Zeeshan Umar's .Net Blog

How to dynamically change connection string in web.config

2011-12-05T02:43:00.000-08:00

Most of people wonder how they can dynamically change the contents of web.config file. To simplify things I have created couple of functions through which you can change the contents of web.config file. Here is the code to change the contents of web.config file:- /// <summary>/// Updates the setting./// </summary>/// <param name="key">The key.</param>/// <param name="value">The value.</param>

Unable to find the requested .Net Framework Data Provider. It may not be installed

2011-11-03T22:05:00.000-07:00

Hi guys, I was on my holidays and enjoying something different so I was away for some time. However right now I am back and working on a Sliver light project. In that project I found an interesting situation which I would like to share with you. I was using Enterprise Library 5.0 for my connection string and I was using Oracle.DataAccess for my connection. Here was the line on which I was

How to create Tag Cloud, Word Cloud or Weighted List

2011-09-07T04:10:00.000-07:00

Tag Cloud, Word Cloud or Weighted List is the visual representation of keywords/tags on websites that shows the importance of keyword/tag. I am sharing a simple code to generate a Tag Could. You can download whole code from this location. First I have created list of Tags. You can use database to fetch the tags and pass them to this list:- //Creating a list of TagsList<string> lst = new List<

Improve ASP.Net Performance by effective utilitzation of String

2011-08-08T05:02:00.000-07:00

Many people ask me that how they can improve their website's performance? There are many ways through which you can improve the performance of your website but today, I will discuss the performance improvement with Strings. In my opinion String is the most frequently used data type compared to other data types available. But there is a big problem with string, it is immutable. An immutable

Drag and Drop in Siliverlight using Mouse

2011-08-04T04:33:00.000-07:00

Recently I started working with Silverlight. It is really a wonderful tool from Microsoft and I am too excited about it. It gives developer the power to create impressive looking user interface. In this tutorial I will focus on drag and drop functionality in Silverlight using mouse. You can download complete source code from SilverLightMouseEvents.zip. First create a new Silverlight Application

How to print contents of Div only

2011-07-12T08:11:00.000-07:00

Generally we do not want to create complex report and our clients are not interested in purchasing expensive reporting tools then we can generate simple HTML based reports for them. You just have to place your report inside a< div>... < / div> and you can easily print that. Here is a sample through which you can easily print contents of specified div only:- <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD

Article of the Day, XML Serilization Tutorial

2011-07-04T03:42:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, Jul 02, 2011, my article on 'XML Serialization Tutorial' was selected as 'Article of the Day' at http://www.asp.net. I also recommend to all of readers to do share useful articles on http://www.asp.net/community. Whenever you found an article which is interesting and can be useful for others.

How to get the week number of date

2011-06-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

Recently I faced a problem in my project that I have 52 images and I have to display images based on the week of year. So as a solution I created images with image name like image1.jpg,image2.jpg and so on. And created a small function which returns the week of year. Here is the code through which I calculated the week of year after searching it on net for a while:- /// <summary>/// Gets the week

Creating Reports in Excel 2007 using EPPlus (Header, Footer, Comments, Image, Formatting, Shape and Formula)

2011-06-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

IntroductionEPPlus is really a powerful tool to generate excel based reports on server side and it is becoming my favorite tool as I am getting more experienced with it. Previously I wrote a post about Creating advanced Excel 2007 Reports on Server. This post is update on the last post and I am sharing more advanced feature of EP Plus. Code which I used in this post can be downloaded from this

How to prevent cache issue with Images, CSS and Java scripts, a better aproach

2011-05-31T02:57:00.000-07:00

Generally when we update images, CSS or java script (.js) files on server, browser still shows old files. This is because in first request, browser download all images, CSS and .js files. But on subsequent requests, browser load images, CSS and .js files from its cache. Here is the solution which you might found on most of blogs i.e. add a DateTime.Now.Ticks as parameter after file name like this

XML Serilization Tutorial

2011-05-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

Introduction Many people ask that how XML serialization work, how can we serialize our data to permanent storage. My objective is to save and load data in XML and avoid the complexity of DOM (Document Object Model). Also I want to drive a generalized mechanism which can be used in multiple projects without modification. In this tutorial I am considering a case of Simple Invoice System. I will

How to create a single border table with help of CSS

2011-05-25T04:23:00.000-07:00

When I was new with CSS, I found it very difficult to create a single bordered excel like tables. Most of the time my tables look like this:- So I learned a trick through which I can get a smooth 1px border quite easily. Here is the CSS which I use to create good looking tables. <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title></title> <style type="text/css">

