Migrating to ASP.NET 2 - Part 1 - Introduction

Published 19 years ago

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.

Enhancing Design-Time Support in your Controls

Published 20 years ago

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.

How Do I Insert 'Now Playing' Info to my Posts on P2P?

Published 20 years ago

Over the past few weeks, I received numerous e-mails from P2P contributors asking me how I was able to insert information in my signature at the Wrox P2P forum about the music I am listening to when I make the post. Some wondered if I had nothing to do at all, and had all the time in the world to insert this information manually. Others already had the idea I had automated this process and were interested in the technical solution of this, rather useless, feature.

In this article I'll explain where I got the idea for this automated signature, what techniques and concepts were involved, and where I found the information required to build the solution.

Logging Errors to the Event Log in ASP.NET Applications

Published 20 years ago

Let's face it. We're not living in a perfect world. I am not a perfect programmer, and the same probably applies to you (otherwise you would be stinkin' rich, laying on the beach somewhere drinking a Bacardi and Coke, instead of reading this article).

Because we aren't perfect, we know we are going to run into errors in the applications we write sooner or later. This article will explain how you can catch these errors in your ASP.NET applications and log them to the Windows Event log, so it's easy to review them later. The article focuses on ASP.NET, but the principle applies to other .NET applications as well.

Howto Create a Hit Counter Using a Database in ASP.NET 1.x with VB.NET

Published 20 years ago

If you have a live Web site on the World Wide Web, you may be interested in how many people are visiting your site. You can of course analyze the log files of your Web server but that information is usually difficult to read. The log files contain information for each and every request a visitor has made to your site, including resources like images, Flash movies and so on. This makes it near impossible to extract information about individual users. It would be a lot easier if you could count the number of individual users that have visited you since you started your site. It would also be useful if you could see the number of users that are currently browsing your site.

This article will show you how to accomplish these two tasks by storing the hit counters in shared variables in the Global class and in a database using code in the Global.asax file. The counters in the shared variables are used to display them on a page in your Web site; either as a counter so your visitors can see it as well, or somewhere on a page in your Admin section, so only you have access to them. By writing the counters to a database you can maintain their value even when you restart the Web server, while you still have a fast and scalable solution.

This article extends the ideas from two previous articles where the values of the counters were just stored in static variables in the Global class and in a text file.

There are also Classic ASP and ASP.NET C# versions of this article available.

Howto send E-mail from an ASP page

Published 20 years ago

Note: this is a very old article targeting Classic ASP. To see how to send email from modern-world ASP.NET core applications, check out the article Improving your ASP.NET Core site's e-mailing capabilities.

This article will show you how simple it can be to send an e-mail from an ASP page. With just a few lines of code, you can add mail sending capabilities to your ASP page in your Web site. Notice that I put the focus on can be; depending on your network setup, this approach may be very easy, or it may require you to setup or configure your network for this code to work. See the reference section at the end of this document for more information.

Searching TheSoccerSite With Dreamweaver MX

Published 20 years ago

More and more Web sites these days are database-driven. That means that most of the content, customer data, site statistics and maybe even information used for the navigation menu or other layout purposes is stored in a database.

With all that data stored in a database, you also need to provide a means to let your users search for it in the database. Since this information is not file based, you can no longer use tools like Index Server that index the contents of physical files. Instead, you'll need to code the query logic yourself. For each database-driven application, the search facility will be different, because usually your back-end database and the front-end requirements are different. However, part of code can easily be reused in other projects. In this article, I will focus on building a search facility for TheSoccerSite, a database-driven soccer fan site that was created in section 2 of the books Beginning Dreamweaver MX and Beginning Dreamweaver MX 2004. Although the implementation will be specific for the Soccer Site project, you'll get enough background to successfully implement a search facility on your own Web site.

Howto Create a Hit Counter Using a Database in ASP.NET 1.x with C#

Published 20 years ago

If you have a live Web site on the World Wide Web, you may be interested in how many people are visiting your site. You can of course analyze the log files of your Web server but that information is usually difficult to read. The log files contain information for each and every request a visitor has made to your site, including resources like images, Flash movies and so on. This makes it near impossible to extract information about individual users. It would be a lot easier if you could count the number of individual users that have visited you since you started your site. It would also be useful if you could see the number of users that are currently browsing your site.

This article will show you how to accomplish these two tasks by storing the hit counters in shared variables in the Global class and in a database using code in the Global.asax file. The counters in the shared variables are used to display them on a page in your Web site; either as a counter so your visitors can see it as well, or somewhere on a page in your Admin section, so only you have access to them. By writing the counters to a database you can maintain their value even when you restart the Web server, while you still have a fast and scalable solution.

This article extends the ideas from two previous articles where the values of the counters were just stored in static variables in the Global class and in a text file.

There are also Classic ASP and VB.NET versions of this article available.

Howto Create a Hit Counter Using a Text File in ASP.NET 1.x

Published 20 years ago

If you have a live Web site on the World Wide Web, you may be interested in how many people are visiting your site. You can of course analyze the log files of your Web server but that information is usually difficult to read. The log files contain information for each and every request a visitor has made to your site, including resources like images, Flash movies and so on. This makes it near impossible to extract information about individual users. It would be a lot easier if you could count the number of individual users that have visited you since you started your site. It would also be useful if you could see the number of users that are currently browsing your site.

This article will show you how to accomplish these two tasks by storing the hit counters in static variables in the Global class and in a text file using code in the Global.asax file. This article extends the ideas from a previous article where the values of the counters were just stored in static variables. By writing the counters to a file you can maintain their values, even when you restart the Web server.

There is also a Classic ASP version of this article available.

Howto Create a Hit Counter Using the Global.asax File in ASP.NET 1.x

Published 20 years ago

If you have a live Web site on the World Wide Web, you may be interested in how many people are visiting your site. You can of course analyze the log files of your Web server but that information is usually difficult to read. The log files contain information for each and every request a visitor has made to your site, including resources like images, Flash movies and so on. This makes it near impossible to extract information about individual users. It would be a lot easier if you could count the number of individual users that have visited you since you started your site. It would also be useful if you could see the number of users that are currently browsing your site.

This article will show you how to accomplish these two tasks by storing the hit counters in static variables using code in the Global.asax file. The disadvantage of this method is that this information is lost when you restart the Web server. Two other articles on this site demonstrate how to store this information in a text file and in a database, so the value for the counter will be preserved when you restart your Web server.

There is also a Classic ASP version of this article available