Ice Coffee

Top Ten New and Exciting Features in ASP.NET 2.0

2005-05-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

ASP.NET 1.0 was a revolutionary advance in developing Web Applications. With its fully complied, highly extensible Server-Side control model, it was one of the best applications of Microsoft’s .NET runtime. It solved many of the issues plaguing ASP developers, and kept the development-centric philosophy that made ASP such a huge hit amongst the web-client community.

But problems remained with the ASP.NET 1.0 release, not an entirely unexpected situation given it was, after all, a 1.0 product. Developers found themselves writing a lot more code than they thought was good, and it was more difficult than it should have been to keep presentation and business logic well-partitioned and separate.

With ASP.NET 2.0, the ASP.NET team has continued to lead the way in making developer’s daily lives more enjoyable.

Read More.

Top 30 Features of SQL Server 2005

2005-05-11T20:53:00.000-07:00

Discover how the next version of SQL Server 2005 will benefit you with the new and enhanced abilities and features described on this page.

Read More. Yukon Homepage

Difference Between the Internet and the World Wide Web

2005-05-08T06:53:00.000-07:00

Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web (a.k.a. the Web) interchangeably, but in fact the two terms are not synonymous. The Internet and the Web are two separate but related things.
The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.

The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet. The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the the Web to share information. The Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape, to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Web documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and video.

The Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the Internet. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.

What is the difference between http:// and http://www. ?

2005-05-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

They are just different domain names. Many online site owners register both the domain names, for example http://cnn.com and http:// www.cnn.com. They point to the same site. However, there are also millions of sites where the non-www domain names are not registered.
If does not contain one of the dot-names such as ".com" or ".org", then the name is resolved within your LAN. So it is likely to point to a web site in the Intranet of your company.

Visual Web Developer Express Edition 2005

2005-04-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

Microsoft is pleased to announce Visual Web Developer Express Edition 2005 Beta 1, a lightweight, easy to learn development tool focused exclusively on Web development. Inside you will find everything you need to begin building exciting, dynamic Web applications with ASP.NET 2.0.
Click here for more information and to get the Beta! ..

10 ways to make your code more testable.

2005-03-10T20:02:00.000-08:00

You know you have to write unit tests. You have the tools, and your team is committed to the idea. Somehow, though, despite your best intentions, the tests just never get written. Or you write them, but never run them. They always fail anyway. For one reason or another, your project is resisting the will of the unit test. Usually, this means that your code needs a good solid refactoring, to make it more accepting of the way of the test.

Facts discussed include.
Use Interfaces,Define a base test class,Make everything return a value,Separate data access from business logic,Make use of configuration,Make Your Classes Do Only One Thing...

Read More

New Security Exception Handling in Whidbey

2005-03-09T20:33:00.000-08:00

Security exceptions are one of the harder exceptions to debug, primarily due to the lack of useful information. In Whidbey, the System.Security.SecurityException has been enhanced to include information that can be used to determine not only the cause of the failure but which method was being called, what zone the code was executing in, and specifically which assembly caused the failure.

Since most developers build and unit test their code in a fully trusted environment, many security errors go unnoticed until the code is deployed into a testing or production environment. This makes having accurate and complete security exception information very important and has been a major failing of the security exception handling in .NET versions 1.0 and 1.1. Whidbey will address this by adding the following information to the security exception type.

Action - the SecurityAction that failed the security check
Demanded - the permission, permission set, or permission sets that were demanded and triggered the exception
DenySetInstance - if a Deny stack frame caused the security exception to fail, then this property will contain that set, otherwise it will be null.
FailedAssemblyInfo - AssemblyName of the assembly that caused the security check to fail
FirstPermissionThatFailed - the first permission in failing PermissionSet (or PermissionSetCollection) that did not pass the security check
Method - the method that the failed assembly was in when it encountered the security check that triggered the exception. If a PermitOnly or Deny stack frame failed, this will contain the method that put the PermitOnly or Deny frame on the stack.
PermitOnlySetInstance - if the stack frame that caused that caused the security exception had a PermitOnly permission set, this property will contain it, otherwise it will be null
Url - URL of the assembly that failed the security check
Zone - Zone of the assembly that failed the security check.

