ASP.NET Resources

May 2006

No Resource Expressions in Skins

In ASP.NET 2.0, skins and themes are a great way to give server controls a consistent look throughout a web app. It is rightfully suggested that skins contain control declarations with properties related to the layout and look-and-feel only. Behavioral attributes should not appear in skins.

5/29/2006 |

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Too Much To Do

From Planning Extreme Programming by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler:

5/29/2006 |

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List Control tagPrefixes In Web.config

In ASP.NET 1.x, whenever you developed a custom server control, you had to @ Register it on every page where it appeared. In 2.0 there’s a new configuration section in web.config, <controls>, where you can list all tagPrefixes for custom server and user controls. This way you don’t need to @ Register them.

5/26/2006 |

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Code Blocks Inside Master Pages Cause Trouble

Here’s a little shocking detail about master pages I figured out yesterday. If you happen to have <% ... %> code blocks in the page <head>, sooner or later you may run into the following exception:

5/25/2006 |

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Edit-and-Continue Should Be an Individual Setting

Now that the Web Application Project for VS2K5 is released, you have no excuse not to migrate to 2.0. :) You should feel comfortable with the familiar setting of a solution with projects, each compiling into its own assembly. Deployment should remain pretty much the same, too.

5/18/2006 |

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Avoid Excessive Logic in Master Pages

Master pages are great at helping separate presentation from intricate logic. It’s best to place in master pages the kind of code that deals only with the look and feel of a page and its layout. Should you have additional logic, e.g. checking user credentials, persisting view state to an alternate store, etc—this code should go into a base class for other pages to inherit from.

5/18/2006 |

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The Purpose and Objectives of a Business

What follows below is an excerpt from The Essential Drucker, a compilation of 60 years of Peter Drucker’s writings. It is taken from Chapter 3 that bears the same title as this post. Drucker’s discourse is direct and to the point: the purpose of a business is to create a customer. Read on.

5/14/2006 |

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Overview of Sql Cache Dependency

Database cache dependency must’ve been among the most anticipated additions in ASP.NET 2.0. Caching, in general, calls for some tough decisions. How long to cache data for? Can we afford to present stale data to the user by way of caching? What kind of data are we dealing with and can we even afford it to be stale? How do we invalidate the cache once the data source changes? and so on.

5/13/2006 |

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New Font On the Block

Now that Microsoft made the Consolas Font Pack available for download (hat tip to Miha), I wonder if we’ll be seeing more of this on the web:

5/11/2006 |

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Initialize Page Titles from Site Map (Part 2)

Bryant Likes and Kent Boogaart offered great suggestions in response to a previous post on this subject. Their suggestion was to create an HttpModule to set page titles from a site map.

5/8/2006 |

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1.x To 2.0 Migration Tip: Temporarily Disable Batch Compilation

If you’ve read through various migration HOW-TOs, you might’ve noticed a suggestion to turn off batch compilation and rebuild your project to see if any compilation errors come up. This is a very important point as the <compilation> section in web.config is a tricky one.

5/8/2006 |

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1.x To 2.0 Migration Tip: Where did ConfigurationManager Go?

Last migration tip for tonight. When migrating a web application project, System.Configuration is not referenced by default in Visual Studio. You may see warnings about deprecated use of ConfigurationSettings, so you’ll need to switch to ConfigurationManager.

5/3/2006 |

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1.x To 2.0 Migration Tip: Office Web Components Cause Compilation Error

This one goes to Microsoft Office Web Components (OWC) aficionados.

5/3/2006 |

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1.x To 2.0 Migration Tip: Where Did WebForm_ DoPostBackWithOptions Go?

We’re finally cutting over from 1.1 to 2.0. As I’ve mentioned a number of times, I prefer the Web Application Project model to the Web Site model. Even though our product is of decent size, the migration wizard in VS2K5 did a good job, and I spent most of tweaking simply replacing deprecated methods here and there.

5/3/2006 |

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Web talk

May 2006