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A CKEditor File Browser For ASP.NET Web Pages

2013-05-16T14:00:26+01:00

CKEditor is one of the most popular rich text editors available. Out of the box, there is no file browser to help with selecting images, but you can purchase an add-on from them - CKFinder. Alternatively, you can build your own file browser component.

Adding A Footer To The Razor WebGrid

2013-02-25T19:43:24Z

Whether you are using the Razor WebGrid in an ASP.NET Web Pages site, or an MVC application, you may well want to display tabular data at some point in which case you are likely to turn to the Razor WebGrid helper. And if you want to do that, you might also want to add a footer to the rendered table. Here are some ways that you can accomplish that task.

Razor Web Pages E-Commerce - Adding A Shopping Cart To The Bakery Template Site

2013-02-19T20:53:50Z

The ASP.NET Web Pages Bakery template site is designed as a starting point for a site that displays products. It also features an order form for customers to specify a quantity for a specific product and provide their shipping address. The site doesn't provide for multiple product selection. If you want a shopping cart for the Bakery site, you need to create it yourself. This article looks at the design considerations behind an effective shopping cart, and shows how to build one.

Consuming Feeds And Web Services In Razor Web Pages

2013-02-06T08:20:53Z

Increasing numbers of businesses are making services and data available to third parties via Web Services or feeds. Data format and protocols can vary significantly across service providers, so here is a look at how to manage the consumption of a number of popular formats delivered through REST and SOAP services within a web site built using the ASP.NET Web Pages framework.

Practical Recursion in ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix

2013-01-22T14:56:15Z

Recursive methods are those that call themselves, and they can be applied to solve a number of common practical problems, particularly ones that involve the management and display of hierarchical data. This article explores some of those scenarios and shows how to design recursive helpers and functions that can be used in Web Pages sites.

Exporting The Razor WebGrid To Excel Using OleDb

2013-01-07T20:43:55Z

This article looks at how you can provide your users with the ability to export the contents of a Razor Web Pages WebGrid to an Excel file using OleDb.

SignalR And Knockout In ASP.NET Web Pages Using WebMatrix

2012-12-27T20:18:56Z

SignalR is a library that simplifies the creation and management of persistent connections between web servers and clients. This facilitates the development of applications that can display updates to data held on the server in real-time. Chat applications are the most obvious beneficiaries of this technology, but line-of-business applications that need to report availability to users can benefit too. Here, I look at extending the canonical SignalR chat example to incorporate a "who's typing" feature, and I also extend my previous Knockout example to use SignalR.

Exporting The Razor WebGrid To PDF Using iTextSharp

2013-03-02T21:49:18Z

This article looks at how you can provide your users with the ability to export the contents of a Razor Web Pages WebGrid to a PDF file using the popular free PDF library, iTextSharp.

Exporting The Razor WebGrid To Excel

2012-12-17T20:17:04Z

This article looks at how you can provide your users with the ability to export the contents of a Razor Web Pages WebGrid to an Excel file.

Enhancing The WebGrid With Sort Arrows

2012-12-14T19:24:51Z

The Web Pages WebGrid offers sorting capability out of the box. However, it's not always obvious to the user on which column the grid data is being sorted at any one time, nor the direction in which it is being sorted. The convention is to provide arrows in the column header to act as a clear visual cue. This article looks at a three ways in which you can enhance your grids with sorting arrows.

Inline Editing With The WebGrid

2012-12-14T20:01:47Z

Unlike the Web Forms GridView control, the Web Pages WebGrid doesn't offer anything by way of inline editing capability. This article looks at one approach to solving that requirement through the addition of a sprinkling of jQuery.

Cleaner Conditional HTML Attributes In Razor Web Pages

2012-12-14T20:29:09Z

Every so often, you will want to conditionally render HTML attributes or their values within your Razor Web Pages based on the outcome of some runtime logic. Often, the logic required to manage this can become messy and lead to unnecessary spaghetti code. This article explores a few common scenarios and provides some solutions, as well as introducing a nice new feature that was released as part of Razor v 2.0.

The SimpleMembershipProvider, Secure Passwords And The Crypto Helper

2012-09-27T13:39:23+01:00

Some people have questioned the security of the ASP.NET SimpleMembershipProvider's storage of passwords. The cause for concern seems to stem from the fact that the PasswordSalt field in the standard membership table is unused by the SimpleMembershipProvider, whereas it is used by, for example, SqlMembershipProvider. So what is the PasswordSalt field, and why should the fact that it isn't used raise an eyebrow?

HTML5 Form Helpers For WebMatrix

2012-12-14T21:15:43Z

It's an odd thing: WebMatrix 2 is lauded for its support of HTML5, but the Web Pages framework doesn't include any helpers for the new HTML5 form input types such as email or color. It's fair to say that support among browsers for the new inputs is patchy at the moment, but with barely a week flying past without a new version of one or other browser being released, it won't take long for that to change. So in the meantime, if you prefer to use helpers, you have to write your own for rendering HTML5 forms.

Cannot use a lambda expression as an argument to a dynamically dispatched operation

2012-09-18T08:08:43+01:00

Since the introduction of the Web Pages framework, ASP.NET has been making use of the dynamic type introduced in C# 4.0. Along with that comes some new error messages which at first glance don't make a lot of sense - mainly because they are unexpected. I have already looked at how dynamics do not support extension methods, and a recent question in the ASP.NET forums illustrated another way in which the dynamic type can catch you out.

Optimising ASP.NET Web Pages Sites - Bundling And Minification

2012-09-20T15:38:42+01:00

ASP.NET 4.5 saw the introduction of new features for improving the performance of web sites. Delivered within a new library called System.Web.Optimization, bundling and minification enables you to combine multiple JavaScript or CSS files into one bundle, and to minify them thereby reducing the number of HTTP requests that browsers have to make, reducing the size of the files, and improving performance of the site overall, especially over slower (read 3G) networks.

WebMatrix - jQuery Cascading Dropdown Lists

2012-12-14T21:23:14Z

I have looked at cascading dropdown lists with WebMatrix previously, but the approach I featured demonstrated the use of jQuery Templates. At the time, the jQuery Templates project looked promising, but since then, the jQuery team have decided not to take them beyond beta stage. So the reason for this article is to illustrate a more "traditional" jQuery approach to managing cascading dropdown lists when developing ASP.NET Web Pages using WebMatrix.

ASP.NET Web Pages - Creating Custom Validators

2012-08-31T14:33:38+01:00

Version 2 of the Web Pages framework includes a new validation framework. Included are a number of specific validators that cover common scenarios such as validating for presence, data type or range. It may be however, that you want to create your own custom validator to test for something that isn't covered by the existing validators, or to combine multiple tests in one composite validator. Fortunately, the Web Pages team have made the validation system extensible so that you can create your own validators.

Book Review - jQuery Mobile Web Development Essentials

2012-08-08T07:45:33+01:00

The imminent release of Visual Studio (2012) will include jQuery Mobile as part of the ASP.NET MVC 4 Mobile application template, and some enhancements to the framework to make developing for mobile devices much easier. So it was a well-timed invitation that I received from Packt Publishing to review their latest jQuery title: jQuery Mobile Web Development Essentials.

Working With Entity Framework Code First And JSON In ASP.NET Web Pages

2012-12-14T21:57:46Z

If you want to build AJAX powered rich client interfaces with ASP.NET Web Pages, you will work with JSON - a lot. You might also be attracted to the Entity Framework for your data access technology. There are some special considerations to take account of when serialising Entity Framework objects to JSON for use in Web Pages applications. This article explores some of the issues you will encounter through the example of a simple To Do list manager.