Scott Guthrie makes the ZBB announcement for Visual Web Developer. This is great news for me since I already have a full-blown application written with Whidbey Beta 1, and I’m chomping at the bit for the Beta 2 go-live release.
In my experience, ASP.NET v2.0 is rock solid, but Whidbey Beta 1 had obvious bugs.
The CustomValidator control is really flexible. Here’s a quick example of validating that a checkbox is checked:
<%@ Page language=”c#” Codebehind=”ValidateCheckbox.aspx.cs” AutoEventWireup=”false” Inherits=”WebApplication1.ValidateCheckbox” %>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” >
<HTML>
<HEAD>
function ValidateChecked(oSrc, args){
if(document.all[“”].checked == false){
alert(“Has to be checked.”);
args.IsValid = false;
}
}
</HEAD>
<body>
<form id=”Form1″ method=”post” runat=”server”>
<asp:CustomValidator ClientValidationFunction=”ValidateChecked” Runat=”server” ID=”val” />
<asp:CheckBox ID=”chk” Runat=”server” />
<asp:Button ID=”btn” Runat=”server” Text=”Submit” />
</form>
</body>
</HTML>
And the code-behind:
private void val_ServerValidate(object source, ServerValidateEventArgs args)
{
args.IsValid = true;
if(chk.Checked == false)
args.IsValid = false;
}
Steve is a .Net developer who recently was sent over to Iraq, and ever since he’s been blogging about it. Check out his latest computer nerd production: a video from Iraq. – no doubt compiled on his laptop computer. Too funny!
The following is a basic skill that every developer should have – even those who have been developing for just a few days: Searching the Internet.
Yes, that’s it, folks. How many developers still don’t have this skill? How many newsgroup posts could be avoided by a simple Internet search. A favorite developer search is Google because we can do a search, and if an article doesn’t pop up, we can “group” it, and somebody is bound to have made a newsgroup post about it already (with an answer).
I’ve answered many newsgroup posts just by doing the google search for them. Am I helping them or hurting them? For instance, in the ASP.NET newsgroup yesterday there was a question as to what other ASP.NET IDEs were out there besides VS and Web Matrix? Wow, what a tough question. Let’s do a search and find out instantly. . . or I can post a newsgroup post and hope to get an answer by the next day or day after that.
What’s worse is to find a newsgroup post of this level posted by someone with MCAD or MCSD by their name. . . *gasp*
There is a current VB6 process that I was considering rewriting in .Net with C#. I began learning the code to prepare for the rewrite, and there is a LOT of code. I realized as I dug deeper into the code that I would be better off making the code changes necessary in VB6 instead of doing a complete rewrite. Now, I am not a veteran Visual Basic developer, so I prefer working in .Net with C#, but the more I thought about it the more I knew that keeping this process as VB6 would be better. This code was several years old and had stood the test of time. My rewrite would undoubtedly introduce bugs that don’t exist now.
The point of this post is that we should not rewrite to .Net just for the sake of .Net. We code every new process in .Net, but out legacy code still marches on.
This is a very useful tool. Properly formatting code for a blog post has been a hassle up until now! This is great. A must-have tool. Great job Colin.
Here is an example of code copied directly from VS using this add-in.
private void WebForm1_Init(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Trace.Write(“WebForm1_Init”);
}
private void WebForm1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Trace.Write(“WebForm1_Load”);
}
private void WebForm1_PreRender(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Trace.Write(“WebForm1_PreRender”);
}
private void WebForm1_Unload(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Trace.Write(“WebForm1_Unload”);
}
I’ve been using this feature since the beginning, but I’ve come to realize
that a lot of people aren’t aware of this. The application path shortcut:
“~/”
When including any resource in your page whether it be a user control,
image, css or whatever, it has to be located. The simplest thing to do is
to type the entire path, http://localhost/myApp/myStyle.css, but that isn’t
very maintainable because when you deploy, you have to change this
reference. So the next step is making the path relative to the page (buried
2 levels deep): ../../myStyle.css, but what if the site structure changes?
What do you do? You could make it domain-relative: /myApp/myStyle.css, but
what if your application needs to be deployed to it’s own domain:
http://myAppDomain.com/ ? Now this reference is broken. Some people get
around this by setting the path with Request.ApplicationPath +
“/myStyle.css”, but this doesn’t work in all cases. If you have a virtual
path, you get /myApp, but if you are at the root, you get “/”, so in the
case of /myApp, you have to add a “/” to the end.
To get around all this, use “~/” as a shortcut to you application path.
With that shortcut at the beginning of your path, any server control will
resolve the url for you. If you use this in a non-server control or just
print it out, you will need to resolve it yourself using the ResolveUrl(…)
method of the Control class. This method is inherited by all controls, so
you can use it directly in Page, UserControl and all web controls. I use
nothing but app-relative paths now.
In .Net 2.0, we’ll get more App-relative shortcut properties like
Request.AppRelativePath. It’s really a much cleaner way to represent a
resource relative to the application no matter what the path to the
application is.
One of these days, it will become necessary to impersonate a user at a
website. Or, a more common use would be to use a legacy ASP app as a
make-shift web service. Say an ASP page does an important function? From
your application(whether windows, console, or web), you can write code to
contact this page and interact with it over HTTP. Here is a sample:
String uriString = http://localhost/WebApplication1/AcceptFile.aspx;
// Create a new WebClient instance.
WebClient myWebClient = new WebClient();
string fileName = @”c:upload.txt”;
byte[] responseArray = myWebClient.UploadFile(uriString, “POST”, fileName);
Using the WebClient class in the System.Net namespace, it’s very easy to
create a custom web request and execute it. Then you can capture the
response and analyze it. . . parse any important data contained in it.
If you have used Application Center Test or the Web Application Stress Tool,
you record a web session, and then that session is repeated many times.
Code is being written to repeat the web requests.
Some people my shy away from this, but see how easy it is. You need a block of custom xml as configuration, so you create your own .xml file and read it in. Instead, use the web.config file. It’s already there, and it’s good to keep all configuration in one place. This is all it takes to make your own Configuration Handler class:
public
class Config : IConfigurationSectionHandler {}
m_oXmlSection = section.FirstChild;
}
}
Then, you just access Config.XmlSection, and you have the complete Xml, so why wouldn’t you do it this way?
I’m reposting my previous post in binary for those geeks for whom English is a second language. Go to http://nickciske.com/tools/binary.php to translate.
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