After about 7 years, Microsoft have decided to re-activate WebMatrix aka “The Matrix” :-)

WebMatrix is everything you need to build Web sites using Windows. It includes IIS Developer Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET and SQL Server Compact (an embedded database). It streamlines Web site development and makes it easy to start Web sites from popular open-source apps. The skills and code you develop with WebMatrix transition seamlessly to Visual Studio and SQL Server.

You can download the beta here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/

The WebMatrix is a smaller / lighter product that the Express product series, which of course still are available for download. If you’re ‘lazy’ you can use the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 for easy setup / install.

Rowland O’Connor has taken the time to update the ‘ASPX Edit’ plug-in to work with Visual Studio 2010 – you can download it here:

http://www.rowlandoconnor.com/2010/04/16/aspx-edit-add-in-for-visual-studio-2010/

Usage / install info is found here:

http://ardentdev.com/aspxedithelper/

.. thanks to Jacob for the update :-)

I’m using AutoComplete to enhance the functionality of a TextBox and make it act like the below image, where the user enters the customer accountnumber, which is then displayed together with their name (the blurry stuff in the picture :-)

As I have to use this functionality on many pages, I needed it to be a UserControl. I wanted to use a PageMethod (instead of a Web Service) to populate the AutoCompleteExtender, but since the page method must reside on the page (in the .aspx.cs file, it does not work if it’s placed in the .ascx.cs file – dammit MS), I wanted to limit the code needed on the .aspx.cs page to a bare minimum. The number of entries displayed in the AutoComplete DropDown list had to be limited, but the user need to know how many matches the prefix entered.

The Page Method (ServiceMethod) of the AutoCompleteExtender requires a string[] to work and I wanted the Page Method to contain as little code as possible. I ended up with this:

[System.Web.Services.WebMethodAttribute(), 
System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptMethodAttribute()]
public static string[] GetDataCustomerAccountNo(string prefixText, 
                                                int count, string contextKey)
{
   CustomerRepository customerRepository = new CustomerRepository();
   return customerRepository.GetCustomerAccountNumbersByPrefix(prefixText);
}

The GetCustomerAccountNumbersByPrefix looks like this:

/// <summary>
/// Retrieves all AccountNumbers which match prefix (AutoComplete)
/// </summary>
/// <param name="prefix">Prefix to match</param>
public string[] GetCustomerAccountNumbersByPrefix(string prefix)
{
    var customers = from e in db.Customers
            where e.AccountNumber.StartsWith(prefix)
            orderby e.AccountNumber
            select e;

    int count = customers.Count();
    string[] result = customers.Take(21).Select(x => x.AccountNumber + " – " 

                                         + x.NameAlias).ToArray<string>();

    if (result.Count() > 20)
    {
       result[20] = ">> antal: " + count.ToString();
    }

    return result;
}

If the ResultSet contains more than 20 rows I want to provide information about this to the user, displaying the total number of rows, which is why I do a Count() before Take()

I use .Select() to transform the properties AccountNumber and NameAlias into a single string, which is then returned as a string[] using ToArray(), in the process I limit the number of rows to a maximum of 21 using Take()

And all there’s left to do is to optionally change the 21th entry to show the total number of rows information. As the string[] is fixed it’s much easier simply to take out an extra row - Take(21) – and use this last row to show the information.

Hope the above example is useful to others who might want to use the AutoCompleteExtender in a UserControls only to find out that the PageMethod actually DO have to reside in the .aspx.cs file.

I have a Order->OrderLine table setup where I need to check if any “duplicate” orders exists. In order to check this I need to be able to select select various columns *not* contained in the group (key) – playing around in LinqPad I quickly came up with this query:

from line in AxSaleLines
where line.QuantityRemaining > 0
group line by new {line.AxSale.AccountNumber, line.ItemNumber, 

ProdName = line.Product.Name, ProdFormat = line.Product.ProductFormat.Name}
into myGroup
where myGroup.Count() > 1
from s in AxSaleLines
where s.ItemNumber == myGroup.Key.ItemNumber && 

      s.AxSale.AccountNumber == myGroup.Key.AccountNumber
select new { s.AxSale.SalesId, s.AxSale.AccountNumber, 

             CustomerName = s.AxSale.Customer.Name, s.ItemNumber, 

             ProductName = s.Product.Name, s.Product.ProductFormatName, 

             s.Quantity, s.AxSale.SalesOrigin}

When bound to a grid, I can then show this to the user:

If you’re using a lot of UserControls or a control package, you’re probably finding yourself adding tons of <%@ Register… %> tags to your .aspx pages.

Phil Haack has an excellent post about how to avoid all this mess and put your assembly references into the Web.Config file. Go check it out!

