Learn MS .NET

On Monday, AjaxDataControls 1.0 was released. This library was developed to work with ASP.NET Ajax Extension. This project's main goal was to develop some rich data controls, to allow replacement of the core ASP.NET controls and provide client-side api calls that were similar to the Server side components.

The current release contains the following controls:

• Repeater
• GridView
• DataList
• Pager

Click on the above links to see a demo of the controls.

Kazi Manzur Rashid provides some screen shots in his blog post which can be found here. The library can be downloaded at Codeplex on the project website located here. For anyone looking for these types of controls they seem to be pretty impressive.

While working on getting a new project ready for publishing to the Internet. I discovered that when you are working with the built-in web server that comes with Visual Studio that it processes all requests through the ASP.NET isapi dll.  Which works great when you are working with url rewriting.

The issue comes about when you move to a production environment with IIS.  Most production environments do not do all their processing through the ASP.NET isapi dll.  Most shared hosting environments would not be accommodating of such a request either because it could cause interference with other running applications on the host server.  But for most people that host their own applications it can be quickly solved with the following.

IIS Management Console

First off we need to launch the IIS Management Console. Once the window is open we need to find the web site that we want to allow to have wild card mapping enabled on and go to the properties for the web site.

Once we have the properties open then we need to click on the Home Directory for the application. This will allow us to click on the Application Configuration button. In the window that opens the bottom half of the form allows us to define Wildcard application maps.  We need to click on the Insert button which will then allow us to enter the path to file that we want to process requests.  In this case the file is c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll.  We then have the option of checking that the file exists.  This should be turned off for the most part as most of the files that will be processed may not actually exist on the server itself but virtually.  Once we have this completed all of this. We can click all the OK button's and close out the IIS management console.

For everyone that has started to work with Blogengine.net and wants to implement the DotNetKicks extension that would be comparable to the DiggIt extension.  There is a new extension that is available at the Flawless Code blog.

This extension places the kick it button on the post with the number of times that the article has been kicked.

The extension can be downloaded here.

For those who are looking to find a free alternative to some of the expensive PDF document generation libraries out there I ran across this library thanks to Dmitriy Salko. He mentioned the product on his blog in the following post. He provides a link on his post to directly download the files.

I also took a look at the PDFsharp web site which is the official web site for the project.  They have some work to do on the site but it provides some good starting points for beginning programming with the product.

Below is some of the features of the library:

• Released Version 1.00
• Includes support for Unicode in PDF files.
• Includes MigraDoc Lite for features not present in PDFsharp.

More Information can be found at the following locations:

• Documentation - http://pdfsharp.wikihost.org/
• Forum - http://pdfsharp.s3.bizhat.com/

The download can be found here http://pdfsharp.com/PDFsharp/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=54&Itemid=64

While working on a ski reservation system for one of my clients, Ski Broker.  I ran across the issue of needing to make sure that when a client registered they didn't set their registration into the past. I took a look through Google to see what I could find and found a few different samples of code to solve the issue.

What I finally ended up with is below:

   1:  <asp:TextBox id="txtDateNeeded" runat="server" />

   2:  <asp:comparevalidator id=valDateNeededCompare runat="server"  

   3:      Operator="GreaterThanEqual" type="Date" 

   4:      controltovalidate="txtDateNeeded" 

   5:      errormessage="The date must be greater than or equal to today." />

This places the necessary code on the page but does not allow the validation to take place yet because we do not have a comparison value yet.  In the code behind file we need to place the following code in the Page_Load event:

   1:  Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load

   2:          valDateNeededCompare.ValueToCompare = DateTime.Now.ToShortDateString()

   3:  End Sub

Once we run the page now we will get the error message that we specified above in our validation control.  If anyone has any suggestions to make this code better please feel free to post it in the comments section below.

