March 2006
23 articles published in March 2006
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Atlas – the new AJAX engine for ASP.NET
Atlas is an ASP.NET control collection for creating AJAX enabled websites. It is also developed by the man who brought us ASP.NET some years ago, the one and only Scott Guthrie . The idea behind Atlas is to make it easy...
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The one true rich text editor
Just this moment, I am writing this sentence in a rich text editor here on my blog. It let’s me format text, insert images, tables and a lot of other great stuff as well. I can do bold or italic fonts, which helps...
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Generate random password in C#
I recently had to make a method that creates a random generated password in C#. So, I looked at the web for such a function and I found this one . It was really simple and short and just what I was looking for. But...
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Do not catch general exception types
If you use FxCop , then you are probably also aware of this rule . Exceptions should only be catched if they can be handled. A lot of exception handling code I’ve seen, are handling exceptions that could easily be...
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10 - the new community site from Microsoft
10 is Channel 9 's new community sister site loaded with videos and blogs. There is, however, a great difference between the two. Where Channel 9 is about the people within Microsoft who build software, 10 is about...
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Calling GC.Collect from ASP.NET
It can be a risky business to manually intervene with the Garbage Collector. You have to trust it to know how to manage the memory efficiently. Otherwise you could end up stressing the web server unnecessary or even...
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AJAX used the right way
I find AJAX to be a great way of combining server-side and client-side experiences. Its' the perfect example of synergy, where the whole experience is greater than the sum of it's parts. Having said that, a lot of...
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GhostDoc for XML code comments and documentation
"GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio that automatically generates XML documentation comments." I have known about GhostDoc for some time now, but didn’t believe it to be very useful in any way. I expected it to...
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A .NET resource editor application for .resx files
Working with resource files (.resx) in Visual Studio 2002/2003/2005 is very easy and straightforward. A .resx file is a fairly simple XML file that can be used for a lot of things. Where I have used it the most is for...
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Book review: Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET
I have unit tested my code for years now, but have never got around to using a unit testing framework like NUnit . I’ve been dancing around it for some time now, but haven’t had the time to get to know it or maybe I just...
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Implement PICS and P3P in ASP.NET headers
PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) and P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) are two really nice things to be aware of when developing web applications. If your website targets children, maybe you sell toys...
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World Community Grid please step it up
Grid computing is a very efficient and cheap way of creating super computers. It works by connecting a lot of computers together to form a kind of a network or grid, hence the name. The more computers connected, the more...
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Remove HTML tags from a string
A lot of websites allow users to input text and submit it to the site. This could be forums, blogs, content management systems etc. Imaging if the user writes HTML into these form fields? It could be perfectly harmless...
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Create beautiful thumbnails from gif images in ASP.NET
There are a lot of tutorials on the web about making thumbnails in ASP.NET. I’ve used some my self over the years. They all show how easy it is, but they all lack some fundamental functionality: Create good thumbnails...
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Convert HTML tags to lower-case for XHTML compliance
The XHTML definition demands all tags to be lower-cased. Your page will not validate otherwise and will therefore not be valid XHTML. If you write all your XHTML by yourself, it shouldn’t be an issue. You simply write...
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Make accessible menus in HTML
I you want to make your website validate the WAI or Section 508 accessibility guidelines, you have to separate adjacent links with more than white space . You actually have to do a whole lot more, but separating links is...
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Web 2.0 has no actual value…
As you may have noticed, discussions about Web 2.0 have been going on here and at The Dojo for the last couple of weeks. It seems to me that developers take one stand and designers/marketeers another. Today I read the...
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Close popups by pressing the ESC key
If you often use shortcut keys to navigate the web or any other program for that matter, you probably expect the ESC key to close popups and message boxes (alerts). When using popup windows on the web, this is however...
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Force x number of rows in a GridView
Today I had to find a way to force x number of rows on a GridView. The problem is that if the GridView.PageSize is larger than the number of rows you are data binding, the GridView itself gets smaller in the height. You...
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What happened to nDoc?
I used nDoc all the time back in the days of Visual Studio 2003. nDoc is a tool that creates documentation based upon the XML comment you write in your source code files. Then came VS 2005 and, as far as I understand...
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The buzz word hype and web 2.0
As you may know by now, I’m not a sucker for buzz words. On the contrary, I like facts, logic, and good old thinking. Not some new fashionable buzz word about something that really isn't new or any more exiting than it...
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Book review: Getting Real by 37signals
The product manager at Traceworks and my boss, Morten Wulff , sent me the eBook Getting Real by 37signals on e-mail last friday. I was a little reluctant to read it, because it was written by the guys from 37signals...
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New design and dasBlog theme
I redesigned this blog yesterday because the old design was pretty boring. The idea is to keep the design as clean and simple as possible, but still be nice to the eye. I'm not sure it is good enough yet, I feel like...