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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 health monitoring comes in handy. A few years ago I wrote an article about custom error pages and demonstrated various ways to tap into error details. Health Monitoring is a natural progression of that approach.
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 to tame file uploading and have enough bruses from hitting my head against the wall (figuratively speaking).
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 When you look at it, it just feels so outdated, so VBScript-ish, so loosely–typed. And what is the right way to name event handlers?
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, efficient page templates with CSS.
Need a quick and easy way to display weather on your site? Templated custom server controls to the rescue!
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 in CSS a typical advice was to build the style sheet on the server. Luckily, it is easy to do in ASP.NET with the help of HTTP Handlers.
Need to create eye-popping charts in real time and do it at no cost at all? Give Microsoft Office Web Components a try.
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 that, but some sites don't and you're still stuck with staring at their printed navigation bar, footer, ads, etc, for ever and ever. All this online decor means nothing on paper. How do you strip page parts that are irrelevant for print?
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 navigate from page to page you notice that each page “thinks” before rendering. What’s going on? Didn’t Microsoft folks promise code compilation and ultra fast execution? Isn’t it why we beat ASP, Java and PHP by such a wide margin?
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 you’ll learn how to enhance IntelliSense in Visual Studio.NET to display CSS2 properties.
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.NET developer): the Web Form template. Default templates suffer from being stuffed with needless markup. In this article we'll analyze what is supposed to be there and learn how to clean them up.
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 4.0 Transitional//EN" >
What is this strange-looking beast?
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 values of page controls between postbacks. In this article you will get an in-depth perspective on view state. We will talk about ways of reducing unnecessary payload and protecting view state from prying eyes.
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 inline font tags. While this used to be a perfectly viable solution the overhead of run-time application of these skins is staggering. A much better way is to separate skin structure from presentation and let CSS take care of the layout and typography.
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 works" it is about time to start paying attention to web standards. In this article you will learn how to implement a response filter and plug it into the ASP.NET pipeline. The filter will transform outgoing HTML into XHTML 1.0-compliant markup.
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 will then take the discussion a step further and learn how to be instantly notified about problems so you can cope with them right away. As a geek touch we will also track the path 404's travel.