While working on my projects it becomes necessary sometimes to add a column to a table in SQL Server.  My brain goes fuzzy sometimes around SQL as I don't do a lot of hardcore programming in SQL.  Most of my SQL is limited to writing basic Select, Update, Insert and Delete procedures.  So I've determined that with my blog I'm going to put up some of the tips I find along the way to make my life easier and hopefully in the long run I will make someone else's easier as well

So here is how to check if a column exists in a SQL table:

   1:  IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS

   2:      WHERE TABLE_NAME = ‘TableName’ AND COLUMN_NAME = ‘TableColumnName’)

   3:      BEGIN

   4:          ALTER TABLE dbo.[TableName]

   5:          ADD [TableColumnName] [int] NULL

   6:      END

   7:  GO

It's not a complicated piece of code to do just takes some remembering or looking for.

Well now LearnMSNET.com has it's own facebook application to allow all our facebook friends to have our blog entries on their facebook profile.  I think this is pretty cool.

Learn MS .NET Facebook Application

The app currently is hosted at http://blogfuse.com/facebook/. They allow you to generate a Facebook application and then publish it from their server for $5/month.  This is a great idea and pretty cheap for hosting an application.  They've done all the leg work for creating the app and you simply have to walk through their application and then voila you've now got a published Facebook application that will contain your blog posts.

For those people who are using BlogEngine.net and would like to have the ability to encrypt their web.config file and decrypt it easily.  Chris Blankenship has written an excellent add-in for us that allows us to do just that.  You can read his post about the modification Encrypt Web.Config Extension for BlogEngine.Net.

Basically the modification needs two files added to the admin section of the site and a simple modification of the web.sitemap file to add the files to the admin section of BlogEngine.  I think it's a great feature for use when your hosting your web site on a hosting service and would like to keep all your passwords kept secret.

With the release of the first CTP preview of the "ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions" which included the following features:

• ASP.NET AJAX improvements
• New additions include support for managing browser history.
• ADO.NET Entity Framework
• New modeling framework to better model real world view of information.
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• Build a fully customizable, data-driven web site app quickly.
• ADO.NET Data Services
• Provides new services to find, manipulate and deliver data with simply URI's.
• ASP.NET MVC
• MVC (Model, View, Controller) design pattern for the existing 3.5 runtime
• Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET
• Provides new Silverlight controls for use within ASP.NET

Now Scott Guthrie has written a great article on his blog on the ASP.NET Dynamic Data component for the CTP.  This feature looks like a great way to get an administration section for a web site up and running really quickly and let you start modifying it to suit your needs once it's complete.  I'm sure I'll use this feature in the future.

Having played with several blogging engines over the last few years and having experience in .NET programming since 2000.  I decided to take a look at BlogEngine.net.  I've previously worked with blogs based on .Text, dasBlog and Community Server and they all were interesting and worked well. I was just not crazy about the upgrading of some of these other engines.

Plus as a developer I always like to get under the covers of what is going on in the code to get a good understanding of what the software is doing. Well while browsing http://www.asp.net/ and taking a look at the starter kits, I saw the BlogEngine.net project there.  I proceeded to take a look at the project site for the starter kit and then took a look at the project site on CodePlex.  I then decided to give it a try.

A few years ago I had started work on creating a community site here at Learn MS NET and it didn't pan out quite like I wanted so I had basically mothballed the domain.  I had also been playing around with blog engines at a URL for my business http://blog.shancer.com/ which I had written a few articles for.  So I made the decision in early December to combine both my mothballed site's content which only had a few articles of interest and relevance and the blog posts from my business blog.

Which has led me to using BlogEngine.net and currently working with the latest build from last night at this point.  I ported all my content from dasBlog which was the blogging engine I was using with BlogML.  It took some playing around to get it complete but it worked fantastically for pulling that content in.  I then took and renamed my old community web site and proceeded to copy all the articles out and place on this new site.

Now that i'm becoming familiar with how the source works for BlogEngine.net I will be developing some extensions and helping improve some of the extensions that are already available.  Look for more on this in the future.