The in-site search feature has been under development for a few days by Claus Christensen. Claus has been developing his own search engine for the last couple of years, so he knows a lot about search algorithms and performance. The algorithm ranks the different hits based on an advanced formula so that the closes hits are always displayed at the top. I think it’s safe to say that the in-site search will be one of the best on any blog engine today. Search comments ... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

The new blog engine is well on its way and almost ready for its beta test. We’ve added extra features that weren’t on our original feature list. The features include: Pingback and trackback support - Almost done Pings services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic etc. - Done In-site search engine - Done OpenSearch support in both HTML and RSS - Done Editable standalone pages - Done XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant -... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Gravatar icons can be used on all websites that lets users write comments. It could be in a forum or on a blog. The image is retrieved from the Gravatar website and is based on the e-mail address of the person that makes the comment. It is very easy to set up because it is just a normal image where the src attribute point to the Gravatar website. Here is a method that writes out such an image. It takes an e-mail address and a size. The default size used by Gravatar i... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

For more than a year, I've been blogging on the excellent dasBlog engine and it has been good. I really like the fact that it runs on XML instead of a database. However, it is written in ASP.NET 1.1 and is quite cumbersome to extend and that's a problem for me, because I have a lot of ideas that I cannot implement. For the past 6 months or so, I've been thinking about building my own blog engine, but it seemed too time consuming. Then I talked to Michal Talaga and he... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

As a follow-up on my post from yesterday about generating shorter GUIDs, I’ve created a small helper class in C#. The class encodes a GUID into a 22 character long string and decodes the string back to the original GUID again. That way you can save 10 characters from the original GUID and it is ASCII encoded so it will work perfectly in a URL as a query string or in ViewState. It takes a standard GUID like this: c9a646d3-9c61-4cb7-bfcd-ee2522c8f633 And... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

The System.Guid is used whenever we need to generate a unique key, but it is very long. That’s in many cases not an issue, but in a web scenario where it is part of the URL we need to use its string representation which is 36 characters long. It clutters up the URL and is just basically ugly. It is not possible to shorten it without loosing some of the uniqueness of the GUID, but we can come a long way if we can accept a 16 character string instead. We ca... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

I’ve noticed that there are two different ways developers locate private variables used by properties. One way is to locate the private variable next to the property that returns them and all other private variable located elsewhere. #region Private fields private string _Member; private int _AnotherMember; #endregion #region Properties private string _Name; public string Name { get { return _Name; } set { _Name... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

A web page with a data bound GridView control can take a long time to load. The page is not rendered until all the controls are, and the GridView cannot render before data has been retrieved from the database. So, let’s load the GridView asynchronous and make the page load faster and the perceived speed greater. This little trick is actually very simple and it involves the built-in client callback feature of ASP.NET. Even though I’m not a big fan of that particular fe... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

A couple of days ago, I had to store some very big strings in an XML file. To keep the file size down I wanted to compress the strings using a GZipStream and then decompress them later when needed. I modified the methods from Papenoo pa so they handled strings in stead of byte arrays. using System.IO.Compression;using System.Text;using System.IO;publicstaticstring Compress(string text){ byte[] buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(text); MemoryStream ms =new MemoryStream(); using (GZ... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

The blogroll has become a standard element on most blogs today. If it is an ASP.NET blog, the blogroll probably contains links to other ASP.NET blogs and that gives the visitor an opportunity to surf to other related websites. The only problem with it is that you have no idea what to expect from the blogs by looking at the blogroll. Most often, the link title on the blogroll contains the name of the author and if you don’t know him/her on beforehand, you have no idea if it’s ... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!