ASP.NET

One of ASP.NET MVC errors wasted one hour of my life today (of course, it is many times less than this season’s leader SharePoint) but this is still one hour. “The view ‘Index’ or its master could not be found. The following locations were searched” error raised suddenly and I was not able to get over it. Well, this time solution was simple.

One problem I faced when writing my example pet portal on ASP.NET MVC was Google Chrome’s request to favicon.ico that doesn’t exist. IE8 that I use (8.0.7000.0) doesn’t make these blind requests to discover that favicon.ico is not there. Solution to my problem was very simple.

About a week ago I started learning ASP.NET MVC framework. It is pretty cool entertainment for cold winter nights as I found out. Here you can find how I got started and what resources I used.

Scott Guthrie had some good news almost week ago – there is new charting component for ASP.NET available now. Component is made by Microsoft and it is free to download. This component fills one important hole in ASP.NET components gallery. We have now very powerful charting component that is highly customizable and configurable. There is also available chart control add-on for Visual Studio 2008.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data is one of those technologies I have been keeping eye on. With .Net 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is fully available. Let’s see how it works and how we can use it.

What is the difference between GridView and Repeater? This is one of the most common questions that beginners ask when they are trying to get familiar with data bound controls. Both of these controls have their own using context and I try to explain when one should use GridView and when it is okay to use Repeater.

I discovered once myself automatically writing some redirects on ASP.NET pages and I started thinking about API behind these redirects and code readability. Here is what I came out with.

In my previous GridView entry titled as GridView and Invalid CurrentPageIndex Value Exception I made an example about how to corrigate paged GridView page index before grid is bound to data. Let’s to id now .Net Framework 3.5 way.

SEO is popular topic nowadays and as ASP.NET is growing its popularity also as platform for public systems. Therefore SEO is going to be more important topic also for ASP.NET developers. The world of SEO is always in rapid change – can you imagine that last year Google published 450 updates to it’s search engine algorithms? Although the field is changing fast there are some key points that has been fundamental and unchanged this far. Let’s see what is the minimum you should do and how you can make your sites more SEO friendly on ASP.NET.

There are many developers who have faced the page index problems using GridView. Specially, if GridView supports deleting. Also one may face page index going out of range when there are multiple users managing same data. Here is my little advice about how to avoid page index problems when using GridView.

This is the first posting of Beginners section of this blog. I will put here code samples that are not advanced enough to put them elsewhere in this blog. First example shows how to filter one dropdown list based on value selected from another.

ASP.NET Futures introduced support for search engine sitemaps. This is content detection protocol introduced originally by Google and later accepted also by Microsoft and Yahoo! ASP.NET makes sitemaps generating easy for us and as a bonus their model is perfect for more complex web applications like e-commerce and e-services sites. Let’s see now what we can do.

In addition to other new and interesting things ASP.NET also brought along controllers supporting representation of hierarchical data. This posting introduces IHierarchyData and IHierarchyEnumerable interfaces we can use to create wrappers for classes representing hierarchical data of the business logic layer.

My current project required a way for exporting data to Excel. I could of course write a separate export method for every data set but in my opinion it would be a pointless waste of time. I would also like to utilise the existing functionality as much as possible – as it is, the lists going to Excel are displayed to the user in the browser.