Lee Kelleher

Archive for posts tagged with 'ASP.NET'

  1. Reflecting on predictions for Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 3 minutes (360 words)

    Last year a wrote a few predictions for Umbraco – for beyond 2014; a 5-year future. Reviewing those predictions, many things have happened in the world of web-development, so I would like to reflect on those. node.js The idea of switching Umbraco’s “server-side” codebase from ASP.NET to node.js was quite appealing. Out-the-box it would be cross-platform, high-performance, asynchronous – all win! Then Microsoft announced ASP.NET vNext! Bringing us… Roslyn! KVM! Cross-platform (Mono)! Async! NuGet! All…

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  2. Robots.txt Editor for Umbraco 5

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (108 words)

    First migration of my Umbraco packages to the newly released v5 (Jupiter), I am proud to announce… Robots.txt Editor for Umbraco 5! The majority of the re-development was done during the #umbWeekend (last weekend – 27th January). It was fun to explore the new codebase and APIs for Umbraco v5; creating tree nodes and building the editor.  Then a few evenings this week to polish-up the UI, etc. For any developers wanting to know more…

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  3. ASP.NET System Information for Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (104 words)

    Released a new Umbraco package today, that integrates the ASP.NET System Information Prober into the Umbraco back-office. What is the ASP.NET System Information Prober? It is a single page that tries to get as much useful hosting information about your web-server. The concept is similar to PHP’s native phpinfo() function. Installing the package will add a new node tree to the developer section. Here is a quick demo video: http://screenr.com/2YC Installing this package will add…

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  4. Updated Robots.txt Editor for Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (109 words)

    Last night I released version 2 of the Robots.txt Editor for Umbraco. Changes & new features: Restructured the package files, they all live in a folder called “robots-txt” (still under the /umbraco folder – but self-contained) Errors are now displayed using the Feedback control (as opposed to the Speech Bubble in the bottom-right corner). Robots.txt editor has buttons for adding new User-Agent and Disallow rules, as well as comment/uncomment functionality. Changed the Robot icon… courtesy…

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  5. Putting your ASP.NET Web Application in Maintenance Mode (using ISAPI_Rewrite)

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 2 minutes (331 words)

    Prompted by @slace’s tweet: i wish there was a way to use app_offline but still view from certain ip's — Aaron Powell (@slace) September 29, 2009 I replied with a suggestion that we’ve used in the past. Aaron said I should blog about it… so here I am (again)! A while ago we needed to do an Umbraco upgrade (from v3 to v4) on a production server – in my opinion it was a pretty…

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  6. How to convert NameValueCollection to a (Query) String [Revised]

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (190 words)

    Following on from a comment on my previous post about converting a NameValueCollection to a (query) string – I have finally got around to revising my code snippet.  Now the method will handle same key multiple values, (it no longer comma-separates them). I have also added extra parameters so that you can define your own delimiter (since the HTTP specification says that you can use both ampersands & and semicolons ;) and there is an…

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  7. Robots.txt Editor for Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (227 words)

    Following up on my recent post of using Robots.txt with Umbraco, I decided that it would be nice to be able to edit the robots.txt directly from the Umbraco back-end.  (Also I wanted to play a bit more with the BaseTree/ITree classes). This afternoon I had a few hours to spare – actually I was procrastinating on another job, (don’t tell my client – I’ll finish it off later tonight) – so I got down…

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  8. Source Code Released for User Control File Tree Umbraco Package

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (94 words)

    A few months ago I released the User Control File Tree package for Umbraco, this allowed developers to edit the front-end code/mark-up in their ASCX user-controls from the Umbraco back-end, (remotely), rather than editing them directly on the server via a text-editor. Today I have released the source-code on the Umbraco Extensions project (on CodePlex) and created a project page on the new Our Umbraco community website. If you have any comments, feedback or suggestions…

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  9. Integrating ELMAH with Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 5 minutes (667 words)

    Update: For the latest details on how to integrate ELMAH with Umbraco, please read the article over on the Our Umbraco wiki. I have a few Umbraco projects that have a lot of custom .NET code, mostly in they are in the form of user-controls and XSLT extensions.  As far as I’m aware Umbraco doesn’t have an extendable mechanism for exception handling and sending out notification emails, (there is the umbraco.BusinessLogic.Log, which writes to the…

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  10. Umbraco Package – User Control File Tree

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 2 minutes (309 words)

    A few months ago, Tim Geyssens (aka Umbraco rockstar) released a package that gave you access to the *.config files in the /config/ folder. This has been a lifesaver in those few times where I have only had web-access to an Umbraco install and needed to tweak some config settings. Recently I found myself in the same situation, but this time I needed to quickly update a few text changes to an ASCX user-control. Due…

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  11. Convert XmlReader to String

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 2 minutes (286 words)

    I was in the middle of developing a member look-up AJAX function for an Umbraco project, when I ran into a slight problem, (confusion rather), about how to pull the XML back from SQL Server and return it to the browser (AJAX). The SQL statement was straight-forward, very simple, does a LIKE query against the members table, no problem there. Added “FOR XML AUTO” to return the result-set back as an XML data-type ... all…

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  12. Populating multiple DropDownList controls with generic ListItem array

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 2 minutes (269 words)

    I’ve just had some fun spending the last half-an-hour trying to figure out why when I used the SelectedValue property of a DropDownList, it also set the value of another DropDownList control. Here’s some background to the problem.  On my web-form, I have 2 fieldsets, one for a "Start Date", the other for an "End Date".  For each fieldset there are 3 DropDownList; Day, Month and Year. Now rather than populating the values declaratively, using…

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  13. Setting up Visual Studio to work with Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 4 minutes (482 words)

    Over the last 12 months I have been involved with developing several Umbraco-powered websites. During that time I’ve experienced many development frustrations; specifically with debugging and version control. A while back I read Paul Sterling’s blog post on “Working with Umbraco in Visual Studio” – I used this as my basis.  I have added to his orignal suggestions: Have a clean, working copy of Umbraco – using the installer – on your machine.  I am…

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  14. How to convert NameValueCollection to a (Query) String

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (132 words)

    Most ASP.NET developers know that you can get a key/value pair string from the Request.QueryString object (via the .ToString() method). However that functionality isn't the same for a generic NameValueCollection object (of which Request.QueryString is derived from). So how do you take a NameValueCollection object and get a nicely formatted key/value pair string? (i.e. "key1=value1&key2=value2") ... Here's a method I wrote a while ago: /// <summary> /// Constructs a QueryString (string). /// Consider this method…

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  15. Making Request.QueryString writable (by clone/copy)

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (102 words)

    Every now and then I completely forget that the Request.QueryString (and Request.Form) object is read-only. Today I had a bit of functionality where I needed to remove a key/value from the collection - but the Remove() method (of the NameValueCollection object) throws an exception. Unfortunately, the Request.QueryString's CopyTo method assigns the values to an ARRAY, not a NameValueCollection - losing functionality and flexibility. You need to copy the Request.QueryString object to a new NameValueCollection instance,…

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  16. rel-tag-spaces dilemma

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 3 minutes (414 words)

    Since I started using the Operator Firefox extension a couple of week ago, I’ve found it to be a useful tool – to quickly access microformatted content; such as Contact details and Tagspaces. Whilst I was testing it out on ReadySteadyBook, I noticed that the only tagspace was “Blog.aspx“, which seemed a bit weird. When I found the same problem on other websites, such as Amazon (example here) where the tagspace was “ref=tag_dpp_cust_itdp_t“. I thought…

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