One UI element that has always been tricky to create in ASP.NET applications is the Modal Window. Often, applications will present an entire page for simple property editing, in situations where a modal window is a more elegant, and straight-forward UI element. This is probably due mainly to the fact...

A common need for web-based reporting is to create a UI to allow the user to apply filter criteria to a set of data. Usually, this involves coding a fairly complicated UI, and associated code to apply the filtering logic to a DataView. This UI usually is fairly static, possibly containing a drop down...

Creating a better way to manage ASP.NET state has been talked about quite a bit. I’ve posted about it a few times, as have others. A couple of weeks ago Raymond brought the topic up again , and it got me thinking that the way I've been doing it could probably be improved upon. Today I needed to look...

I've been having a good discussion on how best to encapsulate your ASP.NET page state over on Raymond's blog . Raymond has advocated adding a State object to your PageBase class that has slots for each important session object that you're going to use (correct me if I'm wrong Raymond).. The nice thing...

I literally stumbled across this solution while creating the WSMQ Instant Messenger demo that I posed about last week. My problem was that I needed a way to log users out of the chat application when they closed their browser window. Since I was storing my list of users in the application, they'd...

A few weeks ago, an article appeared on O'Rielly that showed an example chat application that utilized Amazon's Simple Queue service to store chat messages. IMO, using a middle-ware Queuing system over a Web Service is a great idea (which was the motivation for me creating www.wsmq.com ), and...

A couple of weeks ago, I promised to create a step-by-step guide to setting up Vault on a WebHost4Life (WH4L) . I've been stalling on this basically because for me to do an accurate, detailed step-by-step guide, it will involve setting it up again, so that I can record each and every step. Short of doing...

Say what you will about User Controls (ASCX controls) versus WebControls (classes inheriting from System.Web.UI.WebControl) but the simple fact is that often a User Control is the easiest and best way to design a piece of re-usable functionality in ASP.NET. An essential component to re-use is encapsulation...

The other day, I had to copy a file from a Windows Service running on our Web server which is outside of our firewall, and not a trusted member of our domain , to a folder on a share inside of the firewall . Should be easy, right? Well, it turns out it that it's a bit more complicated than I first thought...

I think the post title is clear enough. Once you have a Typed DataSet, you can do anything, in my opinion. Recently, we were having a problem analyzing our IIS logs with WebTrends. The webmaster here asked me if I could write something in .NET that would let us quickly analyze our logs. We have this...