There was a question about this on the Asp.Net forums and after a quick search I didn't find a good generic function so I thought I'd supply one. Note: I wanted this to be as broad and useful as possible, so the second parameter is a ListControl which both the ListBox and DropDownList inherit from.

download source code download this article in .doc format. Overview In a recent article I presented a simple implementation of a generic type system in JavaScript. Please see that document for a detailed enumeration of the motivations and benefits, including type safetly and Visual Studio intellisen

As you know, IIS 7 is a powerful webserver. Just last month, after only three months of development time, we deployed the new website http://www.beurs.nl/ on an IIS 7 platform (with SQL Server 2008 back end).

This site, with over 7 mln pageviews/months, was built using ASP.NET MVC and Entitity Framework. A technology decision we haven't regretted. One advantage of ASP.NET MVC was the relative ease to support old urls that were still in use by other websites, and search engines. This meant that a url like http://www.beurs.nl/frame2.php still works. Sure, you can do that with simple URL rewriting, but obviously there are other advantages to using ASP.NET MVC. The webservers (three, load balanced) also run other sites, such as one for creating charts and another for the back-end CMS.

When figuring out which legacy urls to support, we found that the previous site had multiple aliases, such as koersen.beurs.nl, koersen3.beurs.nl, ticker.beurs.nl, etc. If we had a dedicated ip address for the primary site, and seperate ones for the other sites on the server, we could simply use a wildcard for all hostheaders. But... we do not. As a result, we needed to add each hostheader individually. The way to do this is described in this post. Though not difficult, it's quite a pain to do for 15 hostheaders, on three webservers. Yes, it's possible to share IIS 7 configuration, but we preferred not to. We do use DFS to mirror the website-folders.

As it turns out, it's not too difficult to add these binding from the command prompt:

c:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set site /site.name: www.beurs.nl /+bindings.[protocol='http',bindingInformation='*:80:forum.beurs.nl']
c:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set site /site.name: www.beurs.nl /+bindings.[protocol='http',bindingInformation='*:80:grafieken.beurs.nl']
c:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set site /site.name: www.beurs.nl /+bindings.[protocol='http',bindingInformation='*:80:koersen.beurs.nl']
...
etc

A simple script that takes 30 seconds to make and 2 seconds to run. AppCmd.exe is the single command line tool for managing IIS 7.0  that every developer/it pro should know.

 

download source code and demo download this article in .doc format Overview I a previous article I complained about the lack of a true 403 Forbidden error in ASP.NET and the clumsy way that authentication is handled by FormsAuthenticationModule. The solution I came up with was a good first attempt b

How to use the easyXDM JavaScript library to transmit messages and method calls between windows in different domains.

Provides an overview of Sharepoint with Silverlight and Web Parts from the perspective of a developer. This content is part 5 of the MOSS content from www.myrampup.com.

PC World - Research In Motion is set to bring full Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight support to the company's BlackBerry phones. The BoyGenius Report blog claims RIM will introduce the new functionality sometime next summer, together with more powerful handsets.

An article outlining an ASP.NET server control which wraps functionality to add ActiveX controls to a page - with postback support

codeproject Introduction Of late, many programmers who develop for Windows/Linux have moved to iPhone because of it’s runaway success. Among the most successful apps on the Apple AppStore, first comes games (yeah I can hear you, fart apps!!!). Next comes apps like Tweetie and others those co

There are several posts about how to implement the master page feature in Silverlight. So the question is do we really need this master page feature in Silverlight. If there is an advantage to use the master page features in ASP.NET, then I can’t see the a reason why Silverlight can’t take advantage

This article presents code that augments any INPUT box with an auto-suggest feature, AJAX-capable

A quick walkthrough showing how to protect files and folders using HttpHandlers, in VB.NET and C#.

Integrating ASP.NET MVC in existing ASP.NET Web Forms application.

download sample code Overview The Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX platform, known previously as ATLAS and ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions and fully rolled into ASP.NET 3.5, offers rich functionality but in certain scenarios the the required .ASPX client page and ScriptManager control coupled with the Micro

Programming implementation of Power Management Operations of the Operating System (suspend/hibernate and resume completely) without human interaction.

This morning I was hoping to take a few minutes to modify one of the examples in the StreamInsight CTP and send an output stream to a UI, rather than the text files used in the examples. I thought this would be easy, as the readme states that there’s

“An alpha version of the StreamInsight libraries for development using the IObservable/IObserver programming paradigm.”

But it wasn’t. The IObservable used in StreamInsight is defined in a different namespace than the IObservable in the System.Reactive and the StreamInsight api lacks the base classes and extention methods defined in System.Reactive. At this time, the two APIs do not play well with each other.

 

Some thoughts on how to get around this temporary inconsistency:

• Recompile System.Reactive to use StreamInsight’s IObservable/IObserver
• Create a type converter between the two IObservable/IObservers
• Create a StreamInsight output adapter which just raises a .Net event, then use the RX method of converting events to IObservables

Perhaps tonight.

The new Ajax approach presented by Visual WebGui is being compared to the traditional Ajax. The new approach allows to focus development efforts on algorithms, requirements and business logics while providing maximal flexibility, interoperability and interactivity with any traditional web applicatio

With the launch of the ORMBattle.NET site, a new discussion started on the blogosphere; later on, this post by Gergely Orosz added more ashes to the fire. The subject seems to be, is it possible to blindly compare OR/M tools, disregarding all differences between them, in simple yet not plausible scenarios, such as loading/saving/updating N entities in a loop?

Oren Eini wrote about it, and so did Davy Brion, both dismissing the way tests were conducted and the general usefulness of these kinds of (well, useless) tests. I tend to agree with both, but I don't know why the performance of these OR/M tools (which all implement the Unit of Work pattern), properly configured of course, can't be configured in simple but common scenarios, such as loading entities by id, loading an amount of entities at the same time, entity materialization, entity saving and updating, SQL generation quality, and so on. Of course, a more interesting test would be implementing a simple application with well known requirements with each technology, something like the PetShop application. Or, why don't we just forget about LINQ (NHibernate's implementation, at least, is not very mature), which seems to me just a trendy subject, and focus instead on things like:

• Cache support
• Available mapping types
• Support for multiple tiers
• Query language quality (or existence)
• Possibility to pre-compile queries
• Support for stored procedures
• Memory and CPU consumption
• Existence and quality of supporting tools (automatic entity generation, for example)
• ...

Inspired by the not-yet-best-seller XP and Scrum from the Trenches from now on I will start to share with you my war stories as a Product Owner in a Scrum team. Expect it to be posted as quick and basic notes, since I am very busy these days and I'm studying hard Scrum :) Today's note: Big stories (an "epic", as Mike Cohn would say in User Stories Applied ) have the potential to fail being delivered no matter the size your sprint has. That's why it is strongly recommended you slice your "epic" in...(read more)