Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in February 2004

Creating Thumbnail Images on the fly with ASP.Net
February 26, 2004 @ 1:37 am

One frequent task is to take images and convert them into thumbnails. I was getting tired of constantly repeating this code for specific situations, so I created a generic page in the app to handle resizing images from the current site dynamically in a page called CreateThumbnail. You call this page with a relative image name from the Web site on the querystring and it returns the image as a thumbnail. An example of how this might work looks like this:

134 comments

Running a .NET Application over the network
February 23, 2004 @ 12:19 am

This post is a reminder to myself on how to get .Net applications to run over the network and set the required permissions to do so with the Framework Configuration tool. Welcome to security hell ...

4 comments

Making sense of ASP.Net Paths
February 19, 2004 @ 2:06 pm

ASP.Net a plethora of properties to retrieve path information about the current request, control and application. To keep things straight I thought it'd be a good idea to summarize those options briefly along with describing some common scenarios of how they might be used.

138 comments

HTML Edit Controls
February 17, 2004 @ 12:59 am

I've been thinking and messing with HTML Editing a lot lately. And it's giving me a headache . I've gotten to the point were just about all of my document based UIs deal with HTML for displaying content. HTML display is relatively easy to create and display and it works well. For example, the Message Board here, the Web Log, Help Builder, the Wiki, the Message Board Reader are typical examples of applications that use a rich display surface with HTML to display data.

4 comments

Open Source Musing on Security and Developers
February 13, 2004 @ 1:42 pm

I've been thrown in the middle of a few open source discussions in the last couple of weeks and I always find the open source arguments that are thrown out immature and lacking any real depth or thought. Most of the argument come from Microsoft hatred for the heck of it and the most common 'alternate' reason given is security.

Reflection to provide EVALUATE functionality
February 12, 2004 @ 12:17 pm

After answering three more questions today on how to ‘dynamically’ access a property or control on a form I thought I’d post my Reflection helpers again. I’ve put these into most articles I’ve published, but this way they are easily searchable and pointable for future reference.

13 comments

Hardware Fun (Printer Installation)
February 11, 2004 @ 12:55 am

Adventures in a new printer installation.

2 comments

Google and the West Wind Message Board
February 10, 2004 @ 10:42 pm

I recently (what the hell took me so long) figured out that Google is not indexing the Message Board on this Web Site, or indexing it very incompletely anyway. But now I'm wondering what is it that's keeping Google and other search engines out of the Message Board. There are a few things that come to mind...

2 comments

A quick way to Object Serialization
February 09, 2004 @ 7:51 pm

Serialization in .Net is one of the more useful features in .Net that I use all the time. Serialization – especially XML Serialization – makes it essentially trivial to write out the content of an object to a file, stream very easily. This is useful to pass data between applications, but also a great simple mechanism for saving and reloading state of applications. In fact, I use Serialization for just about every application to store a number of configuration settings easily.

19 comments

Image Capture with SnagIt in VFP
February 07, 2004 @ 12:48 pm

Today I spent some time making a few requested enhancements to Help Builder and one thing I wanted to do for a while is add support for doing image capture with SnagIt via its COM interface. SnagIt provides a nice easily integrated COM interface that makes it easy to provide capture functionality in your own apps. For Help Builder this interface is used only if SnagIt is installed - if it isn't it uses its own not quite so slick capture mechanism.

4 comments

Using HTTP Ranges to resume resume aborted downloads
February 07, 2004 @ 7:21 am

You can use the Range: Http header to download a specific range of bytes which provides the ability to resume HTTP downloads that have been aborted.

3 comments

Back from the Snow Country
February 07, 2004 @ 6:21 am

Back from the Snow Country in Utah. Some personal notes and a link to pictures of the trip.

2 comments