The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, & Hacks

594 Pages·2007·10.64 MB·English

by  Scott Allen

Summary of Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv

1. Introductory Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2. .NET 2.0 Core Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

3. Data Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

4. Pushing the Boundaries of the GridView . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

5. Form Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

6. Maintaining State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

7. Membership and Access Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

8. Component-based Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

9. ASP.NET and Web Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

10. Ajax and JavaScript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303

11. Working with Email . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339

12. Rendering Binary Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355

13. Handling Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391

14. Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415

15. Performance and Scaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435

16. Search Engine Optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485

17. Advanced Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553
THE ASP.NET 2.0
ANTHOLOGY
101 ESSENTIAL TIPS, TRICKS & HACKS
BY SCOTT ALLEN
JEFF ATWOOD
WYATT BARNETT
JON GALLOWAY
PHIL HAACK
iv
The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks
by Scott Allen, Jeff Atwood, Wyatt Barnett, Jon Galloway, and Phil Haack
Copyright © 2007 SitePoint Pty. Ltd.
Expert Reviewer: Wyatt Barnett Editor: Georgina Laidlaw
Managing Editor: Simon Mackie Editor: Hilary Reynolds
Technical Editor: Matthew Magain Index Editor: Fred Brown
Technical Director: Kevin Yank Cover Design: Alex Walker
Printing History:
First Edition: August 2007
Notice of Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted
in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case
of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Notice of Liability
The author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein.
However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied.
Neither the authors and SitePoint Pty. Ltd., nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any
damages to be caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the
software or hardware products described herein.
Trademark Notice
Rather than indicating every occurrence of a trademarked name as such, this book uses the names only
in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner with no intention of infringement of
the trademark.
Published by SitePoint Pty. Ltd.

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Web: www.sitepoint.com

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ISBN 978-0-9802858-1-9

Printed and bound in the United States of America
v
About the Authors
Scott Allen is a consultant and founder of OdeToCode.com. Scott is also an instructor for
Pluralsight—a premier Microsoft .NET training provider and home to many of the top author­
ities on .NET today. In 15 years of software development, Scott has shipped commercial
software on everything from 8 bit embedded devices to 64 bit web servers. You can reach
Scott through his blog at http://www.OdeToCode.com/blogs/scott/.
Jeff Atwood lives near Berkeley, California with his wife, two cats, and far more computers
than he cares to mention. His first computer was the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. He’s been
a Microsoft Windows developer since 1992. Most of his programming was in Visual Basic,
although he spent significant time with early versions of Delphi, and now he’s quite comfort­
able with C# or VB.NET. Jeff is particularly interested in best practices and human factors
in software development, as represented in his blog, http://www.codinghorror.com/.
Wyatt Barnett leads the in-house development team for a major industry trade association
in Washington DC. He also writes for SitePoint’s .NET blog, Daily Catch, and worked as the
Expert Reviewer for this book.
After working hard as a submarine lieutenant, Jon Galloway was amazed to find that people
would pay him to goof off with computers all day. He spends most of his time with ASP.NET
and SQL Server, but likes to keep involved with a variety of other technologies, including
Silverlight, Mono, vector graphics, web technologies, and open source .NET development.
Jon co-founded the Monoppix project, has contributed to several open source projects, in­
cluding SubSonic, and regularly releases open source utilities (late at night, when his wife
and three daughters are fast asleep). He’s a senior software engineer at Vertigo Software, and
blogs at http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/.
Phil Haack has over eight years of experience in software development, consulting, and
software management, which he puts to good use as the CTO and co-founder of VelocIT. In
his spare time, he leads the Subtext open source blogging engine and contributes to various
other open source projects. To keep his sanity, he also plays soccer regularly.
About the Technical Editor
Before joining the SitePoint team as a technical editor, Matthew Magain worked as a software
developer for IBM and also spent several years teaching English in Japan. He is the organizer
for Melbourne’s Web Standards Group,1 and enjoys candlelit dinners and long walks on the
beach. He also enjoys writing bios that sound like they belong in the personals column.
Matthew lives with his wife Kimberley and daughter Sophia.
1 http://webstandardsgroup.org/
vi
About the Technical Director
As Technical Director for SitePoint, Kevin Yank oversees all of its technical publica­
tions—books, articles, newsletters, and blogs. He has written over 50 articles for SitePoint,
but is best known for his book, Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP &
MySQL. Kevin lives in Melbourne, Australia, and enjoys performing improvised comedy
theater and flying light aircraft.
About SitePoint
SitePoint specializes in publishing fun, practical, and easy-to-understand content for web
professionals. Visit http://www.sitepoint.com/ to access our books, newsletters, articles, and
community forums.
Table of Contents
Preface
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv

