Huthaifa Afanah : ASP.NET

In Hebron “Introduction to VS2008 & ASP.NET” session

Huthaifa Afanah — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:01:17 GMT

As part of PalDev activities I was in Hebron this Saturday to deliver a “Introduction to VS2008 & ASP.NET” session for the PPU –Palestine Polytechnic University – CS and IT students. The workshop was held in Friends of Fawzi Kawash IT Center of Excellence (FFKITCE). We stopped the event registration process after 65 person was registered regarding the room limitation and we also emailed the latest 25 person that the priority will be given for those who registered earlier and we will re-hold a similar event for those who could not attend.

Anyway I went to Hebron using public transportation and it was like using “Crazy Taxi”!! it was really a mad drive I reached with no harm and headed to the FFKITCE center. The presentation started after 12:00 pm and continued to 4:00 pm nearly. It was really a very quick 3 hours full with Microsoft Buzz.

The audience was excited –I think- and I was very pleased to see those motivated students which really encouraged me myself to pursue latest tech’s further and further. The audience was interested with the powerful features the .NET and VS2008 provides which ease the application development process and save time and efforts. On the side of the presentation I introduced the express editions Microsoft offers, Microsoft Dream Spark and MSP programs.

In general the presentation run smoothly except that I could not figure out what happened in the second demo when my VS 2008 refused to connect to adventure works sample database. Although I checked the sample scenario early that morning and it was running fine but this is the demo’s hell I really tested –many times probably- !! Anyway we was already exceeded the given time so I skipped the rest of demo and finished the presentation. I am looking forward seeing more interaction from the students with PalDev and I really think that the time when such events are being held by the students themselves is very near.

A several suggestions came along with the presentation: some folks asked for advanced topics and this is very eligible and PalDev already has plans to do a bunch of advanced sessions for advanced users. Another asked for HOL’s but this is very limited due the limitation of available well equipped labs.

Hope that helps anyone
Huthaifa

The Gu is Back!! with new Multilingual version!!

Huthaifa Afanah — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:56:29 GMT

Yesterday I checked my RSS feed and found that Scott Guthrie announced that he is starting a new series of posts. That was a great news to hear. Scott is one of the most popular Microsoft managers. He is one of those who played a core role developing Microsoft web platform even the whole .NET framework. He leads core .NET libraries,WPF, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MCV, Sliverlight and IIS teams.

Anyway I decided that I will resume translating his posts in the Scott Guthrie in Arabic blog at asp.net blogs. I started doing this early in the last year but after translating some posts I stopped. Something in my brain told me: Stop its not worthy .. you are typing your own posts in English!! Even your blog@PalDev Why to make Arabic clone of another one’s blog!! This was totally a wrong decision. No doubt that the language of the world now is English. But this is not a reason for people not to support their own local content presence on the Internet. This will help their people who has not the abilities to use English or even does not like to read foreign content.

So I made this decision: form so on I will not translate just translate Scott’s posts but I will even translate my own posts.

This will be fair enough. I know that will be tough but I hope that I can cope with this challenge. Its better to stop chatter and start work - Th Gu made another new post!! He is very active blogger!-

To check the new posts check:

Clean Web.Config Files (Posted Aug 25, 2009)

Starter Project Templates (Posted August 26, 2009)

See you very soon.

Hosting multiple websites/applications on IIS

Huthaifa Afanah — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:23:00 GMT

Microsoft provides us with IIS -stands for Internet Information Services- as its only, robust and well packaged web server. IIS is the second popular web server on the internet after Apache HTTP Server the open source web server. You can use IIS to host different type of websites so you can host websites which use ASP, PHP, Perl, JSP, ROR .. etc. and for sure those who uses ASP.NET.

In most cases you will use one web server to host multiple websites. There is a many issues should be addressed and take in our considerations. In this series I will address some of these issues providing guidelines and collection o0f practices to handle them.

Ok, see you very soon I hope.

ASP.NET Globalization hint

Huthaifa Afanah — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 06:56:42 GMT

As one of the most powerful features came with the ASP.NET 2.0 is the out of the box globalization and localization features. Today websites and web applications is usually became a multilingual ones and ASP.NET provides us with a flexible, easy to use and time saving localization mechanism. I ran into a silly issue about localizing a project I am working with and after losing my mind and finished tearing up my hair I said “opps .. I missed something .. the fallback file”

Ok .. to localize your application you need to make use resources files which ends with the *.resx extension local resources or global resource there is no difference. Anyway in the most simple case if you have a Default.aspx form to localize it you must have a related .resx files. One file per culture using this naming convention Default.aspx.[culture].resx … So if you you application supports 3 languages say: English, Arabic, French you must have one resource file for each language. This means we need to have:

Default.aspx.en-US.resx for the English page with USA specifications
Default.aspx.ar-SA.resx for the Arabic page with Saudi Arabia specifications
Default.aspx.fr-CA.resx for the French page with Canada specifications

You may use neutral cultures which related to language rather than a specific region culture e.g en, ar and fr … anyway after doing this you think you are fine but when you run the application you will discover that your pages does not read any values form those files and you still have those you filled when developing the form.

