There are a few pre-formatted validation expressions available in the VS.NET property editor, including one for email addresses.

If you select the ValidationExpression field of the RegExpValidator and click the [...] icon in the far right you will be able to access them.

Nathan

Hi nathan. Thanks...I knew about the pre-formatted ones, but it would be nice to see them all rolled into a single server control.

Actually, I got feedback from Scott Guthrie on this one...he's going to run it by the team doing validation controls for their consideration. Sweet!

Where do you draw the line though? TelephoneNumberValidator? IpAddressValidator? UrlValidator? You could end up with a very bloated product. There are already a whole raft of controls being added in 2.0. My feeling is that such a control is completely unnecessary. If you really need it, it's a simple task to create a custom server control.

One good aspect of the current RegularExpressionValidator is that developers have to learn (to a certain extent) how regular expressions work (very handy). If this was hidden, then creating regular expressions for validation might not be used so much (use the built-in ones instead) and the skill is "lost".

Plus, the functionality is already in ASP.NET, as has been pointed out. It's no real work to access it.

Hey Johnny,

Good point and certainly very true. I've been wanting to request that an e-mail validator be available for some time.

Actually, truth be told, I had the same concerns when Microsoft said they were rolling the Login controls all into one. It's helpful, but I found it to be tedious overkill, and maybe just done more for marketing to tout it as "an aggregated feature".

But considering how MS is really working to use as mant declarative controls as possible with minimized code, I thought it would fit into the feature set nicely, since so many other feautres that can be rolled or already have existing APIs are being consolidated.

I agree that it might be a bit much, bu for devs just starting out, it would help...and regular expressions are still arguably really hard for beginners to work with, IMHO. It's all about making advanced web app development possible for the masses.

I see the push towards more declarative development, and I don't have a problem with it.

I'm not overly happy about the push to dumb-down web development, if indeed that is what it is.

There are too many poor developers out there already. New controls don't make web development easier, they reduce the amount of code that needs to be written, sure, but the *really* difficult problems don't go away:

- How to design a great UI
- How to architect the back-end to allow for reuse, maintainability and reliability
- How to scale the application for large numbers of users
- How to construct an efficient and usable framework or API
- etc

Having more and more controls worries me, to a certain extent. How much bloat can we contend with?

The features that I like in 2.0 are those which will make it easier for me to construct great applications - better custom control development tools/frameworks, db cache dependencies, integrated SqlXml, ObjectSpaces, MARS.

Great feedback. Undoubtedly, that's a concern of Microsoft's, too, to stay competitive. However, it's assumedly likewise a goal to make web development - and in particular, advanced web development - available to the masses.

My initial recommendation was to build-in a utility that would speed up development, not dumb it down, although I can see how that it might be perceived that way. I was one of the classically-trained web devs people who got mad when Dreamweaver first came on the scene and Joe Schmo who's been working with a PC (not just web programming) for less than a year, and is able to churn out a database-driven site because of an IDE, all the while remaining ignorant to the processes behind-the-scenes, despite my years of training and toiling.

It's the bigger picture that MS is concerned with, because that's where the money is. Granted, it opens up a whole new arena of headaches, but consider the control is has, too. Some newbies may move over from JSP or PHP to ASP.NET based solely on the fact that ASP.NET offers auto-validation controls. People are weird like that.

If the issue is that encapsulating functionality into server controls dilutes the amount of total control a developer has, then maybe the midground would be to create a framework delivering the best of both worlds - delivering powerful functionality WITH lots of room for extensibility.

On that note, I really like what the ASP.NET team has done with caching - specifically, unsealing the Cache API so that devs can write their own caching schemes. If this was encouraged a bit more throughout other areas of the Framework (validation being another, et al.) this would be great.

Thanks for the review. I saw the book at the local Border's Books. I have been using Archer's Inside C# 2nd ed.

Reason for not wraping dependent controls
seems obvious-two controls can have the same
"manager" but different placement context not
directly connected to it's "manager", think
also about ability to set DataSource/"some kind of manager" from code at runtime.
Where are you placing validation controls for example or any non-visual controls connected with visuals?

A regex works, but some things like an email address must adhere to a published standard.

It would be nice to have validators that enforce those standards exactly.

I would also like to see a type validator, it just feels silly to use a compare validator and to say that the compare to do is a type check.

