On the ASP.NET forums where I moderate, the poster's IP address is displayed at the bottom of the post. Often I am curious and paste the poster's IP address into an IP locator web page to find out where they are posting from. This was tedious. Once I installed Internet Explorer 8 and saw what accel

Being on the software "bleeding edge" is similar to being the "point man" in combat. I generally avoid being the first to adopt new technology until some other poor bastard has led the way…and occasionally paid a price: The price being missed deadlines, ulcers and ruined reputations. No thanks. How

How to have "static" buttons on a Master Page call functions in child pages when clicked.

There was a question about this on the Asp.Net forums and after a quick search I didn't find a good generic function so I thought I'd supply one. Note: I wanted this to be as broad and useful as possible, so the second parameter is a ListControl which both the ListBox and DropDownList inherit from.

Who remembers Object Databases? At one time they were going to dominate the programming world. But, as with a lot of over-hyped technology (Lisp, AI, ADA, Virtual Reality) they were destined to a small niche segment of the market. Relational Databases remain king. Why? Because Relational Databases

Over on the Asp.Net forums, a user asked how to store an ordered list of pages in an Xml file so he could use it to control the navigation of a group of pages on his web site. It was for a 'Wizard' where the user needed to go through the pages in sequence…no jumping directly to a page. He wanted it

Level: Beginner. After getting information from a database, you may also want summary information about the data (totals, averages, counts, etc.). This can be done using SQL group by clauses or, it can be done while binding to a GridView. I've seen other examples of this but they seem more complica

It's possible you may develop dozens of web sites without ever doing any data caching. However, if you are trying to increase performance, data caching can be a key tool. The Asp.Net Cache object is remarkably easy to use, but it has many settings which makes it extremely powerful. The only way to

I haven't been impressed by any new technology in a long time…until I downloaded and tried out the new Microsoft Chart Controls for the .Net Framework. It contains charts for both Forms and Asp.Net applications. It was easy to put this chart in an Asp.Net page:      The Charts home page is here:

A few posts back, I described the new Microsoft Chart Controls for the .Net Framework: Chart Demo.   While playing with the controls a bit over the holidays, I was pleasantly surprised to find you can hook into the paint events while the chart is being rendered. In the code below, I've hooked into

The new free Chart Control from Microsoft is awesome (for download details see my original post here).  But if you can avoid being dazzled by the plethora of charting features, you may realize it can be used for other tasks. You can use the Chart Control to display simple text dynamically in a bitm

Often, it's the little things that matter. In any application, small changes to the user interface can have a major impact on the readability and usability of a form. Fonts, element spacing, order of elements, colors, etc., all come into play. A skillful designer can make a few tweaks to a crappy in

I wanted a cheap, simple visual indicator similar to a progress bar. Note, not the kind of dynamic progress bar used when updating AJAX pages, more of a single-bar graph. It should have been simple task. My plan was to use a Div as a container, implemented through a panel because they are more conv

Usually, when you think of a Web Service, you think …make the call, get the response, and get on with the task at hand. These "one shot" calls are the norm in Web Services but there may be times when you need a little more. You may need the Web Service to remember states between calls. As an exampl

Sometimes you want your web page to 'stay alive'. That is, if a user is filling out a complicated form, you do not want the session to time out before they are finished. The user could get very angry and rightfully so: You might even get yelled at! It's not simply a matter of increasing the session

I like helping people but I do not like doing support. It's not really my thing. However, when I get a call from my father… I provide support. He wasn't able to install Service Pack 3 on his Windows XP computer. I tried it and, after a very lengthy process, received this message: "Access Denied" I

After years of working in the .NET environment, you can still find new and amazing features.

"The SQL command ran, there's no error message but nothing changed! What's going on? Do you think it's a virus? Maybe there's a bug in .NET!" The junior programmer was almost in tears when he came to me for help. Proud and confident in his abilities and faced with failure on what should have been a

While moderating posts over on the Asp.Net forums, I ran into a thread containing questions about using Nullable types. Nullable types are a simple concept: Allow value types to have the value of null. Typically, an integer or float cannot be null: When in scope, they always exist and therefore mus

Developers, Software Engineers, and Programmers are logical, rational, reasonable people right? Sure they are…until you disagree with something they believe in. Then they can become the most enflamed, outraged, foaming-at-the-mouth, intolerant, lunatics you've ever had the pleasure of meeting. Take

This post is for beginners. Many beginners struggle with the concept of an Interface. Over on the Asp.Net forums, where I moderate, the question is asked a surprising number of times. I'm going to try to describe and explain the concept of an Interface…simply and concisely. Let's say we are going

While answering a question on the Asp.Net forums, I was pleasantly surprised to find nested Generic Lists are possible. They seem much easier than multidimensional arrays. Here is the key line:     List> MyListOfIntLists;      protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {

More and more often I've been seeing C# code like this: var Data = GetData(); What on earth does GetData() return? This code is not as maintainable as it could be and is not as maintainable as it should be. Doesn't explicitly declaring the variable type make the code more readable, understandabl

Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, developers wanting to exchange data between applications used binary formatted data, hardcoded text field lengths, or delimited text files. Much parsing and error checking was involved. It was tedious. With XML files a lot of that work can be d

Over on the Asp.Net forums I recently had the opportunity* to help a few lost souls by showing them how to serialize objects to XML and deserialize the XML back into objects. Since the question has come up more than once, I decided to BLOG it so I could refer similar questions in the future to this 

 XSLT stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations.There is so much to learn in our technical world… and so little time….and for some of us, even fewer brain cells. Alas, such is the life of a nerd/dweeb/geek.The latest technology I spent brain cells on is XML Transforms. You've pr

There are plenty of tips out on the web that I see no need to repeat here. But this one made such a remarkable difference on my box that I had to post it…

"It works on my machine." How many times have we heard that?  Getting something to work on other machines, after deployment, can be the final challenge in a successful project.  The worst case scenario is having to go to the problem machine (hopefully it isn't in the remote reaches of Siberia) inst

More and more often I've been seeing C# code like this: Collapse Copy Code var Data = GetData(); What on earth does GetData() return? This code is not as maintainable as it could be and is not as maintainable as it should be. Doesn't explicitly declaring the variable type make the co