Thoughts on .Net & Coding

At times you may need to make cross-domain requests in your Windows store app. This can be done using the WinJS.xhr() function. The xhr() function is an easy to use wrapper over the traditional XMLHttpRequest object. This article introduces you with the xhr() function and many of its configuration options. It also illustrates how the xhr() function can be used to call ASP.NET Web API.

Web applications needing real-time communication can use HTML5 features such as Web Sockets and Server Sent Events. While these techniques can be used in modern web applications they can't be used with browsers not supporting HTML5. Additionally, they can pose some difficulty in complex scenarios. ASP.NET SignalR is a library that allows you to perform real-time communication in web applications easily. In this article you will learn the basics of using SignalR in an ASP.NET web forms application.

Web applications are exposed to several security threats such as SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting attacks and cross-site request forgery. In an attempt to assist developers protect their web applications from these attacks ASP.NET provides various techniques. To that end this article shows how an ASP.NET MVC web site can be secured from Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF).

At times URLs that you wish to share with others are too long to be shared in their original form. Such long URLs can affect the readability and flow of your message. Additionally, they are unsuitable to use with applications such as Twitter because of their length. Many websites, therefore, allow you to create a shorter version of a URL which gets expanded to the full original URL when accessed. This article shows how to use Google URL Shortener API to generate short URLs programmatically.

Many websites display notifications or prompts in what is called as information bar or notification bar. Such an information bar typically contains some text, graphics or any other HTML markup along with a close button. The information bar is always visible and is flushed with the top edge of the browser window. Once user closes it, it remains hidden for the active session. Such an information bar can be easily developed using jQuery. The remainder of this article explains how.

Most of the blogs display a set of tags or keywords in the form of a Tag Cloud. A tag cloud presents the keywords in font sizes proportional to the number of blog posts having that tag. If you are using some blogging website or using some open source blogging engine you already have a tag cloud ready. However, if you are building your own blog engine or website you will need to build the tag cloud on your own. This article shows how to do just that.

If your web forms consist of small amount of content they render quickly in the browser and user can start working with them almost immediately. However, when your web forms are bulky and render too much of content, the page is loaded in the browser slowly. Users can start using the partially loaded page and perform actions such as clicking on links or buttons. At times this is undesirable and you want users to wait till the complete page is loaded in the browser. You can accomplish this with the help of little client side script.

If you are a web developer you must be aware of the rising attention being paid to HTML5. HTML5 is not merely about some markup tags. It provides a whole new set of features that make it a programmable platform. Modern web applications invariably make use of HTML markup, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX and related technologies. Noticing this trend HTML5 offers many new and exiting features to the web developers. If you want to be on the cutting edge of the web development technologies you must be well-versed in HTML5. To that end Pro HTML5 Programming, 2nd Edition does a great job of providing in-depth understanding of most of the HTML5 features.