I would also like to see a Required property on all validator so I don't have to always put two validators to require something in a specific format.

Given that I've got a bunch of "ASP+" books sitting around, I'd rather wait until 2.0 is a little closer to release than have a bunch of outdated books.

Plus, with pre-release stuff who needs a book when there are n+1 blogs, newsgroups, and web sites out there hawking the 2.0 stuff. There are already XAML examples for cryin' out loud and that's not coming out until Longhorn in 4-6 years .

Thanks! Glad you liked it.

Good point, but I'm interested in seeing Dino's work, in particular since it'll be after the New Year and hopefully incorporate some of the new features that were developed post-PDC.

A type validator would be very solid!

Is this the main reason? I just thought it was initial Alpha design that it "could" be dropped anywhere in the page and didn't have to wrap the WebPartZones it managed. I think that approach would be better design and lead to less problems down the road.

Of course, your point is very well taken - that on complex <TABLE>-based designs, you'd be wrapping essentially the entire document, and this could get tricky if UI stuff was dynamically written within. Great point.

The IE web controls are all pieces of crap that have very bad object models, they should definately NOT be included in ASP.NET 2.0. However, rest assured that you will see a lot of functionality in ASP.NET 2.0 webcontrols that was not in 1.0 (including treeview).

You think so? I'll agree that their use, either declaratively or programatically is far from simplistic, but you can do some pretty cool things with them.

And, they automate most, if not all, of the DHTML, which I like.

Maybe the suggstion should be:
"I'd like the see variations of the ASP.NET 1.x IEWebControls ship in 2.0, but completely reworked."

I haven't checked but you if you are not then you should really be placing these great features/feedback items in either the asp.net forums for Whidbey or the lists at AspAdvice.com to ensure that they are seen by the ASP.NET team.

Additionally, the IEWebControls that were originally shipped were not production quality controls and no one claimed that they were. They were, as I understand it, created to emulate parts of an old version of Outlook Web Access.

Hi Alex,

Yeah, actually I split the difference and post comments like suggestions in as many places as I can. You never know who'll run across them, or when.

I learnt most of what I know about ASP/ASP.Net from ASPFriends. Of course, I've forgotten it all now, but it put me on the road to becoming a programmer, for which I am grateful.

Jim

Hi Jim,

Me, too. I really grew in my ASP.NET knowledge and as a programmer. Exposure was great, amnd I've met a lot of really cool people who I'm happy to call friends.

I am quit proud of the YahooGroups @ AspFriends - they serve a lot of people well as their archives will show. Guthrie and Howard choose to fund AspAdvice covertly and that is their choice, and I choose to find ways to help the community (with some styles and topic choices I prefer) without their help.

Go to Http://www.aspfriends.com and there are quite a few. A quick look at the archives of
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AspNetAnyQuestionIsOk
and
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AspClassicAnyQuestionIsOk
reveals Mucho help you ignore because of your tendency towards subjective biased statements with little basis in fact.

While it is true some (but not all) of the AspFriends.com groups I "gifted" to others did not become very active that was the choice of the people I gifted them to squander the audience by not priming the lists.

I don't consider you a friend. That assumption is yours. Your story was not researched by the normal journalistic standards of integrity. Once you published that shallow piece that was a mockery of what journalism is supposed to be you lost all credibility as a journalist with me - and as a human who pursues excellence in their career.

You interviewed 2 people, omitted wuch of what I said, and did no research as to whether what each of us said was true, gathered no documents (the MS contract for example), treated Guthrie's words as if they were accurate with little verification. I really enjoy true Journalism (the kind where people actually research dozens of sources, verify facts and actually attempt to determine some truths not just publish portions of 2 interviews and call it journalism.

And not everybody has Blogs - some of us realize that updating and maintaining blogs is a time management trap that eats resources from other non-blog efforts. Read
Drive Yourself Sane
by Susan Presby Kodish, Bruce I. Kodish
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0970066465/learnasp
to learn how you misuse language and make absurd statements that the actions of a couple hundred developers blogging somehow consstitutes the whole community blogging.

The code @
http://www.learnasp.com/freebook/learn/xmltextreader.aspx
is a great thing to run over any XMLfile. Answrs many questions about what the Reader object emits as messages when it encounters XML strutures.

