DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by rstrahl

An Xml Serializable PropertyBag Dictionary Class for .NET

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 21:17:34 GMT

How to create a PropertyBag object which you can serialize to XML.

Translating with Google Translate without API and C# Code

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:43:31 GMT

Google Translate without API and C# Code

Building a jQuery Plug-in to make an HTML Table scrollable

Sun, 29 May 2011 17:25:30 GMT

Table displays in limited space require some rendering alternatives. While paging is a common way to address fixed size displays, it's not an end-all solution. Sometimes it's necessary to display larger amounts of data in a small fixed space on an HTML page. Scrollable list are fairly easy to do with most HTML structures, but HTML tables are notoriously difficult to manage when it comes to scrolling. In this post I describe a jQuery plug-in that attempts to make any table scrollable by decomposing and reassembling the table into two distinct areas.

Built-in GZip/Deflate Compression on IIS 7.x

Thu, 05 May 2011 10:37:30 GMT

IIS 7.x makes content compression via GZip very easy. Here's how compression on IIS works and how you can set it up on your server in a few simple steps.

ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats

Mon, 02 May 2011 11:07:10 GMT

GZip and Deflate compression is easy to use in ASP.NET applications, but there are a few caveats that you need to watch out for. This post reviews the basics of implementing compression in ASP.NET code and describes a couple of scenarios that can cause problems when using programmatic compression via Response.Filter.

Rounded Corners and Shadows

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:56:36 GMT

Well, it looks like we've finally arrived at a place where at least all of the latest versions of main stream browsers support rounded corners and box shadows. The two CSS properties that make this possible are box-shadow and box-radius. Both of these CSS Properties now supported in all the major browsers as shown in this chart from QuirksMode:

Displaying JSON in your Browser

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 05:27:00 GMT

Javascript, JSON

ASP.NET Routing not working on IIS 7.0

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 22:25:34 GMT

Got caught be a difference in behavior between IIS 7.0 and IIS 7.5 with how module management to extensionless URLs are fired in IIS. Routing was working fine on my dev machine, but not on my live server. Here's what you need to watch out for.

Setting up custom ASP.NET Routing to an HttpHandler

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 22:25:34 GMT

Routing support in ASP.NET 4.0 has been vastly improved, but custom routing still involves a fairly complex process of creating RouteHandlers and mapping requests properly. In this post I show an example of how to create custom routes automatically via Attribute route mapping for Http Handler endpoints.

Hosting the Razor Engine for Templating in Non-Web Applications

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 03:18:07 GMT

In this article I describe a set of classes that provide a wrapper around the Razor View Engine so you can use it easily in your own applications to provide templating functionality.

Rendering Script References into the Html Header

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 10:27:15 GMT

ASP.NET natively supports script embedding only into the body of the HTML document which is limited in many ways if you need more control over how scripts load under program control. In this post I'll show one of my components that allows embedding scripts and script references in the header of the document as well as many useful script embedding features for ASP.NET.

Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:28:31 GMT

ASP.NET includes a plethora of functions and utilities to retrieve information about the current requests and paths in general. So much so that it's often hard to remember exactly which path property or method you are actually looking for. This update to an old and very popular post from this blog summarizes many of the paths and path related operations that are available in ASP.NET.

Implementing a free standing ASP.NET Pager WebControl

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 04:22:01 GMT

Although there's decent Pager support in ASP.NET controls the way paging works is inconsistent and not very generic. After a recent experience of creating a small pager component for MVC I decided having a generic non-data or control dependent Pager WebControl would be useful. In this post I cover a custom Pager control implementation that addresses some of the shortcomings with the stock paging functionality for me.

Emulate ASP.NET validation groups with jQuery validation

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:45:00 GMT

How to implement a light-weight CSS "flag" based approach for emulating WebForms' validation groups, in order to effectively use jQuery validation within the confines of WebForms' single form element.

Capturing and Transforming ASP.NET Output with Response.Filter

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:00:41 GMT

Capturing ASP.NET response output can be done in a variety of ways. In this post I'll discuss how you can use a Response.Filter to capture output and transform it using a simple class that provides event hooks to make it easy to capture output.

ClientIDMode in ASP.NET 4.0

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:47:27 GMT

The new ClientIDMode in ASP.NET 4.0 is one of my most anticipated features to reduce the naming clutter that ASP.NET naming container naming has traditionally introduced into page. In this post I describe the ClientIDMode behavior and the various ways of how you can control ClientID generation with ASP.NET 4.0

Efficient JSON with Json.NET

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:50:18 GMT

One of the common problems encountered when serializing .NET objects to JSON is that the JSON ends up containing a lot of unwanted properties and values. This can be especially important when returning JSON to the client. More JSON means more bandwidth and a slower website. To solve the issue of unwanted JSON Json.NET has a range of built in options to fine tune what gets written from a serialized object.

No JavaScript IntelliSense in VS 2010 Beta 2? Reset your Settings

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:15:01 GMT

When I installed Visual Studio 2010 a couple of days ago I was really disappointed to see that Intellisense failed to work completely in the new install. No workey in .js files, or ASPX pages inside of script blocks. After some back and forth with folks on the ASPInsiders list and the product teams it looks like there is an issue somewhere with the default settings that get set when Visual Studio...

A generic way to find ASP.NET ClientIDs with jQuery

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:15:00 GMT

ASP.NET ClientIDs and NamingContainer naming are a nuisance when working with jQuery as these long IDs complicate finding elements on the page. In this post I show a very simple way to retrieve munged ClientIDs by just their ID names with a small helper function that still returns the jQuery wrapped set.

Do you know about this undocumented Google CDN feature?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:30:02 GMT

Information on an undocumented feature of the Google AJAX APIs CDN (jQuery UI themes hosted on the CDN, including images).

LINQ to SQL, Lazy Loading and Prefetching

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:00:04 GMT

Lazy loading in an ORM can be really useful or a royal pain if you walk through a lot of data. LINQ to SQL uses lazy loading of related entities and entity sets but there are a couple of ways that allow you to do eager loading instead. Both require some extra effort and foresight.

Lookbehind in Regex searches

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:53:07 GMT

Regex's more esoteric features are easy to miss as they make sense to me only in a context that applies to my work. I've certainly read about lookahead and lookbehind before but until I needed it today and was pointed to look at this functionality in the Regex engine it just didn't sink in. Lookbehind allows matching or not matching of a string before the the string you are interested in. It effectively allows you to look for values that don't have x before another match which is actually quite common.

Fun with Func<T,TResult> Delegates, Events and Async Operations

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:30:01 GMT

Delegates are powerful for event handling, highly useful in LINQ and a core requirement for async operations. Func<T> makes using delegate based logic a lot easier by providing a generic implemenation that in many cases allows you to skip creation of a separate delegate and instead just point at the Func<T> definition which can be a big timesaver and a nice way to remove delegate defintions from your namespaces.

Integrating OpenID in an ASP.NET MVC Application using DotNetOpenAuth

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:00:02 GMT

OpenId is getting more popular and with it requests to integrate it into Web sites as a user authentication mechanism. In this post I'll discuss the OpenId integration on CodePaste.net in an ASP.NET MVC application discussing both high level OpenId concepts, the process and the code implementation.

Take Two: A jQuery WCF/ASMX ServiceProxy Client

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:31:45 GMT

This post revisits the WCF/ASMX ServiceProxy that can be used to make native jQuery calls to ASMX and WCF AJAX services. The component is self contained and provides JSON conversions including dates, as well as a simple class interface for simple one line service calls and consistent error trapping. This is an update that handles native JSON parsers. Includes examples and a detailed walk through on how it works.