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As a web developer and consultant, I am often involved in the upgrade or redesign process of existing web sites. Clients have had a site for a couple of years, and are now ready for something bigger, better or more feature rich. They approach the company I work for (Design IT) for a new web site. Upgrading (or even maintaining) these sites is often not an easy task, especially when they have been built with Dreamweaver and its Templates and Library features.

While in itself these features can be very useful, and allow you to create a consistent looking web site with little work, these features often make it hard to upgrade the web site. In this short article, I show you the common pitfalls with templates and library items, and show you a better alternative. While this article uses ASP for any sample code, the concepts also apply to other programming languages and web servers that support server side includes.

Update!! 05/03/2006
A while ago, Microsoft released the full source of the Built-in ASP.NET 2.0 Providers. Downloading the source is highly recommended if you want to create your own (or customize existing) providers. You can find more detail here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/04/13/442772.aspx.

This is the fourth part of a (long running) article series about migrating a .NET 1.x Web site to ASP.NET 2. This installment focuses on custom providers for the Membership and Role management features found in the .NET Framework. While out of the box these features make it very easy to implement security in a new site you build, you can't use them directly in existing web sites that already implemented a custom security mechanism.

This is the third part of a (long running) article series about migrating a .NET 1.1 Web site to ASP.NET 2.0. This installment focuses on the way I migrated my business logic, content pages and user controls.

You may be aware of the new ASP.NET 2.0 Profile feature that allows you to store and retrieve information for the currently logged on user. This Profile feature makes it extremely simple to store user specific information, like a user's address, phone number, or site preferences. (Note: if you're not familiar with ASP.NET 2.0 Profiles check out the section Storing User Profiles in the ASP.NET Quick starts).

But what if you want to access the Profiles data for another user? For example, what if you want to allow a site administrator to change the personal data of all users in your site? The trick to make this possible is to use the ProfileCommon class, which inherits from ProfileBase. This article shows you how you can use this class to access the Profile data for arbitrary users.

You may be aware of the new ASP.NET 2.0 Profile feature that allows you to store and retrieve information for the currently logged on user. This Profile feature makes it extremely simple to store user specific information, like a user's address, phone number, or site preferences. (Note: if you're not familiar with ASP.NET 2.0 Profiles check out the section Storing User Profiles in the ASP.NET Quick starts).

But what if you want to access the Profiles data for another user? For example, what if you want to allow a site administrator to change the personal data of all users in your site? The trick to make this possible is to use the ProfileCommon class, which inherits from ProfileBase. This article shows you how you can use this class to access the Profile data for arbitrary users.

This is the second part of a (long running) article series about migrating a .NET 1.x Web site to ASP.NET 2. This installment focuses on the general setup of the new web site and the Master Page I am going to use.

This is the first part of a (long running) article series about migrating a .NET 1.x Web site to ASP.NET 2. I'll show you how to take an existing site, and upgrade it to ASP.NET 2. As an example, I'll be using my own web site, Imar.Spaanjaars.Com, show you how I have designed and implemented the currently existing features, and how they can be upgraded to take advantage of the new ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. I won't be describing each and every feature in great detail, but instead focus on general concepts and techniques, and provide links to other articles with more in-depth information.

Each article starts with a little background about one of the new ASP.NET 2 features, like Master Pages, the new Login controls, the Provider Model, Skins, and so on. Next, I'll discuss how I implemented similar behavior in my current site, or how I managed to live without it. Then I'll explain how the new features work and how you can use it in your ASP applications. At the end of the article, I'll show you how I implemented the feature in my own site.

Server controls allow a page developer to drag and drop a page together in no to time. Most of these controls come "out of the box" with ASP.NET like the TextBox, the Label, the DataGrid and many other controls. Changing the appearance and behavior of these controls is often as easy as visually setting a few properties in the properties grid for your design application, like Visual Studio .NET or the Web Matrix.. To make this process even easier, many properties can be expanded and collapsed in the property grid. By collapsing a property like the Font style, you end up with a shorter and much cleaner property list, making it easier to locate and change your properties.

Adding these collapsible properties to your own server controls is possible as well. This article will guide you through the process of creating a simple server control that exposes a collapsible property in the property grid of visual designers like Visual Studio.NET or the Web Matrix.