Hi Charles,

Thanks for commenting and for demonstrating the sterling level of professionalism, maturity, and candor that only goes to prove how ASPFriends ultimately went under in the first place.

That's certainly true about what you said about not everyone having blogs. That was a clever exaggeration of the speculation that everyone in the ASP.NET community blogs to prove a point, rather than an outright statement of fact. Apparently, you didn't pick up on that.

Thanks also for the book recommendation...I think one of my producers has this at work. I'll check it out. I'm appreciative of your criticism of my article and I'd like to hear specific recommendations about how you think my station's journalism may improve. I'm always happy to hear from readers how I or the people I manage may get better at what we do.

Thanks for the link Charles! :)

Visio is dying with Whidbey. Whitehorse will more than likely support all of that stuff.

Really? That's too bad - RIP. Actually, Visio might not have been the right fit. But some modeling tool would definetly help.

Thanks for the info!

Yeah, that MSNBC.com, what a crazy web site! Jason - thanks for your hard work. Keep keeping Guam informed!
-b

Hi! Thanks for blogging with me! Where do I know you from...KUAM.COM? :)

I tried your link: http://photoalbums.wdwmagic.com/showgallery.php?cat=500&amp;ppuser=9378&amp;thumb=1 but it didn't work.

Definitely looks like ASP.NET. I think they're using HttpHandlers for the articles now, since I doubt each article resides in it's own directory. Pretty slick setup IMO.

Yep...this seems to be a new trend...prettier URLs!

Either an HttpHandler or perhaps using RewritePath() in Application_BeginRequest in Global.asax.

ASPAlliance started doing the same thing with its articles recently (making IDs directory names) and I implemented something similar a few months back:

OLD:
http://www.kuam.com/news/story.asp?headline=1234

NEW:
http://www.kuam.com/news/1234.aspx

Just an update...the code for ASP.NET in C# is here:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jasonsalas/posts/43303.aspx

Whenever I had to build an app that made heavy use of query strings, I'd pop it up in a window with no address bar after login. Then they couldn't fudge with the app if they knew what they were doing.

Sweet. I did the same thing on numberous occasions - although a few crafty users were able to point it out from getting into IE's History folder and hovering over the page title.

Even though it's quite frequently recommended, I'm not a big fan of <input type="HIDDEN"/>.

I would like to add that it's not only the appealing part of the query string that drives site builders to using 'friendly querystrings' but also the fact that search engines treat these url's as directory indexes thus successfully indexing them in contarary to the bla.asp?foo=bar pages.

That was the original concept behind the Apache MultiViews trick anyway, not sure if the search engines have become smarter nowadays,

- Cheers

Hiding your address bar is by no means foolproof - Ctrl-N pops up a new window with default settings, including the address bar; if you're relying on hiding a querystring like ?superuseradmin=false, it's not tough to get around that.

We used a similar url rewriting technique on a CMS driven website recently - it's nice for other reasons, too. Search engines and website traffic analysis tools (webtrends, etc.), can catagorize by folder locations (even though they're virtual) a lot better than by querystrings, usually.

Is there an example somewhere showing how to do this? Also can this be accomplished using ASP Classic too?

Hi Waseem,

Thanks for the tip...I'd read before that there were certain search engine advantages advantages to not using the query string. :)

Hi Jon,

Yeah...totall not foolproof!

Of note: here's a good link about making search engine-friendly URLs: http://www.codetoad.com/asp.net_ma_searchenginefriendly.asp

Hi Shahn,

Here's a sample, borrowed from Steve Walther's seminal work "ASP.NET Unleashed", which runs in the Application_Request event of your web app's GLOBAL.ASAX file:

public void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string currentPath;
string customPath;

currentPath = Request.Path.ToLower();
if(currentPath.IndexOf("/content/") > 0 && System.IO.Path.GetExtension(currentPath) == ".aspx")
{
// the request is within the /CONTENT/ directory, so re-write the URL to appear to be a filename, rather than a URL with a query string.
customPath = String.Format("/mysite/content/templatefile.aspx?headline={0}",System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(Request.Path));
Context.RewritePath(customPath);
}
}

IMHO what I try to do is:

1) hide the "engine" I am asked to build "Web based applications" not web sites.
in word you don't get to see the name of the cpp files they used so why see the .asp / .aspx / .pl and so on ?

