Building javascript minification into MSBuild scripts
How to use a tool called Packer.NET to build javascript minification into a MSBuild script.Published in ASP.NET, CSS, Javascript, Tools on Saturday, August 29th, 2009
ASP.NET
Published in ASP.NET, CSS, Javascript, Tools on Saturday, August 29th, 2009
Improving the way ASP.NET handles 404 requests
How (and why) to make your ASP.NET site's error handling better by returning the right response codes and redirecting to the error page without changing the url.Published in ASP.NET on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
Svelte asp.net: avoiding <form runat="server">
postbacks add a lot of weight to your page and you don't always need them. Find out when you can do without them and how to use ASP.NET without paying the postback price.Published in ASP.NET on Sunday, February 8th, 2009
Reducing viewstate on custom controls
One of the biggest waste I see in using viewstate is that it persists values that are already set in the aspx. These get set every time that the page runs and don’t need to be round tripped to the browser so that they will be persisted. I did a little experiment a while back where [...]Published in ASP.NET, Server controls on Sunday, February 1st, 2009
IButtonControl – any button will do
One nice feature of ASP.NET 2.0 is a new interface called IButtonControl. You can use it in a code behind to say a control needs to be a button but without actually saying whether it needs to be a Button, LinkButton, ImageButton or custom control button type. This is the type of thing that’s useful if [...]Published in ASP.NET, Server controls on Monday, June 30th, 2008
Validating your pages (the technical bit)
So hopefully now you’re convinced that validation is A Good Thing, have decided which doctype you’re going to use and have resolved never to use quirks mode again. Check, check, check. Ok people, that means enough of the talking. We are finally get to the technical stuff: how to validate pages! Validating using the W3C validator The [...]Published in ASP.NET on Sunday, January 13th, 2008
Friends don’t let friends use quirks mode
Having a doctype in your webpage isn’t just about making your webpage validate. The most important practical reason to include one is to make sure the browsers are rendering in standards compliance mode. Most browsers have two modes for displaying webpages, standards mode and quirks mode. Webpages with a doctype are rendered using standards mode, which [...]Published in ASP.NET on Monday, January 7th, 2008
Choosing a doctype
So making sure that your webpages validate is important because it will make the pages render more consistently across different browsers, meaning you can spend less time debugging cross browser incompatibility and more time with your loved ones/down the pub/plotting world domination. But what are we going to validate against? The current most popular options [...]Published in ASP.NET on Monday, December 31st, 2007
Sacrificing the validation goat to the browser gods
As a web developer, much of my working day is spent at the mercy of browsers. Sometimes it feels like I spend all my time coaxing useful work from bratty children who don’t like to get along. One of the important tools available for convincing the browsers to play nice is HTML and CSS validation. [...]Published in ASP.NET on Thursday, December 27th, 2007
Web Standards for ASP.NET developers
Find out more about doing web standards compliant development if you develop in asp.net.Published in ASP.NET on Thursday, December 27th, 2007
Frontpage extensions firewall
I wanted to set up front page extensions on my machine this week so I could access the web projects I wanted by typing in the url rather than having to pick from the list in IIS which is littered with experiments and sample projects. Lazy but worth it considering how often I have to [...]Published in ASP.NET on Sunday, January 28th, 2007
Using print stylesheets with ASP.NET themes
Using the @media css declaration to create a print stylesheet when you're using ASP.NET themes to automatically include stylesheets.Published in ASP.NET on Monday, October 16th, 2006
You don't have to register web controls and user controls on every page!