Jacob mentioned a nice little free Add-In for VS2005/2008 yesterday while we we’re chatting on Messenger :-)

Short description: “The ASPX Edit Helper is an add-in for Visual Studio 2005 for those who like to type ASPX markup themselves instead of using the visual designer"

Usage:

Type <asp:Label and press Enter. The add-in will replace it with:

<asp:Label runat=”server” id=”asp_Label2943″ />

The add-in will also highlight the ID attribute value so you can immediately type a new ID for the control.

Very handy, thanks to Jacob for mentioning this – free download at: http://www.ardentdev.com/aspxedithelper

Recently installed Windows 7 which is really nice. IE8 is the default OS browser and typical the one I use as my “default development browser”, which means it is not my default browser (Firefox is), but it’s the browser that Visual Studio opens when I do a “View page in browser”.

I have multiple sites which use ASP.NET Membership (and hence use session cookies to keep me logged in). I typical change my ‘hosts’ file to something like this below, and of course set the ‘binding’ (host header) in IIS7 to match:

127.0.0.1    site1
127.0.0.1    site2
127.0.0.1    site3

(names have been changed to protect the clients :-)

However when I fired up VS2008 and tried to log into one of my sites which uses membership, I simply could not log in. After having done some HTTP Cookie debugging I realized that IE8 did not store my cookie. A fact that was proven correct as the same site worked fine i both Firefox and Chrome.

Surfing the net I found a that this is a “security feature” of IE8 – the thing is that if you have e.g.

Site: http://mha
Cookie domain: mha

should work, but if you do

Site: http://mha
Cookie domain: 127.0.0.1

..then it won't work, because IE sees that as security risk as 127.0.0.1 does
not match the requested hostname.

Microsoft recommend that you should always name internal servers with
hostnames that are FQDNs, such as mha.local - This also helps to mitigate
problems such as DNS failures and use of suffix handling - eg. if the DNS
automatic suffix for a machine on your network is .com, and you name a
server mha, a request to http://mha could end up requesting http://mha.com
because of the automatic suffix handling.

So to get this to work you need to stop using single words for internal site
URLs and start using e.g. localhost.mha

So .. in order to make IE8 accept cookies from internal sites running on localhost / IIS7, and is mapped in your ‘hosts’ file we need to do a couple of thing:

1) Make sure you’re using a full qualified hostname, e.g. localhost.aspnethotelV25

2) In IIS7 make sure you’ve set up your hostname correctly in binding:

3)  In your ‘hosts’ file, make a matching entry:

# --- IIS7 / localhost ---
127.0.0.1    localhost.aspnethotelV25

4)  In IE8 make sure to add your site to always allow cookies:

• Go to Tools –> Internet Options
• Click ‘Privacy’
• Click ‘Sites’
• In Address of website, enter your host header name
• Click ‘Allow’

That’s it!! – Finally your site, running on your own localhost / IIS7 which is using a different name that localhost or 127.0.0.1 is now able to accept cookie (because we all know that cookies server up from localhost is a big security risk!?! :-)

Enjoy the wonders of Internet Explorer v8 (or simply use Firefox, Chrome or any other browser which just work out-of-the-box)

Setting up my VS2010 Beta 1 environment and a website running against IIS 7, I encountered this error:

Could not load file or assembly 'Name' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

After a bit of research it turns out that this is caused by the fact that I’m running a 64bit version of Vista, my DLL’s is compiled to x86 .. and the IIS applicationpool does not allow execution of 32bit (x86) code!!

My DLL was (by default) compiled to x86 (32 bit) code by VS2010:

.. and my ASP.NET 4.0 (integrated mode) ApplicationPool did not allow 32bit code to execute:

(Note that in the above screenshot I’ve turned on the ability to run 32bit code within the ApplicationPool)

I could of course have changed the DLL to compile x64 code instead.

Rick Strahl has put together a real nice blog post about Creating a Data Driven ASP.NET Localization Resource Provider and Editor, complete with free code sample and everything :-)

It’s part of his West Wind Web & Ajax Toolkit for ASP.NET which is free for personal and non-commercial use.

If you planning to use a data driven Localization resource provider then you should definitely take a look at Ricks article.

REL (René) showed me a very interesting link the other day that I think I’ll share (as some of you probably already have guessed, I sometime uses this blogs as a means of remembering great articles/links :-)

Anyway here’s the link, which shows how to maintain debug information (and get information about the exact line of code that caused the exception) while running in release mode (this is really awesome):

http://www.rohland.co.za/index.php/2009/02/11/maintain-debug-information-while-in-release-mode/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8cw0bt21(VS.80).aspx