ASP.NET

vCard is popular format for exchanging contacts. Besides e-mail clients also modern mobile phones are able to read and send contacts as vCard. This posting introduces same ideas how to implement vCard support in your applications and how to add images to vCards. (more…)

I am writing simple ASP.NET MVC system that I plan to publish with source code pretty soon. I needed some simple calendar component that doesn’t require ASP.NET server-side form to work. I found different JavaScript based calendars and only one pretty oldcalendar that was specially written for ASP.NET MVC. I updated it and here is the source and binary downloads for Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET MVC 1.0.

There is new project in CodePlex called OpenForum. With source code you get also some samples you can run on your machine. OpenForum is pretty new and simple. There are no advanced forum features and currently it is suitable for smaller forums. You can change the look of OpenForum and write your own user repositories. Let’s see how OpenForum looks like.

ASP.NET pages that use AJAX components make usually many requests to server per one page to load all required JavaScript and CSS files. Connections, like all other real time resources, are most expensive to create and keep. If we can somehow decrease the number of requests per page load then we need less server resources for same amount of users. For ASP.NET forms we can use script combining, for ASP.NET MVC applications we can use ASP.NET MVC Client-side Resource Combine.

Visual Studio 2010 has very powerful web application packaging and deployment system. When deploying your web application you create the deployment package and then publish it to web server. After configuring it is one-click action to get current version of application up to target server. Let’s see how it works.

Recently I wrote about Visual Studio 2010 and multiple web.config files support. Let’s see now how to play with web.config transformation so we can use one configuration on development environment and the other for production environment.

Today I found something weird. I tried to add some new views to my ASP.NET MVC solution but there were no ASP.NET MVC items in new items dialog. All the other ASP.NET MVC projects had no problem like this. Solution is simple.

Visual Studio 2010 has support for multiple web.config files. It is one feature of new web application packaging and deployment system. We can create now separate web.config files for each configuration we have for application.

Client-side ID-s of ASP.NET controls have been problem for a long time. They are hard to predict and guess. Fool-proof method that uses JavaScript block that defines client-side ID-s as variable values is not very elegant. Today’s web applications use client-size scripting heavily and now ASP.NET 4.0 provides us with elegant features to handle client-size ID-s of controls to make client-side scripting easier for us. Let’s see quick example.

Another new SEO feature that ASP.NET 4.0 introduces is support for meta description and keywords. I think these are the most abused SEO features ever and search engines are very careful when considering these meta tags but I am very sure that there are still engines that respect those tags and that’s what makes these new features very useful.