Archives

Archives / 2008 / September
  • Taking an ASP.NET Site Offline with a Message

    This was another one that I was literally beside myself that I didn't know this one before. A fellow business partner of mine named James Sutton mentioned this one to me. This one's been around since ASP.NET 2.0 as well. If you have an ASP.NET web application site, and you place a text file named "app_offline.htm" in the root of the site, all requests to that website will redirect to that app_offline.htm file. Basically, if you need to take an entire ASP.NET site offline, you can place some nice message in that file. Then, any new requests to a URL, any URL, in that website will redirect to that file allowing you to do maintenance to the site, upgrades, or whatever. It is not really a redirect though. ASP.NET essentially shuts down the site, unloads it from the server, and stops processing any requests to that site. That is, until you delete the app_offline.htm file - then things will continue as normal and your ASP.NET site will load up and start serving requests again. 

    A super-cool side effect of this is that any files that are locked by the site, such as a database or other resources, are freed since the application domain has been unloaded from the server. This allows you to remove the locks from those files and replace them, without the need to do a full IISRESET, taking down other sites on the server. One thing to keep in mind with this file however, make sure you out enough content in it so it is larger than 512 bytes or IE will consider it a 404 and will display the 404 instead of the contents of your app_offline.htm file.

    Thanks to Ryan Farley for posting this tip...

  • New Image Generator control in ASP.Net 3.5

    Storing images in database BLOB field and displaying it on aspx page is one of the common tasks we do in asp.net projects.  Asp.Net itself does not have an in build control to bind the image stored in database. To display an image stored in database, we will write an HttpHandler which will fetch the image from database and do a binary write. We all know that doing a binary write will become cumbersome when the number of images increases and the number of users becomes high. This week Microsoft have released a new control called ASP.NET Generated Image control to display image in ASP.Net page. This article will give you a kick start on this control and some of its features.

  • ASP.NET AJAX Page Methods

    Simply put, a Page Method is a page specific WebMethod.  Instead of creating a full web service for your method, you can conveniently create a method in your page and use it from client-script.  Let's look at how simple it is to use them...

  • SQL Server 2008 - Merge Statement

    In this article Nidal Arabi examines the usage of a SQL Server 2008 feature named Merge statement. It is a new T-SQL Statement that allows you to perform join of tables and then apply one of three different operations on the result set. He demonstrates the concepts with the help of step-by-step explanations accompanied by relevant SQL statements.

  • Slider AJAX control in ASP.NET 2.0 and C#

    In this article Joe Maguire will explain how you can easily create an AJAX enabled web site within Visual Studio 2005 utilizing C# and how to utilize the AJAX framework to add a simple control from the list of controls available in the AJAX Control Toolkit.
    The AJAX control we will be working with in this article will be the “Slider” control. We will also learn that the Slider control can be manipulated via its properties to display horizontal or vertical as well as allowing you to have incremental steps or a smooth non-step motion.

  • The .Net Coffee Break Show 5 - Ajax Data Binding with Dino Esposito

    Developers.ie invites all our members to attend our regular webcast.
     Dino Esposito
    Our next speaker is Dino Esposito, with a talk on AJAX Data Binding.
     
    Dino is the author of Programming ASP.NET 3.5 Core Reference (Microsoft Press, 2008) and other best-selling books such as Introducing ASP.NET AJAX (Microsoft Press, 2007) and Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Applications-Advanced Topics (Microsoft Press, 2006). He's also the author of the "Cutting Edge" column on MSDN Magazine and a frequent speaker at industry events worldwide, including Microsoft TechEd, DevConnections and in Europe, DevWeek and Basta.

    ASP.NET AJAX excels at connecting client code with remote services, but it doesn't provide just as yet an as much excellent mechanism to consume downloaded data within the client browser.

    No doubts that this aspect of AJAX programming will be greatly improved in the near future; however, for the time being, ASP.NET AJAX doesn't offer a UI model as rich and well done as the server-side service model. In this webcast, dino will discuss client-side templates and data binding for an effective and JavaScript-powered consumption of server data.

    This will be broadcast live on Tuesday 9th of September at 11:00 (Irish time!)