DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by mikekick

A String.Format Alternative for Using Named Variables Instead of Numbe

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:01:44 GMT

StringHelper.NamedFormat is a String.Format alternative which will let you use names instead of numbers in your string templates.

Dynamic Custom Form Buttons With CSS

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 14:29:21 GMT

Our users like pretty, usually round, buttons on the page. And the solution for sometime was (and still is) a predefined image created in your favourite graphics application that also had the caption of the button. All is fine except when you want to reuse the same button with a different text (especially in a multi language), when you have to draw another image that has only the text changed. The technique presented in this article shows an alternative and modern way to the "old" one.

Some SELECTs will never return 0 results -- regardless of the criteria

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:17:24 GMT

In SQL, the general rule of thumb is that the number of rows returned from a SELECT will be zero if your criteria did not match any data. However, there is an important exception to this rule; it does not apply when asking for aggregate calculations such as SUM(), MIN() or MAX(), without any grouping. This is rather interesting and important to know and look out for, as it can cause some confusion and recently some of my ASP.NET code failed due to this. Let's take a look.

Create elegant code with Action delegate and List.ForEach method

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:46:02 GMT

Small example of how to use Action delegate to perform some action on all elements of a collection.

URL Rewriting in ASP.NET without using HTTPHandlers or ISAPI.

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 03:01:02 GMT

How to perform URL Rewriting by writing a custom HTTPModule. This technique even works on shared hosting plans.

Custom Authentication with Community Server

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:40:34 GMT

Describes how to handle cookie timeout and authentication issues with Telligent's NNTP and SSO modules.

Escape from the tyranny of the Asp.Net form

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 13:12:20 GMT

A solution to get rid of the mandatory form and the viewstate while retaining some of the goodies associated with it. Developed while struggling to have postback capability by using jQuery ajax posting.

Building a File Path with Path.Combine (.NET)

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:46:02 GMT

When using a variety of input methods to accept a file path and file name, the format of the results can vary. To avoid the problems of checking for path separator characters and adding or removing them as required, .NET provides a method to provide this.

Fixing BlogEngine HTML Editor Problem

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 16:13:25 GMT

When submitting posts the BlogEngine HTML Editor removes certain HTML tags. This post shows how a quick way to fix this problem.

The uncommon features of C#.

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 20:16:02 GMT

A quick and dirty post about the few keywords & statements that developers rarely use.

Refactoring: Replacing Enums with the Strategy Pattern

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:46:07 GMT

Here's a simple way to remove all of those ugly switch statements and enums and to buy yourself a little more flexibility and testability as an added bonus!

Implementing a jQuery-Calendar ASP.NET Control

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 20:46:02 GMT

I've posted a wrapper ASP.NET around the jQuery-calendar control from Marc Garbanski. This small client side calendar control is compact, looks nice and is very easy to use and I've added an ASP.NET wrapper around it so it can more easily be more easily used with ASP.NET applications by dragging and dropping onto a form and supporting postbacks of the SelectedDate.