Latest Articles: .net >> ASP .net

ASP.NET view state is a great feature and an essential tool for web development of today. It maintains the state of a page as it travels back and forth. There is no more need to worry about restoring values of page controls between postbacks. In this article you will get an in-depth perspective on view state. We will talk about ways of reducing unnecessary payload and protecting view state from prying eyes.

ASP .net ViewState is something that most of developers are using without even knowing that it exists, you only realize about this when you start having performance issues or your application is not working properly on a server farm (something like MD5 MAC viewstate validation failed...).

This articles explains you very basic concepts, good to start learning what in the hell is ViewState, why is not easy to get rid of it, why is useful, and where you should pay attention.

The following code sample will illustrate a method on how to preform validation using the intrinsic ASP.net validation controls using client javascript, thus minimising the need for a postback to the server which in some cases my be desirable.

There is often a requirement in intranet applications where one would like to preform some cleint side validation on controls and often situations arise where some client side validation is required even though no postback to server is going to be preformed, often developers seem to think they are forced to write thier own javascript routines to validate the form instead of using the intrinsic .net Validation controls, as it is a common misconception that .NET controls requires one to preform a postback of the form in order to make the validation controls to function, which is not necessarily true as I will attempt to illustrate with this article.

ASP .net validators are quite powerfull, but now on this AJAX days, you don't want to use server controls, what if you could call the validators from any javascript function ? Is that possible ? Is that easy?

This article explains you how to kick ASP .net validators from your javascript methods !! Pretty cool !! and Pretty Easy !! superb article !!

In this tutorial we will explore using the Membership framework (via the SqlMembershipProvider) to create new user accounts. We will see how to create new users programmatically and through ASP.NET’s built-in CreateUserWizard control.

Quite good tutorial: using the ASP .net membership framework is quite easy, even you have a built in interface to create users and roles, but....

... what if you need to provide your own custom UI / Pages to create user, roles... This tutorial will teach you to to create accounts and other security related items programmatically from your .net code.

What is the one thing forums, eCommerce sites, online email websites, portal websites, and social network sites all have in common? They all offer user accounts. Sites that offer user accounts must provide a number of services. At a minimum, new visitors need to be able to create an account and returning visitors must be able to log in. Such web applications can make decisions based on the logged in user: some pages or actions might be restricted to only logged in users, or to a certain subset of users; other pages might show information specific to the logged in user, or might show more or less information, depending on what user is viewing the page.

This is the first tutorial in a series of tutorials that will explore techniques for authenticating visitors through a web form, authorizing access to particular pages and functionality, and managing user accounts in an ASP.NET application.

If this is the first time you have to face with ASP .net and security, or you want to get clarified with some basic concepts, this article is a great start.

You will learn how to use the ASP .net Membership framework, and basic terms of security access (what is authentication, authorization, roles...).

In a previous article, we looked at Master Pages in ASP.NET 2.0. Master pages allow you to dictate the layout and common content for the pages in your application using template files with a .master extension. The Themes feature in ASP.NET 2.0 allows you to dictate the appearance of controls in your application using template files with a .skin extension, and with style sheets. In this article, we will examine the Themes feature in-depth.

Great Themes introduction by Scott Allen.

We are used to CSS style sheets, or just to use some predefined skins or themes... but what happens when we want to make some change, or just disable a given them for some pages? what about Themes and Master pages?

This Post will teach you the basic and the inners of using Themes in your site.

When you build a Web application, it usually has a similar look and feel across all its pages. Not too many applications are designed with each page dramatically different from the next. Generally, for your applications you use similar fonts, colors, and server control styles across all the pages.

You can apply these common styles individually to each and every server control or object on each page, or you can use a new capability provided by ASP.NET 2.0 to centrally specify these styles. All pages or parts of pages in the application can then access them.

CSS Style sheets are quite powerful, but when you want to apply that to your ASP .net site your nice look & feel does not always look fine with server controls

You can combine Themes plus CSS, a bit of work, but good results on your server controls as well.

It’s important to remember that a partial postback is just that: A postback.

The UpdatePanel’s way of abstracting AJAX functionality behind standard WebForm methodology provides us with flexibility and familiarity. However, this also means that using an UpdatePanel requires careful attention to the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle.

When you start developing using Microsoft AJAX ASP .net, you can think that Partial Rendering and UpdatePanels are the magic soluton to all the problems, Watch out !! Is quite important to know the inners of this technology in order to know in which scenario you can use them.

Beware... everything will perform fast in your local development environments, headaches come when you move to a production enviroment...

see how to add the membership-related schemas to an existing database using the ASP.NET SQL Server Registration Tool (aspnet_regsql.exe).

ASP .net 2.0 / 3.5 Membership - authentication blocks and controls are quite powerful, but all the samples that you will find use the default MDF / Express precooked database, What happens if you just want to add this functionallity to your existing database?

This article explains you how to add this to your DB by using a wizard ASP .net SQL Server Registration Tool

This tool will add the tables needed for authentication and memmber ship managament to your existing database, then you can link users / roles to items in your existing tables.

Somebody asked how you use the DataGrid in Silverlight 2 in order to load data from a web service, modify it and submit it back so I thought I'd spend 5 minutes experimenting with that.

I wrote a very simple web service with WCF;

How to hook a Silverlight DataGrid to data via WCF web services

Here you will find interesting information, things like: how to remove or insert a row, how to send the changes to the backend via web services, ...

Now, after the very futile example which accompanied the introduction to JavaScript Object Notation in my last post (by the way, I forgot to mention that this is what the fancy acronym stands for, but I'm sure you already knew that), let's go straight to the fun part, and see how we can leverage the flexibility of JSON (and ASP.NET AJAX, of course) to achieve some less trivial result. When developing a web application, we often need to aggregate data from different sources. You might argue this is no big news, as we've all used web services in a way or the other, and "mashup" is surely not an uncommon word these days. But probably, for most of us, the natural way to think of data returned from a web service call is XML. But XML is not exactly the easiest thing to parse on the client, nor a very succinct format. That's why a number of JSON web services have flourished lately. Probably the first that comes to mind is Google Maps' Geocoder (see here), but there are a lot more. If you are looking for inspiration you can have a look at xmethods. But today, we are focusing on some very, very interesting web methods kindly offered by Geonames.

Quite good stuff, AJAX ASP .net + JSON at low level.

Most of us are used to let the AJAX ASP .net framework to do all the magic for us (JSON serialization / deserialization) in this post series you will learn the internals, and how to do it by your self, interesting thing to, for instance, serialize an array on a hidden field

Few day back i need post back control name in the Page_Load event. I did lots of search on net. I found few intersting fact about that and i am sharing that. There are two types of controls which make post back in ASP.NET. One button type control like image button, button (whose type is “submit”), and another type use javascript function “_doPostBack” for the post back. If post back control is button type then it will be added in the Request.Form collection means if there are two button in a page named button1 and button2 and if button1 make post back then only button1 will be in Request.Form Collection not button2 (but Request.Form collection can contains other server controls also like if page contains few textbox, dropdown list etc.) and if post back made by the button2 then only button2 will be available in Request.Form collection not button1(with other server control as I discuss earlier).

When you have a server control that has the property AutoPostback is not straight forward to detect in the page load stage if that control fired the roundtrip to the server.

This article explains how to implement that, by using hidden fields and some javascript.