2) reduce the "attack surface"
things I am working on include striping off all the MS / IIS headers that annonuce what kind of server hardware / software is running that application, after killing off the
"IIS 6.0" and the "Powered By ASP.NET" and related headers the next thing is to make the cracker think the pages are just html if ican.
while a dedicated attach will figure out what I have done a casul peek at a site that only uses www.acme.com/this/that/foo/12637gf/at66/
and never serves up a foo.aspx or the like will be a tad less likeky to get targeted for more time cracking it.

and for some apps I toss up a frameset that grabs the /sss/ttt/sss stuff and just lets the user see: http://www.acme.com/
thats it, all the pages are called from under the master frame page thats just a big 100% * 100% frame.
so back to the "application" ness.... you just started "http://www.crm.acme.com/"
so thats all the URL bar should show in that case... as we don't want our customer data to be "Googled" .... so we add in https and no-cache and all that stuff....

I don't think Google will spider URLs based on querystring...

Hi Tim,

When my site's former naming convetion used ID columns in the query string, Google would index them this way, but it was sporadic. I think your chances will be better faking a filename or directory.

Tim, Google will spider URLs based on QueryString quite nicely. For example, ASPFAQs.com - http://www.aspfaqs.com/ - has a single "render" page - ShowFAQ.aspx - which takes in a querystring value to determine what FAQ to show. Google has all the ASPFAQs.com FAQs available...

hi,

I always wandered how to do the "get rid of the querystring" thing.

does anyone knows how ?

kem

H, Kemal

Here's a sample, borrowed from Steve Walther's seminal work "ASP.NET Unleashed", which runs in the Application_Request event of your web app's GLOBAL.ASAX file:

public void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string currentPath;
string customPath;

currentPath = Request.Path.ToLower();
if(currentPath.IndexOf("/content/") > 0 && System.IO.Path.GetExtension(currentPath) == ".aspx")
{
// the request is within the /CONTENT/ directory, so re-write the URL to appear to be a filename, rather than a URL with a query string.
customPath = String.Format("/mysite/content/templatefile.aspx?headline={0}",System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(Request.Path));
Context.RewritePath(customPath);
}
}

For anyone interested, here's an <a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/succeed/">article</a> on A List Apart which talks about URL rewriting.

Their's was the method I'd used in the past when building PHP driven web sites.

<a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tacklingusability/">This article</a> talks further about URL rewriting, as used in the redesign of their site not too long ago.

*gulp*

Excuse the messed up links, I should have noted that .Text doesn't permit html in comments :/

Also, note that in ASP.NET 2.0, you can manually control URL mapping for complex, unattractive URLs to friendlier addresses with web.config.

<urlMappings enabled=“true”>
<add url=“~/dir/dir2/filename.aspx?key=val&key2=val2” mappedUrl= “~/MySite/index.aspx”/>
</urlMappings>

This is neat, but hardly new. Apache has had mod_rewrite for quite some time now. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/rewriteguide.html

It's nice to see a easy method of doing this in ASP.NET. All of the other methods I've seen were ISAPI based. Ick. I've got some querystring based parameters, nothing like "admin=false" or anything like that, that would be nice to hide from an aestethic point of view.

I went through the same thought process awhile back, but Don Box made me see the light.

It is, after all, just XML. Why do we need (or even want) specialized classes for dealing with specific XML dialects?

I have a few more thoughts on this which I'll try to post later tonight.

Hi Tim.

Good point. Do you not think custom server controls to generate - and now that I think about it, consume - RSS feeds would be a worthwhile addition to the Framework?

I think sometimes web services for this purpose can be a bit too top heavy. I wrote a client-side process of getting data from a remote source (http://weblogs.asp.net/jasonsalas/posts/43257.aspx) just to get around this.

Thanks for your feedback! I'm lookiing forward to seeing your other thoughts.

They already have this, it is called the Xml control.

PS: you would never use a server control to generate an RSS feed. That would imply it was inside a web form, which implies you are going to be outputting XHTML or HTML pages. It takes like 5 lines of code to create a http handler to export RSS from your site, I doubt anyone would really gain much from built in .NET support.

Hi Jesse,

Thanks much for the feedback. I agree with what you said about it being tough to use a server control to generate XML only. However, maybe junior developers or people just getting into programming might appreciate the control. A top-notch coder like yourself would probably want to do it by hand, anyway. :)

I think it's possible to change the MIME type of a control to "text/xml", and then bubble up to the parent Page control and set "Page.Visible = false" to negate the default "text/html" headers, so that XML could be written, right?

