Archives
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Automatically Generate Stored Procedures with Visual Studio
This is one of those tucked-away features in Visual Studio that, once you find it, can make you slap your forehead so hard that it hurts. Warning: You may need an aspirin after reading this.
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A ‘Simple’ Asp.Net Custom Server Control
A user on the Asp.Net forums, where I moderate, asked how to list a bunch of files in a directory as hyperlinks on a web page so the user could click on them. I thought this was probably an often performed task and decided create a Server Control to encapsulate it.
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Can the C# ‘var’ Keyword be Misused?
More and more often I've been seeing C# code like this:
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Why SQL Updates Fail – Five Reasons
"The SQL command ran, there's no error message but nothing changed! What's going on? Do you think it's a virus? Maybe there's a bug in .NET!"
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Twin Cities Code Camp – October 24, 2009
The seventh Twin Cities Code Camp will be held Saturday, October 24, 2009 from 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM on the University of Minnesota Campus.
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CompareValidator’s Hidden Gem (It does data type validation)
Man is small and the .NET environment is vast. After years of working in the .NET environment, you can still find new and amazing features. A user on the Asp.Net forums posted this feature I had never discovered…so I thought I'd pass it along.
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Debugging XML Transforms (XSLT) with Visual Studio
XSLT stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations.
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How to Fill a ListBox/DropDownList from an Enum
There was a question about this on the Asp.Net forums and after a quick search I didn't find a good generic function so I thought I'd supply one.
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Speed Up the Visual Studio Toolbox
There are plenty of tips out on the web that I see no need to repeat here. But this one made such a remarkable difference on my box that I had to post it….
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What’s the Deal with Interfaces?
This post is for beginners.
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Serializing and Deserializing Objects…to and from…XML
Over on the Asp.Net forums I recently had the opportunity* to help a few lost souls by showing them how to serialize objects to XML and deserialize the XML back into objects. Since the question has come up more than once, I decided to BLOG it so I could refer similar questions in the future to this post.
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AH, Ah, ah, ah…Staying Alive…Staying Alive
Sometimes you want your web page to 'stay alive'. That is, if a user is filling out a complicated form, you do not want the session to time out before they are finished. The user could get very angry and rightfully so: You might even get yelled at!
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Why goto Still Exists in C#
Developers, Software Engineers, and Programmers are logical, rational, reasonable people right? Sure they are…until you disagree with something they believe in. Then they can become the most enflamed, outraged, foaming-at-the-mouth, intolerant, lunatics you've ever had the pleasure of meeting.
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Quick and Dirty Automatic Page Navigator
Over on the Asp.Net forums, a user asked how to store an ordered list of pages in an Xml file so he could use it to control the navigation of a group of pages on his web site. It was for a 'Wizard' where the user needed to go through the pages in sequence…no jumping directly to a page. He wanted it to be easily editable.
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jQuery…Worst Practices
jQuery and Regular Expressions have a lot in common: They are both amazingly powerful and they are both as ugly as a knife fight between two obese street-whores in a garbage-strewn alley.
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Using Session State in a Web Service
Usually, when you think of a Web Service, you think …make the call, get the response, and get on with the task at hand. These "one shot" calls are the norm in Web Services but there may be times when you need a little more. You may need the Web Service to remember states between calls.
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IE 8 - IP Address Mapping Accelerator
On the ASP.NET forums where I moderate, the poster's IP address is displayed at the bottom of the post. Often I am curious and paste the poster's IP address into an IP locator web page to find out where they are posting from. This was tedious.
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Master Page, Child Pages: Dynamic Communication Flexibility
Over on the ASP.NET forums, where I am a moderator, a user asked a question concerning Master Pages. I thought it was an interesting enough question to spend a little time on it and write a BLOG entry (golf season hasn't started in my state yet).
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IE 8 Can Profile JavaScript
Being on the software "bleeding edge" is similar to being the "point man" in combat. I generally avoid being the first to adopt new technology until some other poor bastard has led the way…and occasionally paid a price: The price being missed deadlines, ulcers and ruined reputations. No thanks.
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Rock the Cache Bar, Rock the Cache Bar
It's possible you may develop dozens of web sites without ever doing any data caching. However, if you are trying to increase performance, data caching can be a key tool. The Asp.Net Cache object is remarkably easy to use, but it has many settings which makes it extremely powerful.
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ILDasm Helpful Hack
I do not want to learn "yet another programming language", especially a low-level one like Microsoft's Intermediate Language (IL). And yet, sometimes it's useful to look under the hood and see what in tarnation is going on. And that means knowing something about IL.
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C# Nullable Types…Subtlety
While moderating posts over on the Asp.Net forums, I ran into a thread containing questions about using Nullable types.
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Debugging a Deployed Site
"It works on my machine."
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Twin Cities SharePoint Camp Winter 2009 (and jQuery)
I stepped out the front door and watched my breath turn to ice crystals in the moonlight…the sun hadn't risen yet. As I walked to the garage, my shoes crunched loudly on the packed snow and when I opened the car door, the metal-on-metal shrieking of cold-friction gave my skin goose bumps. The temperature was -13F below zero and it was a Saturday morning. What on this earth would compel a man to leave a warm bed and face such bitter cold on a weekend?
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Internet Explorer 7 and CSS….DOH!
I wanted a cheap, simple visual indicator similar to a progress bar. Note, not the kind of dynamic progress bar used when updating AJAX pages, more of a single-bar graph. It should have been simple task.
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Create an XSD Schema….without knowing a darn thing about XSD.
Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, developers wanting to exchange data between applications used binary formatted data, hard-coded text field lengths, or delimited text files. Much parsing and error checking was involved. It was tedious.
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Anonymous Macros…Awesome Power!
Once upon a time, in the chilly windowless basement of a Fortune 100 company, a young programmer joined our small development team. He brought with him a programmers editor called Brief. Within weeks every developer in the entire company was using this powerful editor. The three compelling features were the ability to select copy and paste columns of text, multiple windows with cut and paste between them and…drum roll please…macros. With macros, enormously tedious tasks can be performed easily in seconds.
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From Table to TreeView…Displaying Hierarchies
Who remembers Object Databases? At one time they were going to dominate the programming world. But, as with a lot of over-hyped technology (Lisp, AI, ADA, Virtual Reality) they were destined to a small niche segment of the market.