Aaron Schnieder on ASP.NET

Input validation is one of those areas that most developers view as a necessary evil. We know that it is necessary and we really do want to ensure that we get good input from our users. But most of us are lazy (me included) and input validation is one of those things that gets done but usually is a quick and dirty implementation. This is partly due to laziness and partly do to input validation being painful.

I love Windows Live Writer as a blogging application and use it pretty much exclusively for writing my blog posts. The only downside is that I have found it difficult to get code snippets formatted correctly in my posts. Luckily a friend of mine, Tyson Swing, turned me on to a great code snippet plugin for Windows Live writer.

Kind of an ironic statement isn’t it? We obviously want to avoid errors if at all possible in our applications, but when errors do occur then we want to provide some nice feedback to our users. The worst thing that can happen is to blow up a huge server exception page when something goes wrong or equally bad is not providing any feedback at all and leaving the user in the dark. Although I do not recommend displaying actual .NET Framework exception messages or stack traces to the user in most instances; they are usually not helpful to the user and can be a security concern.... [Read More]

Worried About The Loss Of ASP.NET Controls in MVC? Don’t Be

If you are running IIS6 and want to deploy an ASP.NET MVC app it is a royal pain in the behind. Pretty URLs (www.mysite.com/prices instead of www.mysite.com/prices.aspx) aren’t supported out of the box. There are several solutions to this problem. First, you can still use MVC with IIS6 out of the box and just append .mvc to all of your files. This approach works, but you lose the nice URLs. Second, you can add a wildcard mapping that processes EVERY resource in a website through the ASP.NET ISAPI dll (images, css files, javascript, everything!) There is a known performance hit with this method and I found it to be quite noticeable when I tried it. Third, you can configure a URL re-writing module that will enable pretty URLs and do so in a well performing manner.

One of the controls that it seems like everyone in the ASP.NET community is most concerned about losing when switching to ASP.NET MVC is the ubiquitous GridView control to render grid based data. Fear not ASP.NET community there is a GREAT alternative that, in my opinion, has a lot more to offer than the GridView in terms of user experience.

A while back I wrote a locale control for ASP.NET that gave you a nice and easy way to plug in a cascading state/province – country control into your ASP.NET websites. Now that I have moved on to using ASP.NET MVC for my new projects I needed the same control, only this time in MVC.

Read my full list of favorite geeky free stuffs for development and OSs here: http://www.schnieds.com/2010/01/essential-free-software-for-net.html