If junior level developers dictated every framework design, we would all be in a lot of trouble... especially if these junior level programmers you are designing for aren't capable of performing simple string concatenation. Those developers need training, not class libraries.

In any case, server controls are not intended for such things. You can do many unwise things if you really want to.

No offense Jesse, but thank god you aren't in charge of programming languages. We'd all still be programming in Assembly or punch cards.

I'll tell you the first thing that will happen if you don't include a class in the Web namespace; Someone will write a parsing class. Which is fine if the argument is "Should we include one in the Web namespace or should we include one at all either as a namespace or as a server control." I'd say, it doesn't matter. There will BE one whether Microsoft writes one or not.

Hi again Jesse,

True, if development was left to be dictated by underlings and newbies, we'd totally be in trouble. But remember, the key element here is that the non-expert market is a major demographic to tap, and that means big money if MS can build controls that will get a company to take a small team with people without 17 credentials after their names (big $$$), and can still be productive and build effective apps. If they choose this path over Java, that's a major sell.

I'd venture to say that the majority of programmers out there aren't gurus.

In lieu of any formal marketing push at the moment, ASP.NET 2.0 seems to be about a move towards more declarative programming, which fits in with that crowd perfectly, while still satisfying those of us who like to write everything by hand.

Case in point: Macromedia Dreamweaver, circa 2001. Everyone I knew had a cpoy of that, and were building database-drven apps WYSIWYG-style, without knowing a thing about them or their internal processes.

For some, ignorance is bliss. And again, this can be very profitable.

Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow

Why do you think this wouldn't work? The default output caching mechanism is based on a URL plus whatever attributes you assign to the cache characteristics so there's I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work. Then again I haven't tried it either :-}...

Hi Rick,

Thanks for commenting. I was thinking it would going into my little experiment, but I'm now stuck trying to figure out a way to test if it really does. :)

I'm no expert, but from my understanding remoting has been deprecated in favour of Indigo (which is something I plan to get into in 2K4). I want to understand XML Schema better. I might try my hand at some avalon too. In the coming year I also plan to try get more acclimated with "products" like sharepoint and maybe biztalk.

I believe you could use performance monitor to monitor the "Output Cache Hits" counter. This counter should tell you if requests for the text/xml files are being served by the output cache or not.

Thanks Alex!

A few thoughts:

1) Development at Microsoft is done with a number of different end users in mind. In other words, APIs and features are designed and chosen by taking the perspective of (these are just examples of the kinds of things you might see) Fred the VB 6 developer who is really a hobbyist turned consultant for small shops, Jim the experienced developer consultant, and Bob the enterprise architect at a Fortune 500. All of these people have different needs, wants, approaches to development, etc. so we try to cater to all of them as best we can. The important concept here is that no one is lopped off because they are not an enterprise developer, etc.

2) The XML server control does make it fairly easy to consume and display/manipulate XML as Jesse suggests. I'm not sure Microsoft needs to create the RSS consuming control simply because there are other controls that are more critical for customers. I think we'd all rather have the ASP.NET team spend time on something like a sweet menu control, etc. before they build an RSS control or controls. I think someone like Jesse should take the XML control and write a composite RSS control that exposes RSS specific functionality that the XML server control does not have. =)

3) As far as the Framework is concerned, I think the RSS specific implementations should be done by the community (who also controls the RSS spec) as they have been done to date. I don't see anything wrong with using RSS.NET (http://rss-net.sourceforge.net/). When our customers start telling us that they are building and using RSS in a business critical fashion then I know you will see RSS libraries in the Framework.

Well put Alex...thanks for the feedback! I'm actually almost done writing a custom control of my own to do harvest/publish headlines for RSS.

Yes, Indigo is where it (distributed programming in .NET) will be at in the future.

I'm all for learning more about the enterprise server products as well. Office development is high on my list as is Tablet and other embedded/compact development.

Agree. If you do want to track links to your domain, you can get a start with google "link:domain" queries: http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Aweblogs.asp.net

I think it's interesting to track who's linking to you, but I very much agree it's stupid to try to control it.

