Articles by Williarob (Article: 1, Technical Blogs: 15)

Ever think "wouldn't it be nice if there was a control - like a panel control - that you could simply use to wrap some input controls, set a single property (to the ID of the control that should be 'clicked' when the Enter key is pushed), and that was all you needed to do?". Well, now there is such

or "One Mans obsession with finding a way to call synchronous methods asynchronously in ASP.NET". This is for anyone interested in exploring the System.Threading Namespace in ASP.NET. There are many wrong ways to do it, one right way, and one other way that should only be used when you have no al

ASP.Net Threading Inside the ASP.Net Worker Process there are two thread pools. Theworker thread pool handles all incoming requests and the I/O Threadpool handles the I/O (accessing the file system, web services anddatabases, etc.). Each App Domain has its own thread pool and thenumber of ope

ASP.Net Threading Inside the ASP.Net Worker Process there are two thread pools. Theworker thread pool handles all incoming requests and the I/O Threadpool handles the I/O (accessing the file system, web services anddatabases, etc.). Each App Domain has its own thread pool and thenumber of ope

What is a Metafile Image?The Windows Metafile (WMF) is a graphics file format on Microsoft Windows systems, originally designed in the 1990s.Internally, a metafile is an array of variable-length structures called metafile records. The first records in the metafile specify general information such a

If you have ever looked at a media file (audio or video) in explorer on a Windows 7 PC, you may have noticed that it displays additional information about that media file that previous versions of Windows didn't seem to have access to, for example the length/duration of a Quicktime Movie Clip.

A Data Access Layer that does not support Asychronous I/O is not scalable. Period. However, since Microsoft kindly provided the source code along with the Enterprise Library, it is possible to make the Enterprise Library's Data Application Block scalable by adding the Asynchronous methods (Begin

I recently needed to write an application that would loop through a queue of files and FTP them to our Content Delivery Network for streaming. Users upload files, and our administrators can mark some of them as urgent. Urgent ones need to jump to the front of the queue, otherwise everything should b

If you have read my other articles about setting the SQL Membership provider's connection string at runtime, or automatically detecting the server name and using the appropriate connection strings then it will come as no surprise to see that I also had to find a way to set the Elmah connection strin

How to use Expression Encoder 2 Silverlight 2 Templates in your project.

Some time ago, I wrote a popular article on how to create a scrolling Silverlight 1.x Playlist using Microsoft Expression Encoder output. Well, I finally found some time to revisit that application to see how I might upgrade it to Silverlight 2. As you are probably aware, Expression Encoder 2 Servi

The concept of unit testing my code is still fairly new to me and was introduced when I started writing applications with the Microsoft MVC Framework in Visual Studio 2008. Intimidated somewhat by the Moq library's heavy reliance on lambadas, my early tests used full Mock classes that I would write

There are many ways to manage the problem of connection string and app settings substitution in the web.config / app.config files when publishing to different environments (e.g. QA and Production servers). In the past I have made use of the Web Deployment project's ability to replace the appsettings

When working on enterprise level, multi-tiered .Net applications it is not uncommon to want to create a shared class library, that may be used in multiple related projects. For example, let's suppose you are building a public website, a separate private intranet website used by company staff to mana

Override Configuration Manager

Sometimes you may not want a user to launch multiple instances of your program, or you may have a processor or I/O intensive scheduled task that runs every few minutes and you want to make sure that if it is started again before the last instance has finished it simply exits immediately. One way to