  11. At design-time, the control is displayed by running the rendering logic. To override this, use the GetDesignTimeHtml(), GetEmptyDesignTimeHtml() and GetErrorDesignTimeHtml() methods

Update: Unlike in C#, in VB.Net the subfolders are not taken into account with the namespace. So the example above in point 10 will be: Namespace + filename

Cutting Edge: AJAX Application Architecture, Part 1 — MSDN Magazine, September 2007

MSDN Magazine – Cutting Edge: “AJAX Application Architecture, Part 1 & 2”

Cutting Edge: AJAX Application Architecture, Part 1 — MSDN Magazine, September 2007:
AJAX to the Rescue
The AJAX Architecture
What’s an AJAX Framework?
ASP.NET AJAX Extensions
A Look at Partial Rendering
Anatomy of an AJAX Postback
Optimization Techniques for Partial Rendering
Weighing Partial Rendering

Cutting Edge: AJAX Application Architecture, Part 2 — MSDN Magazine, October 2007:
Logging In with AJAX
Flavors of Services
What Do AJAX Services Return?
JSON Versus XML
Security Concerns
Services in ASP.NET AJAX
ASP.NET AJAX Services and SOAP
Invoking AJAX Services
Building the User Interface
What It All Means

10 SEO tips for your ASP.NET website – The Code Project – ASP.NET

10 Tips on SEO for your ASP.NET website. I´m sorry, that some of the screenshots contain german language, but I hope you´ll get my point despite that 🙂

The Code Project – ASP.NET: 10 SEO tips for your ASP.NET website