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UPDATE: Links to the MVC site on the URL mvc.spaanjaars.com are no longer active, now that the site is live at imar.spaanjaars.com.

Just updated mvc.spaanjaars.com with a new version.

UPDATE: Links to the MVC site on the URL mvc.spaanjaars.com are no longer active, now that the site is live at imar.spaanjaars.com.

I have finally decided to rebuild this web site - imar.spaanjaars.com in ASP.NET MVC 2.

Visual Studio (2005 and later) has a nice feature to create your own templates that appear in the Add New Item dialog of a web site. This feature enables you to create new files, such as a Web Form, to your liking and then export it as a template so you can base new items on it.

In my (quite possibly very short) series on "things I discovered today in ASP.NET 4", today I am discussing disabling links in ASP.NET 4.

The cool thing about working with beta technology such as Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4 is that you discover something new every day. Today I found the Sorted Styles that enable you to define the looks of sorted columns and headers in an ASP.NET GridView control.

A while ago (actually a long while ago but I didn't have the time to post this earlier), I was approached by Amanda Myer with a question about comparing and sorting BusinessBase objects in collections that inherit BusinessCollectionBase, discussed in my article series on N-Layer design in .NET 3.5.

I am working on an application that ships with documentation in the form of a Windows Compiled Help file. To build the help file I use Sandcastle and the excellent Sandcastle Help File Builder. Building the help file is part of a continuous integration plan so the help file is always up to date.

Some of the Login controls that ship with ASP.NET, such as CreateUserWizard, ChangePassword and PasswordRecovery enable you to send e-mail to your users without writing a lot of code. You just drag and drop a control, assign a mail body template and you're pretty much done. However, as soon as your mail server requires you to use SSL (as, for example, GMail does), things become a little trickier. In this short article I'll show the code and configuration needed to send mail to servers that require SSL.

Before I launched my web site www.dotnetattributes.com in early 2009 I generated most of the content automatically using reflection and web look ups. I extracted all the various attributes from .NET assemblies using the Managed GAC API Wrappers and I extracted a lot of class details and documentation from the MSDN site using the HttpWebRequest class. One thing I hadn't automated at first and was planning to do manually using Visual Studio was generating class diagrams. However, soon after the first full import attempt I ended up with more than 1,200 attributes so manually creating the diagrams suddenly did not seem so attractive anymore.

Recently I saw a number of people (a colleague and some readers of my book Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in C# and VB) run into an ASP.NET error indicating that the "specified string is not in the form required for an e-mail address". This error is quite common and usually pops up when developers or end users are supplying a value that doesn't match the syntax rules for an e-mail address. However, in the recent cases I saw this error popped up at the moment a new MailMessage class is constructed. That means the code crashed even before it tried to assign an e-mail address to one of the To, CC, Bcc or From properties through code. So what happened?