Who Should Read this Book? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvi

What’s Covered in this Book? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvi

The Book’s Web Site . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix

The SitePoint Forums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xx

The SitePoint Newsletters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xx

Your Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xx

Conventions Used in this Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xx

Chapter 1 Introductory Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Which web project model should I choose? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

How do I deploy my web site? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

How do I choose a third-party web host? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

How do I use source control? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

How do I go about using open source code? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Where can I find more information about ASP.NET? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Chapter 2 .NET 2.0 Core Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

How do I use strings? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

How do I display an object as a string? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

How do I display formatted strings? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

How do I use generics? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

How do I filter items in a generic collection? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

How can I get more use out of my custom logic? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

How do I convert generic lists to specific classes? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
viii
How do I concatenate delimited strings from object properties? . . . . . . 53

How do I batch operations with large collections? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

How do I choose the right collection? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Chapter 3 Data Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

How can I get started using ADO.NET? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

How do I configure my database connection? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

How do I read data from my database? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

How do I sort and filter data? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

How do I fill a DropDownList from a database table? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

How can I perform data binding without having to write all that

repetitive code? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

How do I display the contents of a database table? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

How do I allow the modification of a single record? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

How can I data bind without using the SqlDataSource? . . . . . . . . . 106

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Chapter 4 Pushing the Boundaries of the
GridView . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

How do I add a data-bound drop-down to a GridView? . . . . . . . . . . 124

How do I sort on multiple columns? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

How do I display the sort state? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

How do I implement custom paging? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

How can I allow users to download tabular data as a Microsoft Excel

file? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
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Chapter 5 Form Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

How do I validate form input? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

How do I validate multiple forms? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

How do I set up custom validation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

How do I perform custom client-side validation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

How do I build my own validator control? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

How do I perform client-side validation with my custom validator

control? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

Chapter 6 Maintaining State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

How do I maintain per-request state in a web application? . . . . . . . . . 190

How can I maintain session state in a web farm using a state

server? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

How can I maintain session state in a web farm using a database? . . . 196

Where should I store application state? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

What’s the cleanest way to access a page’s view state? . . . . . . . . . . . . 206

How can I make sure my custom control works when view state is

turned off? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

Chapter 7 Membership and Access
Control
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

What’s the easiest way to add membership to my site? . . . . . . . . . . . . 220

How do I allow users to register for my site? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

How do I manage users on my site? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226

How do I require users to log in? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

How do I grant access to users who have forgotten their

passwords? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
x
How do I display content based on roles? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242

Chapter 8 Component-based Development . . . 243

How can I use master pages? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244

How can my content page override data on my master page? . . . . . . . 248

How can I have my master page interact with my content page? . . . . 253

How do I use URLs in a master page? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

How do I modify header elements in a master page? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260

How do I use themes effectively in conjunction with CSS? . . . . . . . . . 262

How do I treat user controls as components? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

How do I embed resources into my components? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278

Chapter 9 ASP.NET and Web Standards . . . . . . . 279

What are all these span tags doing in my HTML output? . . . . . . . . . . . 281

How do I obtain DataList-style functionality without using a
table? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285

How do I use ASP.NET’s fancy menus without the fancy HTML? . . . . . . 287

How do I make sense of the CSS maze produced by the CSS Friendly
menu? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300

Chapter 10 Ajax and JavaScript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303

How can I write better JavaScript? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304

How can libraries make writing robust, cross-platform JavaScript
easier? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310

How do I use Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314

How do I perform partial page rendering? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318