Or check the logs for all referrers.

output caching should work for any content types. I am caching dynamicly generator jpeg, png's, xml, text you name it !

tip : use application level tracing when you want trace info on requests other then html.

NPR tried to have a link policy and the people revolted over it: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,53355,00.html

Why not incorporate a Creative Commons [1] license into your blog? This should help alleviate some of the legal wrangling that your users endure.

[1] http://creativecommons.org/

Hi Oddur,

Thanks! That's very helpful. :)

Hi Phil,

That's a perfect example of what I was talking about! The fact that the company's police was called "brutally stupid" cracks me up! Thanks much!

Just as a follow-up, I spoke with Rob Howard from MS, who confirmed that any data type can be output cached. Awesome.

I thought this one was quite good,

http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt

Good grief! :)

innovative.

I'd like to point out that this could also benefit client side scripting. Instead of having to use hidden form fields the client side script could modify the viewState directly. I'm not sure if this is actually feasable - just pointing out the fact. I remember reading something about v2.0 better support of client side scripting - can't remember where though. Letting controls decide if they want theyre viewState typed could be beneficial - giving controls that require client side code to modify theyre viewState the ability to do so.

There's a good thought. Whidbey does provide a lot of helpful integration with managing server-side data to the client, but I'd also like to see more of the opposite - supporting client-side data pushed into server-side logic.

When the christmas rush is over I'm thinking about sitting down and writing something to make it easier to modify a Control through client side scripting.

I'm thinking a c# control base class that includes a ClientState dictionary (strKey, obj, type) ala example 3 and some client side js code to make working with it easier (as in ClientState[strKey] = value). The base class would write the ClientState into a hidden field (like ViewState is now) - but in a format that the client side js would be able to parse and modify. On postback it would verify that the returned ClientState is valid and pass it on to the control.

In short: Client side editable ViewState.

Anyone interested enough to comment? Or am I trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist?

Hi Snorrk,

That's a great idea. I'd be interested in working with you on the theory behind it (after the holidays), but optimally, I'd like to see this ship as part of the .NET Framework, so such could be implemented for other controls.

It's interesting that you compare Visio to other products. Rational XDE, while a good modeling tool, sucks up memory like Visual Studio .NET. I shouldn't have to get more memory to support a modeling tool that is based on the code. And Together for Visual Studio right now has locking issues on dlls. Which means it is basically worthless to me (as partners, we are working with Borland to fix it). So while Visio may not be perfect, it does produce valid UML and doesn't crash all the time.

Hi Darrell,

Thanks for writing. I have Rational XDE, but can't run it...not enough RAM. I use Visio too, for UML projects, but to be honest with you, as a web dev, the vast majority of my documentation and visual modeling is done with he "UML-by-PowerPoint" method, or quick sketches on paper. In my opinion, again, true UML is a bit much for a typical web project, and makes for more work. I'd like a refined extension of UML wherein we can get our architectures down with a somewhat standard set of symbols and then get to work.

That's what I'm after...a quick and easy convention of modeling that will be understood by ASP.NET developers.

Have you tried PocketUML for VS.NET? (http://www.codeguru.com/net_general/PocketUML.html) It's supposed to be really good for C# projects.

In my Christmas Eve browsing, I came across this workspace (http://www.scottonwriting.com/sowBlog/RssFeed.htm">http://www.scottonwriting.com/sowBlog/RssFeed.htm) started/owned by none other than my favorite writer (Scott Mitchell - http://www.scottonwriting.com).

I also noticed that the XmlDataSource control in Whidbey has been modified to read both local *and* remote xml data sources making it ideal for reading RSS feeds. Once you've got the data in the XmlDatasource control, there are a variety of other server controls that making displaying the RSS text a breeze. =)

Hi Alex,

Yeah I saw Scott's post yesterday, which is sweet! Thanks for your input...and Happy Holidays!

PS: Love your tag line dude. Talk about a jack of all trades! Do you develop while you're on the air?

Anchor #1: And in other news, shots rang out....
<loud screaming off camera>
<camera pans to Jason typing into the inset monitor in the newsdesk>
Jason: Sorry.... I just figured out how to post to my blog from Microsoft Word.

You may not want to go into the whole (ASPElite) thing.... as the name intails it was doomed from the start. Just what developers need is to appear to be MORE elitist then they already are.

So..... DataReader... or... DataSet?!?!??