Rick Strahl's Web Log

WebLog Posts in Category ASP.NET

A small, intra-app Object to String Serializer
April 01, 2013 @ 2:41 am

On a few occasions I've needed a very compact serializer for small and simple, flat object serialization, typically for storage in Cookies or a FormsAuthentication ticket in ASP.NET. XML and JSON serialization are too verbose for those scenarios so a simple property serializer that strings together the values was needed. Originally I did this by hand, but here is a class that automates the process.

3 comments

Using plUpload to upload Files with ASP.NET
March 12, 2013 @ 3:42 am

plUpload is a popular client side multi-file upload component. In this article I describe a small library that abstracts the server side processing of uploaded files with an HTTP handler demonstrate putting it all together with a small Image Upload sample application.

14 comments

Visual Studio Web Publish Lockup? Check for invisible Window
February 21, 2013 @ 12:25 am

If your Web Publish dialog appears to lock up Visual Studio when you click on the Publish option, most likely the Web Publish window is hidden on a second screen that is not currently visible. Here's how you can work around this annoying little bug.

4 comments

Caveats with the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests in IIS 7/8
October 25, 2012 @ 11:15 pm

IIS 7 and 8 support using Managed Modules to handle access to all IIS request content which is very powerful. But sometimes you actually want to not handle non-ASP.NET content and it's not very obvious how to minimize access to non-ASP.NET requests in managed modules.

5 comments

Creating STA COM compatible ASP.NET Applications
September 18, 2012 @ 6:36 pm

When it comes to deploying STA COM components in ASP.NET only WebForms has native support for STA component. Other technologies like MVC, ASMX Web Services and WCF run only in MTA mode. If you need to run your STA COM Components in ASP.NET here is what you need to know and a few tools that help you create STA compatible handlers.

17 comments

ASP.NET Frameworks and Raw Throughput Performance
September 04, 2012 @ 6:13 pm

I got curious the other day: How do the various ASP.NET framework compare in raw throughput performance? With so many development choices on the ASP.NET stack available today it's interesting to take an informal look at how raw throughput performance compares.

19 comments

Rendering ASP.NET MVC Views to String
May 30, 2012 @ 1:53 am

Creating templated text output that's not tied to the HTTP output stream is a frequent requirement in my applications. Rendering confirmation emails, password resets, validations and notifications all generate text through templates that require string or stream output that doesn't get sent to HTTP. Here are some helpers that make it easy to create string output from MVC Views...

7 comments

GZip/Deflate Compression in ASP.NET MVC
April 28, 2012 @ 4:00 am

If you want to create ASP.NET MVC content that uses gzip or deflate compression you need to use some custom code. Here's an action filter that compresses content in your ASP.NET MVC applications.

4 comments

Internet Explorer and Cookie Domains
April 25, 2012 @ 6:04 am

Got tripped up today by another IE issue: Internet Explorer will not accept Cookies with local domains set for the Cookie Domain and fail silently.

5 comments

ASP.NET MVC Postbacks and HtmlHelper Controls ignoring Model Changes
April 20, 2012 @ 2:19 am

Today I discovered an MVC behavior I hadn't noticed: For HTML helper controls MVC always uses POSTBACK values to display the control value rather than model values when the View is rendering in a POST back. In effect this means that MVC Views can't update the value of controls during a POST back using the standard HTML Helper Controls.

17 comments

Wishful Thinking: Why can't HTML fix Script Attacks at the Source?
April 14, 2012 @ 5:49 pm

I'm dealing with user HTML input in a Web application today and again I curse over the complexities involved in sanitizing this html. So today I started dreaming about a possible alternative...

15 comments

Changing the default HTML Templates to HTML5 in Visual Studio
December 23, 2011 @ 4:19 am

The default WebForms templates in Visual Studio still use the XHTML doctype headers by default. HTML5 doctype headers are easier to use and read and with HTML5 support now becoming mainstream and backward compatible with older browsers its time to switch those doctype headers. This post demonstrates how to change the default VS templates or create new templates altogether. With HTML becoming more prominent and the new headers being easier to read and smaller in size, it's

Debugging Application_Start and Module Initialization with IIS and Visual Studio
December 15, 2011 @ 2:19 am

If you're running the full version of IIS and you try to debug your Web application's startup code in Application_Start you might have found that you can't debug this code as the debugger doesn't break there. Here's why and some easy ways you can work around this limitation.

4 comments

HTML 5 Input Types - How useful is this really going to be?
December 10, 2011 @ 9:13 pm

The HTML 5 input controls enhancements seem like a nice feature - until you look a little closer and realize that that validation and styling these control enhancement use are likely going to interfere with your existing application logic and styling. Here are are some thoughts on the subject.

16 comments

HTML 5 Input Types on WebForms Controls
December 10, 2011 @ 8:24 pm

HTML5 input types are new, and as it turns out ASP.NET Webforms input controls can easily create HTML5 input elements.

5 comments

Loading jQuery Consistently in a .NET Web App
October 10, 2011 @ 12:56 pm

Loading jQuery into a page consistently across the lifetime of an application involves, managing versions and updating urls frequently. In this post I look at my preferred way to load jQuery and how to manage the script reference that gets embedded into the page with a single update location.

14 comments

Getting a Web Resource Url in non WebForms Applications
October 05, 2011 @ 3:29 am

Need to retrieve Web Resource Urls from a .NET assembly, but not running in WebForms? Here's how you can create a small helper function that lets you retrieve WebResourceUrls from Razor or MVC applications.