Registering Arrays In Client Side.

2005-03-08T19:19:00.000-08:00

RegisterArrayDeclaration(arrayName, arrayValue)
If you need to create a client-side JavaScript Array object with some set values, use this method to add a value to a specific array. For example, when using validation controls in an ASP.NET Web page, an Array object (Page_Validators) is built that contains references to the set of validation controls on the page. When the form is submitted, this array is enumerated to check if the various validation controls are valid or not.

To add the values 1, 2, and 3 to a client-side Array object named FavoriteNumbers, you'd use the following server-side code:

RegisterArrayDeclaration("FavoriteNumbers", "1")
RegisterArrayDeclaration("FavoriteNumbers", "2")
RegisterArrayDeclaration("FavoriteNumbers", "3")

This code would emit the following client-side script:

<script language="javascript">

</script>

Notice that each array value passed in must be a string; however, the client-side script rendered sets
the values of the Array object as the contents of the string. That is, if you wanted to create an Array with the string values "Scott" and "Jisun", you'd use:

RegisterArrayDeclaration("FavoriteFolks", "'Scott'")
RegisterArrayDeclaration("FavoriteFolks ", "'Jisun'")

Notice that the second input parameters are strings that contain 'Scott' and 'Jisun'—text delimited by a single apostrophe. This would render the following client-side script:

<script language="javascript">

</script>

Microsoft - MSDN2

2004-09-19T20:36:00.000-07:00

Microsoft releases sneak peek at MSDN2

Microsoft, who for years has heard reams of feedback and complaints about MSDN, has announced the release of the complete revamp of MSDN, dubbed "MSDN2". Of principal note is the new URL format, of the form "http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/System.IO.Compression.GZipStream", which promise to be stable now and forevermore.

Authentication & Access Control tool for ASP.NET

2004-09-19T13:29:00.000-07:00

MS Releases Authentication & Access Control tool for ASP.NET

Microsoft has released a new tool to help identify authentication and access control issues in ASP.NET for Web sites, FTP sites, virtual directories, Web directories, and files. This tool not only will help to identify current issues but can be used to monitor authentication failures as they happen.By running the diagnostics tool, the user can see how the combination of configuration and IIS permissions are applied which caused the authentication failure. The tool gives detailed analysis of the current security configurations including directory permissions, IIS settings, and user roles.Using the monitoring tool, errors in authentication can be passively logged and fixed later.You can download the various versions of the tool here:

x86
IA64
AMD64

OraDirect .NET Data Provider 2.40 released!

2004-09-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

Core Lab recently released new 2.40 version of OraDirect .NET, 100% managed .NET data provider for direct access to Oracle server for .NET Framework. In the new version performance was greatly increased,http://crlab.com/oranet/perform.html. Features of the new version: -new component OracleDataTable to provide functionality to retrieve and manipulate data from Oracle server, - new methods for asynchronous working, - paginal access, - parameter editor extended for Array and Table datatypes and others.

Read More

Determining if a project should move to .NET.

2004-09-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

Migrating to .NET is a common phrase, however, the word migration is simply a security blanket for the management. I guess it conjures ideas that a project can just slip into the .NET framework and Voila...you're done. In most cases, migration isn't a viable or useful option without some work.

How do you determine if a current project should be moved to .NET?
When should you consider J2EE?
Under what conditions would you decide not to move to .NET or J2EE?

Read More

Adding Variables To CSS

2004-09-16T02:30:00.000-07:00

Even though the spec defines CSS as a style sheet language, this language is missing one of the essential features: variables. Every time I've seen people in newsgroups ask how to implement variables in CSS a typical advice was to build the style sheet on the server. Luckily, it is easy to do in ASP.NET with the help of HTTP Handlers.

Add Variables