Lots of Free Images and Icons with Visual Studio 2008 Image Library

2011-04-25T05:09:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has shipped a great image and icon library with Visual Studio 2008. This library is available at following location:- C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\VS2008ImageLibrary\1033\VS2008ImageLibrary.zip Here is what is inside that zip file:- You can use that icon free of cost in any of your projects. But there is one note which I found in extracted folder. Here is the

How to restart your web application

2011-04-19T05:26:00.000-07:00

Generally we all use cache to improve our website's performance. Caching is really useful when we are frequently displaying data which rarely requires changes. But, sometime client request an immediate change in cache entries and we have no option to manually run IISReset or change the contents of web.config file to clear all the cache. In below code, I am sharing different approaches which can

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

2011-03-16T00:55:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has released long awaited service pack 1 for Visual Studio 2010. You can download this from here. This Service Pack includes number of feature enhancements along with the bug fixes. Major enhancement for me is the HTML 5 support and IntelliTrace (formally known as Historical Debugger) for SharePoint. Here are some of the major enhancements:- General Many Bug Fixes Help Viewer 1.1

How to implement Cookieless Session in ASP. Net

2011-03-11T05:00:00.000-08:00

By default ASP.Net relies on cookies to store session id. Cookies are actually a text data which is stored in browser. Generally cookies are not considered a safe way to store information. Also there is a chance that browser have disabled the cookies and in that case our application wont work on that browser. To avoid such situation, we can use Cookieless session. To implement that you just

How to Clear all elements from Cache

2011-03-10T01:22:00.000-08:00

There are many situations when we want to clear contents of the cache in our ASP. Net application. Here is a quick and dirty way to remove all the contents from our cache. /// <summary> /// Clears all the data from Cache /// </summary> public void ClearCache() { try { List<string> keyList = new List<string>();

Understanding Asp.net Cache Sliding Expiration and Absolute Expiration

2011-03-04T14:43:00.000-08:00

Asp .Net provides two different ways to expire the cache on the basis of time. Here are two aproaches:- Sliding Expiration Absolute Expiration 1. Absolute Expiration Absolute expiration means that your data will be removed from cache after fixed amount of time either it is accessed or not. Generally we use it when we are displaying data which is changing but we can afford to display outdated

Article of the Day, PageMethod - An Easier and Faster Approach for ASP.NET Ajax

2011-02-24T23:31:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, Feb 20, 2011, my article 'PageMethod - An Easier and Faster Approach for ASP.NET Ajax' was selected as 'Article of the Day' at http://www.asp.net. I also recommend to all of readers to do share useful articles on http://www.asp.net/community. Whenever you found an article which is interesting and can be useful for others.

How to Pass value from ASP.Net to Javascript

2011-02-24T07:58:00.000-08:00

Many times we have to pass a value from server side (ASP.Net) to client side (java script) and many peoples ask this question that how we can accomplish this task. Here I am sharing some examples in which I will tell different approaches to send values from ASP.Net to javascript. 1- <%=%> Construct You can simply use a <%=%> construct to pass server side variable to client side. Here is how you

How to end session when browser is closed

2011-01-13T04:21:00.000-08:00

In high traffic sites sessions are very costly and they use lots of server's memory. Generally session timeout is 20 min (by default) and even if user closes the browser. Values in session still exist until session get expired after timeout. We can save lots of server memory if we destroy session as user closes the browser. Here is how you can do it:- 1)First create a page AutoLogOut.aspx and

Real World Scenario: Object Writer

2010-12-08T02:46:00.000-08:00

Recently in a project I was facing a bug which was very difficult to reproduce. So, I decided to log object with complete properties in a text file. This code can be really useful for those who want to solve bugs which only occurs very rarely. Here is the code of my class which converts object into a string:- public class ObjectWriter{ public static string GetObjectString(object obj) {

How to keep session alive in ASP.Net using Webservice and jQuery

2010-11-22T04:18:00.000-08:00

Most of the time when we develop intranet web applications, our clients request us that they only have to log in in the morning when they reach office. It seems very easy to implement i.e. increase session timeout to 10+ hours and we are done. But there is a drawback of this approach. Even if user close the browser, session's data will occupy server's memory till 10+ hours and our site's

PageMethod an easier and faster approach for Asp.Net AJAX

2010-11-16T02:39:00.000-08:00

We can easily improve user experience and performance of web applications by unleashing the power of AJAX. One of the best things which I like in AJAX is PageMethod. PageMethod is a way through which we can expose server side page's method in java script. This brings so many opportunities we can perform lots of operations without using slow and annoying post backs. In this post I am showing

ASP.Net State Server

2010-09-15T05:21:00.000-07:00

Introduction In the world of web applications Sessions are commonly used to keep key information about users. Before going into the details of State Server lets have a quick look over different session management solutions provided by ASP.Net. Here are the different modes for storing session in ASP.net:- InProc This is the default mode. In this session data is stored in web server's (IIS)