Finally I had the chance to install Vista on my work PC - something I've wanted to do since November when it became available on MSDN. Now the installation is over and it went incredibly smooth. It installed all my hardware except my onboard audio controller. The installation took 30 minutes without any problems at all. After the first start of Vista it automatically downloaded an installed the driver for my audio controller. Excellent! I didn't format my C drive... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

At work, we are about to build a new internal tool for administration of different systems. We developers need certain applications and the sales department needs some other ones. All the different people need to be able to administrate different systems, so we decided to create one application that hosts only the applications the individual needs. Last weekend I played with a generic application that hosts other applications by using reflection. The Plug-in Applicat... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Today, I needed to store images in XML files so I had to serialize an image file into text so it could be written in the XML file. Of course, it should also be deserialized back to an image again by reading from the XML file. The result is the following two methods. The first method serializes a file on disk and returns the base64 string representation. public static string Serialize(string fileName) {  using (FileStream reader = new FileStream(fileNa... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

In almost every web project of any size, you would probably use a lot of user controls to separate the content and UI logic. Many of the user controls are used only at one place in the solution while others are used by various pages and other user controls. The ones that are used throughout the website needs to be generic and loosely coupled from the context in which they are used. If not, they would contain a lot of code only to cater for the needs of certain pages or o... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

A week ago I wrote about the native client callback feature of ASP.NET 2.0 and why it isn’t always the smart choice. That post got me some good feedback that inspired me to build a custom callback implementation so you wouldn’t have to use the native one. I could just use other AJAX libraries such as ASP.NET AJAX or Ajax.NET, but that’s not fun. When I started thinking about this little project I imagined it to be complex, but actually it turned out to be extremely simple with very little co... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Some years ago there was a lot of fuzz about the importance of the W3C XHTML standard. I’ve always been a firm believer of the standards and built every website to comply with them. But why? Very brief history The standards have made a huge difference historically speaking, because they helped eradicate browser specific mark-up to such a degree that it today doesn’t really matter if you use Opera, Firefox or IE. The same is true with the CSS standard to some extend. The next ... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

I was ones faced with the issue of enforcing copyright on different files on a website. That meant that images and dynamically created XML files had to be blocked if accessed from outside the website. So, I had to find a way to prevent other websites from linking to or referencing these files. Copyright or not, it is a good idea to do it on dynamically created files such as charts, because they take a lot of computer power to generate. That resulted in an HttpModule that stops all requests c... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Finally Internet Explorer caught up with the rest of the browsers and introduced tabs. For some reason I don’t know, the tabs feature doesn’t work the way you would expect from your experience with Firefox, Opera etc. All the other browsers with tabs open a new tab when you click a link like this with the target set to _blank: <a href="example.com" target="_blank">example</a> This is expected behaviour, but IE7 doesn’t open a new tab, it opens... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Some say that screen scraping is a lost art because it is no longer an advanced discipline. That may be right, but there are different ways of doing it. Here are some different ways that all are perfectly acceptable, but can be used for various different purposes. Old school It’s old school because this approach has existed since .NET 1.0. It is highly flexible and lets you make the request asynchronously. public static string ScreenScrape(string url) { ... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Some time ago, I wrote a post called “Is ASP.NET too difficult?” and I strongly believe that it is. Yet at the same time it cause problems by making it too easy to do relative advanced programming. It doesn’t seem to be a problem. On the contrary it appears to be a good thing, but an important thing is missing. Step-by-step learning Before ASP.NET when we used PHP and ASP, there was a certain step-by-step learning curve that everybody followed. You started out by ... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!