So here’s the deal... lately Rob has been kicking the hornet’s nest and stirring up all kinds of controversy, and discussion, amongst the asp.net community. The conversation is mainly focused around the use of inline scripting and plain old HTML camp versus the more traditional asp.net way of doing things with all server side programming and PostBacks. The conversation is challenging some of the core concepts that many asp.net developers hold true. Concepts and practices that Microsoft has handed down as gospel over the past several years. It’s a good old fashioned holy war. The kind that gets...

Last night I finally took the time to watch the ScottGu and ScottHa presentations on the new MVC framework that Scott first mentioned back in March at the MVP Summit. First let me say that I’m really excited about this move, especially with my good buddy Phil at the helm. But I’m also excited because being the pragmatic developer that I try to be, I realize that much of the world only eats what it’s fed from Microsoft†. That being the case, I’m for any move that will help the large number of developers out there who are stuck...

One of the things I’m most excited about with Visual Studio 2008 is it’s ability to target various versions of the .net framework, a feature known as multi-targeting. I recently rebuilt a (hand-me-down) laptop for use at developer group meetings, conferences, and coding from the couch. When building out the machine I decided to only install VS2008 and make use of multi-targeting to work on my various .net 2.0 projects... like Subtext. Today I finally got around to loading Subtext up in VS2008 and I was expecting some heartache. But I did a little research first and...

Being Web 2.0 is a hot topic right now. So much so that everyone and their mom is out to dress up their web presence with whatever Ajaxy goodness they can. Lucky for the Internet the ASP.NET AJAX framework has made adding Ajax functionality to asp.net web sites and web applications a pretty simple task. The simplicity is made possible because the framework hides much of the magical mechanics of doing the actual Ajax and DOM work behind a new control, the UpdatePanel. However, like most magical solutions this one comes at a cost. Actually a couple of costs. Two...

This is a quick note to myself - and all of you as well - for writing code and using classes from outside the standard .net assemblies. Be sure to add assembly references to the project! I was was working on some code today and tried to use a .net class from outside the assemblies that are automatically referenced when a new project is created. In this particular case I was trying to make use of the System.Transactions.TransactionScope class - from the System.Transactions assembly. After several minutes of banging my head into the desk and Googling I threw my...

As several of my comrades have already announced, Subtext has been nominated for two, count 'em two Community Choice Awards! Apparently my pleading worked! Nominations Best Project for Communications: The best project for talking to your friends or sharing information. Other nominees include - Miranda, Pidgin, and FileZilla. Most Collaborative Project: The project most likely to accept your patches and value your input. Other nominees include - Azureus, XOOPS, and Zimbra. This is a really big achievement for the project and we're proud to be one of only two .NET projects to be nominated. The other project is VMukti, a corporate...

Recently several Subtext users have asked how to integrate Lightbox JS into Subtext's photo galleries. My standard answer has been Right now it's not possible because the control that renders the galleries emits links with relative URLs rather than fully qualified URLs. We'll look into making a change to the data binding mechanism for a future release - so hold tight! I finally had a few spare cycles so I looked into the existing data binding logic and realized that it is possible to get the control to emit fully qualified URLs right now! Notice, I said it's...

asp.net 2.0 introduced a new section in the web.config file -ConnectionStrings. This new configuration section allows you to add connection strings in your web.config, like we always have, or in a different data source. In Subtext 2.0 we're using this new feature to split the connection string out into a new configuration file, user.config. Doing this should make day to day development easier for our development team by reducing the number of merge conflicts in web.config. Since most every developer has a different database configuration, it makes sense to keep this information in its own file and away from the...

Remote debugging can be a huge time-saver when dealing with a hard to reproduce bug, or trying to track down a Works on My Machine issue. I mean, what's better than stepping through the code on the remote machine that's having the problem? However, the hardest thing about remote debugging isn't actually using it - it's getting it correctly configured between your local (debugging) machine and the remote host. Luckily the MSDN site has a pretty solid How to: Set Up Remote Debugging guide that can get you most of the...

As you might have been able to tell by my last few posts about CSS Friendly Control Adapters - I'm in the middle of using the adapters on a project... and I'm running into all kinds of trouble. I finally came to the realization that many of the issues I've seen are all caused by the same bit of busted functionality - a double PostBack. I just posted a new message to the CSS Friendly Control Adapters Forum over at asp.net, and I figured I'd re-post it here in hopes of drawing a little more attention to the issue....

If you're using CSS Friendly Control Adapters to get some of your asp.net 2.0 controls under control - at least when it comes to the markup they render - be careful when adding comments to the CSSFriendlyAdapters.browser file. The .browser file is an XML formatted file that the asp.net runtime uses to configure what adapter(s) gets attached to which framework control(s). And as some of you may be aware, there are some known issues with using the CSS Adapters with some of the new Login controls. One common solution work around is to disable the CSS Adapters for the controls...

While working on a new client application and ran into a bizarre issue with the WebResource.axd handler. The issue manifests itself as a JavaScript error when trying to do a PostBack from your WebForm. In IE7 you'll get the standard Error pop-up message informing you that 'WebForm_PostBackOptions' is undefined Not exactly the most useful error message. After a little JavaScript debugging in Firebug I found that the error was thrown because the WebForm_PostBackOptions method was missing. Yikes! How is it missing? As of asp.net 2.0, the Framework uses a new WebResource.axd handler to send assembly resources (like images, CSS...

So you're using the CSS Friendly Control Adapters to generate lean, mean markup for your asp.net 2.0 controls, awesome! And you're also using some of the new Login controls to cut down on the hand-rolled authentication/authorization code, great. Do you also have ViewState disabled? Are you also having trouble getting values out of the controls during PostBack processing? I was! My scenario I was using the CSS Friendly Control Adapters and the Login controls without ViewState. Specifically I was using the CreateUserWizard and it's ContentTemplate to generate a sleek user registration UI. I had attached a LoginCancelEventHandler to the wizard's...

A couple of days ago I was using ASP.NET WebForms and the new ReportViewer control to put together a quick demo for rendering SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports right in your web application. If you're not familiar with the ReportViewer control, Thom Robbins put together a great screencast to introduce the ReportViewer control. How I used the control I was running the control in remote mode - meaning it pulls the reports down from a fully managed SSRS installation, and then renders them directly in the web browser - all from within my application. I was also using Windows Authentication because the client required it....

I was working on some CSS based printing stuff today (inside an ASP.NET WebForms application) and I ran into an odd issue. The application is making use of MasterPages and Themes, but I was working on a new page (a full blown .aspx) that was used exclusively for printing. This meant two things: I made sure to NOT use a MasterPage in the @Page declaration. I set EnableTheming="false" in the @Page declaration. With that done I should have had a page with zero style... that is, no stylesheets or inherited markup - essentially a blank slate. So I started...