http://www.west-wind.com/ West Wind Technologies Article Archive for .Net, Windows and Visual FoxPro developers. en-us 1440 Sat, 2 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT ASP.NET includes a plethora of functions and utilities to retrieve information about the current requests and paths in general. So much so that it's often hard to remember exactly which path property or method you are actually looking for. This article summarizes many of the paths and path related operations that are available in ASP.NET. http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/132081.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT ASP.NET includes several controls that support paging but they vary fairly drastically for different controls and can't be controlled purely by assignment. This article discusses the shortcomings of native paging in ASP.NET and introduces a free standing pager control that is generic and works without dependencies on DataSource or other specific ASP.NET controls and provides SEO friendly navigation. http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/114621.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT Capturing ASP.NET response output can be done in a variety of ways. In this article I discuss how you can use a Response.Filter to capture output and transform it using a simple class that provides event hooks to make it easy to capture and transform output generically http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/72596.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:00:00 GMT OpenId is a single sign on technology getting more popular and with it come requests to integrate it into Web sites as a user authentication mechanism. In this post I'll give an overview of what OpenId is, how it works and demonstrate implementing it in an MVC Web application using the DotNetOpenAuth toolkit including a detailed walk through of the integration code. http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/899303.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:00:00 GMT This article describes a self-contained mechanism for calling WCF/ASMX services using only the jQuery client library and a small bit of custom code by providing a reusable ServiceProxy class that makes calling service methods as easy as a single method call. http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/896411.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Wed, 1 Jul 2009 08:00:00 GMT This article introduces the core localization features in the .NET framework relevant for WPF as well as specific localization approaches supported for WPF. Covered are the static and rigid approach using LocBaml as well as a couple of approaches using a Resx markup extension or using a more Windows Forms based approach using attached properties. This article is hosted on the CodePlex site as a downloadable Microsoft Word document. http://wpflocalization.codeplex.com/ Rick Strahl dotnet Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:00:00 GMT Visual Studio provides an easy way to create project templates from an existing project and this makes it real easy to create custom project types that are tailored to the way that you work. http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/740022.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT Sometimes it can be handy to display data from Enum values in lists in the user interface as a quick way to present pick lists, especially in administration interfaces. Here is how you can load up enum values in DropDown lists along with some ideas on when this practice does and does not make sense. http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/632732.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:00:00 GMT When working with HTTP clients or Web Services being able to capture HTTP output is crucial. HTTP monitors are invaluable in this process and using them with .NET clients requires some special care. Here's what you need to know. http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/596348.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Sun, 4 Jan 2009 08:00:00 GMT Part 2 of this series introduces focuses on connectivity between the jQuery client and ASP.NET server. This article discusses the Ajax functionality available in jQuery and demonstrates a variety of ways on how to retrieve data from the server and use on the client with jQuery. Topics covered using .load() with external content, making Page callbacks with HTML fragments and JSON results and using WCF and ASMX service to create raw Ajax applications that only consume server data. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/jQuery/jQueryPart2.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Wed, 3 Dec 2008 08:00:00 GMT Part 2 of this 2 part series covers using jQuery's Ajax functions to call back to an ASP.NET backend. This article covers a variety of different approaches you can take to communicate with ASP.NET starting with external Urls and using the simple .load() function, same page callbacks and returning Html Fragments or JSON data and using WCF/ASMX services to create raw Ajax data services for client consumption with jQuery. There's also some discussion of using client templates to render content and keep your markup centralized in one place. Article includes extensive samples and a jQueryControls support library that provides both a client library of plug-ins and server side controls and ASP.NET and Ajax related utilities. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/jQuery/default.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Tue, 7 Oct 2008 08:00:00 GMT Part 1 of this 2 part series introduces the jQuery JavaScript library and provides an overview of the functionality this powerful library provides. Article starts with an overview of what jQuery is and does followed by a walkthrough of some of jQuery's prominent features starting with Selectors, Wrapped Set functions, event handling all the way up to simple plug-in creation. Part 1 deals purely with client side functionality. Part 2 addresses ASP.NET integration and AJAX functionality. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/jQuery/default.aspx Rick Strahl foxdotnet Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:00:00 GMT This article describes the complete process of signing an XML document with a private key certificate, and then validating the same document with the public key. The includes step by step instructions including creating a test certificate and installing it and how to use the certificate from your code for signing and validation. It also covers installation of a full certificate from a qualified CA which is a slightly different process. A sample class that works with any SOAP Envelope XML document is provided to demonstrate. http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/257599.