2 comments

ActiveX component can't create Object Error? Check 64 bit Status
June 19, 2011 @ 11:55 pm

When moving applications to 64 bit servers be sure to check that you don't call old school, 32 bit COM objects. If you do these COM object calls fail. Thankfully IIS 7 and later allows Application Pool configuration to enable 32 bit operation to work around this issue. Here's how.

2 comments

Built-in GZip/Deflate Compression on IIS 7.x
May 05, 2011 @ 1:42 am

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.

12 comments

ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats
May 02, 2011 @ 3:17 am

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.

22 comments

Error on 64 Bit Install of IIS – LoadLibraryEx failed on aspnet_filter.dll
April 04, 2011 @ 1:07 pm

Ran into a problem on my 64 bit machine with IIS trying to load 32 bit dlls. Turns out this is a misconfiguration that occurred from some additional installation that failed to set a specific bitness valuie and pointed to 32 bit install. Here's what happened and how it got fixed.

20 comments

Custom ASP.NET Routing to an HttpHandler
March 28, 2011 @ 3:02 pm

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.

11 comments

Changing an HTML Form's Target with jQuery
January 30, 2011 @ 3:44 am

If you have multiple submit or link buttons in an ASP.NET Page and one or more of those buttons needs to post to a different target there's no built-in way to force one or more of those buttons to POST to a different frame/window. With a little bit of JavaScript though it's real easy to change the form's target dynamically as needed.

8 comments

Retrieve the full ASP.NET Form Buffer as a String
January 17, 2011 @ 3:04 am

How do you get the full Request.Form buffer in an ASP.NET request as a string? Here's how with a simple function.

7 comments

WCF REST Service Activation Errors when AspNetCompatibility is enabled
January 06, 2011 @ 2:54 pm

Ran into a version problem with WCF REST Services when using on IIS and with ASP.NET Compatibility enabled. Turns out there's a potential version conflict in the system .config files that can cause this error to creep up - here's how to fix it.

1 comment

A Closable jQuery Plug-in
November 29, 2010 @ 12:30 pm

I've found it very useful to have a closeable plug-in that hide the content of an HTML element providing a visual close image cue. Almost every UI I build these days requires either closing pop up windows or even more commonly requires that items are removed and visually hidden which usually implies 'close' behavior. In addition to removing a bunch of HTML markup, having a plug-in is also quite useful for server controls especially if multiple behaviors (plug-ins) need to be applied.

10 comments

Adding proper THEAD sections to a GridView
November 18, 2010 @ 5:12 pm

ASP.NET's GridViews (and the older DataGrid) don't generate the best HTML and one of the common problems I run into is that headers aren't generated with proper thead tags. With a little jQuery script help this can be fixed easily when the page loads. Here's how.

9 comments

Request Limit Length Limits for IIS’s requestFiltering Module
October 28, 2010 @ 10:57 pm

Got bit during an update today by code that ran just fine on my dev machine and failed on OpenID logins on the live machine. Turns out RequestFiltering was not allowing the long OpenID urls to be served, a problem that's easy to hit with the default settings in Windows Server 2008.

1 comment

Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix
August 17, 2010 @ 3:44 pm

Microsoft recently released a preview of WebMatrix a tool geared towards hobby/non-developer types to build Web applications. This all in one environment is supposed to simplify Web development with having to be an expert. In this post I review some of the interesting features and how they stack up.

10 comments

AspNetCompatibility in WCF Services – easy to trip up
April 12, 2010 @ 3:51 pm

When using ASP.NET compatiblity in WCF REST services you'll want to be very careful in matching your configuration settings and service attributes in the correct combination or you may end up with unpleasant and hard to find ServiceActivationExceptions.

4 comments

HttpContext.Items and Server.Transfer/Execute
January 20, 2010 @ 4:32 pm

I got bitten by a the fact that the Context.Items collection stays active throughout the ENTIRE lifetime of an ASP.NET request including Server.Transfer and Execute calls. In certain situations this can cause big problems if you expect the items to be unique for the specific page/component request.

2 comments

Speaking at the Portland Area .NET User Group on Tuesday Sept 1st
August 27, 2009 @ 9:49 pm

I’ll be speaking at the PADNUG meeting next week in Portland at the Microsoft office. Rich Hubbins asked me to present on jQuery again as I did last year. A lot has changed in the last year and when I gave the last presentation jQuery was just starting to get some attention in the .NET world. By now many more people have been using jQuery for a while so this talk likely will hit a different...

Url.Action() and RouteValue Encoding
July 19, 2009 @ 5:21 pm

When creating custom URLs with the UrlHelper.Action() method is a great way to create links to other URLs in the current Web application. However, you need to be careful of certain encoding issues as certain characters are not correctly encoded to work properly as parameters.

11 comments

Creating a quick and dirty jQuery contentEditable Plugin
May 25, 2009 @ 11:20 pm

Inline editing content is a feature that's novel and highly useful at the same time. I've been using it in a number of admin interfaces to provide very easy and quick text updates to existing content. There are a number of ways to accomplish this but in this post I'll discuss a contentEditable jQuery plugin that makes any content inline editable using the DOM's contentEditable attribute that maintains text formatting in the editable text.

9 comments

Where's my .NET 3.5 (on IIS), Dude?
March 24, 2008 @ 12:36 pm

I just delivered a small 3.5 application to a customer in compiled form and told him to install the application on IIS. The company is one I've dealt with on a few occasions and they are .NET aware shop where I deal with developers and a .NET familiar IT department. But it wasn't long after I sent my email that I got a call back from the customer who - slightly embarrassed - mentioned that they couldn't find the 3.5 Runtime option in the ASP.NET configuration panel.

34 comments