One of the coolest things I learnt lately thanks to Dino Esposito’s excellent Atlas talk that I went to in Nice was that you can register your user controls and web controls in one place in the web.config file rather than at the top of every page. You just need to add a <controls> tag to [...]Published in ASP.NET on Monday, May 1st, 2006
Joe's new ASP.NET blog
My boyfriend Joe (who’s also an ASP.NET programmer) has a new techblog! Go read about how excited he is about his new Porsche. ;) Now he has to link back to me! Can you believe I had to tell him to?!Published in ASP.NET on Sunday, April 16th, 2006
Bookmark: tips for debugging atlas applications
If you’re doing any work with the Atlas beta there’s a nice page in the documentation with tips on debugging atlas applications. Some of the tips are actually quite useful for general clientside debugging as well so it’s worth a read even if you’re not using Atlas.Published in ASP.NET on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
Pausing page rendering at a certain point
I don’t know if this will be useful to anyone else but I thought this was kind of a neat trick for messing around with ASP.NET page rendering for debugging purposes. My problem was I wanted to stop the rendering of a page at a certain point so I could see how the scripts were reacting [...]Published in ASP.NET, Javascript, Server controls on Friday, April 7th, 2006
UserControl type not available if code behind file isn't in app_code directory
I ran into a weird problem with dynamically created ASP.NET 2.0 user controls yesterday. I was using the user control to populate a panel of a tab control which meant I didn’t actually have a reference to the user control object anywhere on my form. The only way I could get a reference to it [...]Published in ASP.NET, Javascript, Server controls on Thursday, April 6th, 2006
Connecting to Amazon Web Service through ASP.NET
I have had such fun this afternoon! I’ve been creating a little sample application for something I’m doing and I was sick of the Northwind database so I thought I’d try hooking up to the Amazon web service instead (and make fun of David Hasselhof’s 80s movies). I went the VS2005 Web References route and it [...]Published in ASP.NET on Thursday, March 16th, 2006
WebResources aren't cached when debug is set to true in your web.config
On the subject of the ASP.NET 2.0 web resources, something very useful to know is they aren’t cached when debug is set to true in your web.config. My research suggests that regardless of this caching isn’t enabled at all on Cassini (aka the ASP.NET development server). It doesn’t seem to even cache static files and it [...]Published in ASP.NET, Server controls on Thursday, March 16th, 2006
Using the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Resource Attribute
ASP.NET 2.0 has a really nice feature that lets you compile site or component resources like javascript files into your assembly file instead of deploying these shared files to the wwwroot/aspnet_client directory like in ASP.NET 1.x. This makes your component/website much easier to deploy because it means you can keep everything you need in one [...]Published in ASP.NET, Server controls on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
The resource cannot be found.
I was playing around with embedded web resources and was having a problem loading some javascript files. When I cut and paste the script link from the source of my page into the browser’s address bar I got the following error message: The resource cannot be found. Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking for [...]Published in ASP.NET, Server controls on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
Overview on new features for ASP.NET 2.0
I found a pretty cool article on developer fusion with an overview of what’s new in ASP.NET 2.0. It’s a great overview with an overview of things like changes to page state, new design time functionality for server controls, new localization functionality and new page lifecycle events. I promise I’m not blogging this because I want [...]Published in ASP.NET on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005
Where have the web project files gone?
I’m using ASP.NET 2.0 today to actually try to do something. I’ve opened it up before and had a bit of a look around, but this is the first time I’ve actually needed to make a new project and write a bit of code. I’m trying to breath deeply and tell myself that change isn’t neccessarily [...]Published in ASP.NET on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005
Refactoring tool that looks at C# and aspx files
Saw an interesting looking refactoring tool called DevAdvantage that looks like it’s a cross between FXCop and Resharper. I haven’t actually taken a look at it yet, but I really liked the fact you could set rules for things in aspx files. I think the fact that aspx files aren’t really treated like “real code” is [...]Published in ASP.NET on Saturday, October 1st, 2005
Is there javascript debugging in VS.NET 2005?
I might just be dense, but I can’t find out how to do javascript debugging in VS.NET 2005. It cheerfully informs me that “object is null or not an object” but there’s no script listing or running documents or even line information so I can’t really do much with the information. Does anyone know if this [...]Published in ASP.NET on Friday, August 12th, 2005