All FAQs

Back in 2004, I wrote an article about making a full table row clickable using JavaScript, so you could click anywhere in the table row to browse to a new page. That solution used quite a bit of in-line JavaScript to accomplish that task which adds to the size and complexity of the page. Since then, the JavaScript landscape has changed quite a bit with the introduction of JavaScript libraries such as Prototype and jQuery. Because my initial article is in the top 10 results for "full row select javascript" on Google, I figured it made sense to write a new, cleaner and more modern version of it using one of those libraries: jQuery.

I have been trying to install Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008 on a Virtual PC for a presentation I'll be giving in a couple of weeks. I must say, the installation process is not as easy as you'd hope. If you follow the installation guide to the letter there's a fair chance you can get things up and running on your first attempt to install TFS. If you can't make it work, there are many useful posts on internet forums on TFS that can help you out. However, in my case I wasn't having so much luck....

In a previous article I showed you how to use the ASP.NET 2.0 DefaultFocus and DefaultButton features inside a Master Page. You saw how you could use the UniqueID of a control to pass the right control ID to the WebForm_AutoFocus JavaScript method. In this short article, I'll show you how you can use another client side script method to dynamically switch the DefaultButton at run-time.

You may be aware of the new DefaultButton and DefaultFocus properties that a few ASP.NET 2.0 controls, including the HtmlForm have. These properties allow you to determine which button gets "clicked" when you hit enter on the page, and which form control gets the focus when the page loads. (If you're not familiar with them, check out this MSDN help file) But how do you use this feature in a page based on a Master Page?

Today I was experiencing unexpected 404 "The resource cannot be found" errors when working with Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition beta 2 in combination with the ASP.NET Development Server. No matter what I tried, and what file I tried to open, I kept getting the same error.

When you try to create a new project in Visual Studio .NET 2003 on a network drive, you might get the following error:

You get this error because by default .NET framework does not fully trust network locations. It's easy, however, to grant this trust to your projects, or your entire Visual Studio Projects folder.

If you use .NET Data Binding to bind data from a data source (like a DataSet) to a control (like a DataGrid or Repeater) you often want to know if the control contains any rows. You can then use this knowledge to, for example, hide the entire DataGrid and display a message with the text "No records found" instead. You can easily accomplish this with a DataSet, because you can retrieve the number of items in the DataSet using something like myDataSet.Tables[0].Rows.Count. But what if you use a DataReader like the SqlDataReader? This class does not expose a count property.... Fortunately, there is a way to work around this.

Update: 06/11/2006
Due to a number of requests I received, I have added a VB version of the code example in this article

In many applications, it's common practice to use a client side dialog, like a message box, to ask the user for confirmation or display a message. For example, if you allow a user to delete, say, an article on your site, you better ask if they are sure they want to delete the item. Many people know they can add a confirmation box to standard HTML or classic ASP pages. However, the same trick is less well known for ASPX pages, but just as possible and easy to implement. This FAQ will show you a few different scenario's for adding a confirmation dialog to your ASPX pages.

If you use any ADO constant, like adOpenForwardOnly etc, ASP has to know what adOpenForwardOnly really means. There are a couple of ways to tell ASP where to look for these constants.