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Thu, 9 Aug 2007 08:00:00 GMT This article is a quick start step by step guide for setting up Subversion for Source Control and using Tortoise SVN to set up and manage your repository and local copies of projects. This article uses a Visual Studio Solution as an example, but the same concepts can be applied to any tool or set of files for that matter. The article discusses installation and setup, creating of a repository, creating local copies and basic day to day operations. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/subversion/ Rick Strahl foxdotnet Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:08:02 GMT Check out the localization features in ASP.NET 2.0 and understand how they work under the covers. This introduction focuses on the ASP.NET 2.0 specific technology for localization and discusses how Resource Providers are used to provide the various integrated localization features in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio .NET. The focus of this article is on the technology rather on the deep semantics of localization. Serves as an introduction for the Resource Provider article. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/wwDbResourceProvider/introtolocalization.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Wed, 18 Jul 2007 08:00:00 GMT Find out how to build an ASP.NET 2.0 Resource Provider that uses database data for its localization storage rather than Resx files. Database resources can be much more flexible and this article demonstrates how to build a powerful ASP.NET resource editing front end that allows editing of resource data in a live ASP.NET application in a context sensitive manner. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/wwDbResourceProvider Rick Strahl dotnet Sun, 1 Jul 2007 08:00:00 GMT This article discusses how to host the .NET Runtime in a non .NET application - specifically Visual FoxPro. By providing a small C++ Win32 DLL wrapper to bootstrap the .NET runtime it's possible to host the .NET Runtime directly in Visual FoxPro which allows for loading most .NET types without using COM Interop to load the type. This means you can skip the nasty COM registration issues that COM Interop introduces and gain access to .NET components that normally wouldn't be exposed as COM objects. A helper .NET assembly is also provided to allow you to access static object and provide dynamic execution methods for accessing properties that are not directly compatible with Visual FoxPro data types. http://www.west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/104449.aspx Rick Strahl foxdotnet Tue, 8 May 2007 08:00:00 GMT This article demonstrates how to build a Windows Live Writer plugin that allows for embedding screenshots into the current Blog entry being edited. The article describes the basics of content plugins for Live Writer and uses a plugin that uses SnagIt from Techsmith to provide an easy and flexible way to do screen captures directly into your blog content using C# code... http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/30318.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Tue, 9 Jan 2007 08:00:00 GMT Web Services with Visual FoxPro have never been easy. The most common Web Service tool for FoxPro is the SOAP Toolkit, which has been discontinued and which had a host of problems when dealing with complex types passed over Web Services. In this article I’ll show how you can leverage the powerful Web Service features of .NET and the new Windows Communication Foundation in your FoxPro applications through COM Interop both for calling and hosting Web Services. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/foxdotnetwebservices/ Rick Strahl foxdotnet Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:00:00 GMT As much as ASP.NET 2.0 improves data binding, one aspect - simple control binding for controls like textboxes, checkboxes and selected values of lists for example - is still tedious especially when it comes to unbinding data. This article demonstrates a powerful extender control that can provide easy to use two-way databinding semantics. Using the control you can easily bind and unbind any control properties to any data field or property of an object with full control over binding, unbinding and dealing with binding errors at runtime. The article demonstrates the control functionality and discusses the design of building an ASP.NET 2.0 extender control that provides the flexibility to extend any existing controls on a Page, Master Page or User Control. Article is published on MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/12/ExtendASPNET/default.aspx?loc=en Rick Strahl dotnet Thu, 28 Sep 2006 08:00:00 GMT Compilation and deployment in ASP.NET 2.0 has brought some of the biggest changes to the ASP.NET development model. As developers we use page compilation all day long and deployment is something we all have to worry about sooner or later. A lot has changed in both areas and they can affect how you build and deploy your applications so understanding how the model works is crucial. In this article I'll provide a detailed discussion of how compilation and deployment works. I'll also talk about the new Web Deployment Projects and Web Application Projects add-ins that Microsoft is providing to ease some of the pain points of the stock functionality shipped with ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/AspNetCompilation/AspNetCompilation.asp Rick Strahl dotnet Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:00:00 GMT It's been about a year since ATLAS was first unveiled. It's come a long way towards becoming the offical Microsoft framework. A few weeks ago Microsoft announced official names for ATLAS and a tentative release schedule which is a sign that we're getting somewhat close to feature lockdown and a 1.0 release. In this post I talk about where we're at with the technology and some experiences that I've had talking with developers about ATLAS in the last couple of months. http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/7551.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Sat, 20 May 2006 08:00:00 GMT The new ASP.NET 2.0 project model can make certain types of applications much easier to work, but for more sophisticated projects it's quite possible that stock projects may get in your way for development and deployment. Microsoft has recently introduced Web Deployment Projects and Web Application Projects add-in project types for Visual Studio to address most of the concerns with the stock project model and this article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of each of the different models. http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/5601.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Tue, 11 Apr 2006 08:00:00 GMT Find out to integrate Credit Card processing into your ASP.NET applications. This long article starts at the beginning discussing how the actual payment processing works from the provider level and delves into details with specific implementations for several common gateway services and a set of classes you can use for payment processing. Providers covered are Authorize.NET, PayFlowPro, LinkPoint and few other smaller providers. Finally an example shows how to integrate these classes in a live application. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/aspnetecommerce/aspnetecommerce.asp Rick Strahl dotnet Thu, 16 Feb 2006 08:00:00 GMT Now that Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 have been out for some time, it's time to take stock on what the new environment brings. This editorial takes a look at some of the features that I really like in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 and some annoying problems that seriously get in the way of development at times. http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/4502.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Mon, 2 Jan 2006 08:00:00 GMT Are you using COM Interop from Visual FoxPro to communicate with .NET? This series of articles takes you through some of the scenarios you are likely to run into once you go beyond the basics of calling simple COM objects and show more sophisticated .NET functionality that you can take advantage of in your FoxPro code with a little extra work. This series written by Rick Strahl consists of articles that deal with passing complex objects, handling events from .NET components and using multi-threading in .NET components called from Visual FoxPro. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/dotnetfromVfp/DotNetFromVfp_ComplexObjects.asp Rick Strahl foxdotnet Sat, 10 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMT At this year's PDC there was one technology on the huge list of announcements that Microsoft made that didn't quite get the attention it deserved: IIS 7.0 in Longhorn Server. I checked out several of the IIS 7.0 sessions at PDC and recently attended a Microsoft 3 day event highlighting the new features of IIS 7.0. The short of it is: I'm impressed by the planned changes, because for the most part the changes are evolutionary and bring a more solid architecture to IIS. I's an architecture that formalizes many previously haphazardly thrown together technologies and brings something to IIS as a platform that was previously missing: elegance and simplicity. http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/3838.aspx Rick Strahl dotnet Sun, 2 Oct 2005 08:00:00 GMT Find out how to use the Script Callbacks feature in ASP.NET 2.0 which provides a built-in, rudimentary AJAX implementation in ASP.NET 2.0. This two part article series on ASPToday covers an overview of AJAX in general, how the Script Callbacks architecture works and then takes through a number of simple and practical examples of various complexity. Part 2 also discusses a number of issues to consider, like network bandwidth, debugging concepts and how to best utilize AJAX technology in existing applications. http://www.asptoday.com/Content.aspx?id=2381 Rick Strahl dotnet Wed, 3 Aug 2005 08:00:00 GMT AJAX is the ho topic in Web Development at the moment and there's a lot of discussion going around about how to best implement this technology in real world applications. AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML and it's basically another term for Remote Scripting or the ability for browser client code to call server side code directly without reposting the entire page back to the Server. While the technology has its uses, the current hype about it seems misplaced especially in light of the dearth of actually useful applications or even samples that utilize the techology beyond the Gee Wiz factor. Here are a few initial thoughts on some issues that aren't often discussed in relation to AJAX technology. http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2725.aspx Rick Strahl foxdotnet Mon, 18 Jul 2005 08:00:00 GMT ASP.NET is a powerful platform for building Web applications, that provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and power for building just about any kind of Web application. Most people are familiar only with the high level frameworks like WebForms and WebServices which sit at the very top level of the ASP.NET hierarchy. In this article Rick Strahl describes the lower level aspects of ASP.NET and explains how requests move from Web Server, through ISAPI into the ASP.NET runtime and then through the ASP.NET Http Pipeline to process requests. The article provides a low level look at ASP.NET plumbing and also explains how the many related objects of the ASP.NET Runtime interact with each other. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/howaspnetworks/howaspnetworks.asp Rick Strahl dotnet Thu, 13 Jan 2005 08:00:00 GMT Visual FoxPro doesn’t have native Unicode support which means that you have to do some extra work and understand how the process works in order to work with it. In this article I’ll describe the issues in the context of supporting of multiple languages simultaneously, rather than through the view of code page translation which Visual FoxPro readily supports. I’ll start with an overview of the issues and how to work with Unicode in general, then show how to retrieve and update Unicode data using Visual FoxPro and SQL Server data. Finally I'll talk about how to get the Unicode content to display both in your Web and Desktop user interfaces. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/foxunicode/foxunicode.asp Rick Strahl fox Wed, 8 Sep 2004 08:00:00 GMT PayPal provides one mechanism to process payments on the Internet. While it's not the first choice for payment processing for typical e-Commerce sites it does provide additional choices for those customers that don't feel comfortable paying by credit card over the Web. It's also an easy solution for first time Shop owners who might not want to invest in a full merchant account setup. This article describes PayPal integration from the perspective of a full featured e-Commerce application and focuses on integrating PayPal seamlessly into this environment. The article also provides a PayPal helper class (ASP.NET/C#) and a skeleton sample application that demonstrates the process and makes it easy to hook your own code into. Although the code provided is .NET, the concepts in this article apply to any Web development environment. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/PayPalIntegration/PayPalIntegration.asp Rick Strahl foxdotnet Tue, 27 Jul 2004 08:00:00 GMT Find out how to create a .Net Web Service that serves up data in a variety of ways, then see how to consume this data with Visual FoxPro. .Net Web Services are easy to develop, debug and deploy, but consuming the data, especially with Visual FoxPro is not always as straight forward as you might think. This article discusses how to pass complex data between .Net Web Services and Visual FoxPro and provides several tools to facilitate and standardize the process of building solid Web Service clients for your applications and workaround some of the limitations. http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/foxpronetwebservices/foxpronetwebservices.asp Rick Strahl foxdotnet