This occurs because in all circumstances you need to provide a default resource file which called “Fallback” resource file –will look like this Default.aspx.resx- which CLR will use when the users culture does not have its own resources file. e.g say that we have a visitor with the Chinese culture on his browser then the fallback resources will be used to get the required resources to serve his request.

What make me forget about the fallback resources file in my case is the truth that I am forcing users to choose between en-US and ar-SA –which is the default- culture. I thought: who need this file while the users will have a default culture and can only switch to another predefined one. Plus the resource mechanism works by searching for the users specific culture first –which in my case is forced by code to use ar-SA - in the cultures hierarchy and then move to the parent culture and so on!!

Hint

You need to make sure that you ever never forget about providing Default or Fallback resource file in your application. I will make another detailed post about how CLR handle resources. Hope that helps

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released

Huthaifa Afanah — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 03:46:52 GMT

Hello The Gu -Scott Guthrie- has announced the ASP.NET MVC 1.0. You can read the full post here. The amazing thing that ASP.NET MVC is an open source project and the code released under MS-PL licenses.

And they say Microsoft does not support open source. They published the source code of the .NET framework itself last year -but it was a closed source- and they now releasing open source projects. Who knows what future is hiding for us.

Congratulation Microsoft!

ASP.NET Flavors

Huthaifa Afanah — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:03:15 GMT

Hello All … many of us have heard of ASP.NET as a web development technology. But many of us does not noticed that things differs a lot from ASP.NET 1.1 time.

So what is the difference?

Since ASP.NET 2.0-3.5 has been released we have multiple flavors of ASP.NET. This means that you can develop ASP.NET web application using different asp.net frameworks. You may select the framework you think its the most efficient to your situation. That is really great thing to have because its provide developers with sufficient flexibility needed to let there job done.

ASP.NET Flavors

Since there is much of articles, posts about ASP.NET new era I will just summarize them from Paul Litwin blog post in which he talked about this pillars in details. Thanks Paul.

ASP.NET Web Forms

Until recently, this was the only pillar of ASP.NET. Everything was done using the familiar rich server-side controls that many have grown to love (and some have learned to despise which is the seed for the other three pillars). Event Driven development model, very powerful designer support, and persistence in mind.

ASP.NET AJAX

This pillar came to life with the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions for ASP.NET 2.0 / Visual Studio 2005. ASP.NET AJAX is now integrated into ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2008 and consists of both a set of server-side controls as well as the AJAX client-side libraries. In regards to its existence as a “pillar,” I would argue that Microsoft is really only talking about the client-side of ASP.NET AJAX. The reason I say this is that the Upgrade Panel and other server-side AJAX controls merely extend the Web Form pillar, giving Web Form controls the ability to do asynchronous postbacks.

ASP.NET MVC

This pillar is the newest to emerge from Microsoft. In fact, as of this writing, it’s only a couple of weeks old, having been released at Mix09. The basic idea behind ASP.NET MVC is to separate out the three concerns of the MVC pattern: the model, view, and controller. The model represents the data model, the view is the user interface that presents the data and interacts with the user, and the controller is the command center that takes inputs from the view, pushes and pulls data into/from the model, and decides what to do next.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

MSDN Help says, “ASP.NET Dynamic Data is a framework that lets you create data-driven ASP.NET Web applications easily.”

Dynamic Data uses what is termed dynamic scaffolding to construct your application. This means if you change your data model, the application will be instantly updated: there’s no code that needs to be re-generated.

So what does this mean to the developer?

As Paul said this is good news as that you now have a choice in how you develop your ASP.NET applications. And its bad news as that you now have a choice in how you develop your ASP.NET applications. (Wait a second, wasn’t that also the good news?)This means you have more things to learn. And Microsoft may be taking some of its focus off Web Forms.

For more details you can refer to Paul’s nice post and have a extensive idea bout those options and comparison between them. Regarding myself I still stuck with ASP.NET web forms which I feel its more appropriate and easy to use.

Hope that helps

Huhaifa

Embedded Resources difference between VB.NET and C# projects

Huthaifa Afanah — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:48:00 GMT

While I am developing a custom web control to extend the default validation summary I used some images within this control. One of the nice features and solutions came with ASP.NET 2.0 to address this problem is using web resources. So I embedded these images in my custom control assembly and used the Page.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl to resolve their URL's.

To do this task correctly you need to do 2 simple steps:

First, you need to select whatever file you want to embed in your assembly and then set the Build Action property from its properties to Embed this is straight forward as saying 1, 2, 3.
The second this we need to do is referencing that embedded resource so it could be retrieved as a web resources.This could be accomplished by adding WebResource attributes in the Assembly.info file.

In general to do this all we need is to add the web resource attribute like

<Assembly: System.Web.UI.WebResource("EmbeddedResourcesVB.Sunset.jpg", "image/jpg")> the WebResource takes two parameters, the first one is the resource full name which following this convention: (Rootnamespace).(SubNameSapce).(Filename).(Extension) and the second parameter is the MIEM file type of the resource

So what's wrong?

This looks very simple but why all problems occurred? What is the error prone thing which make all these posts and articles on the web!! To identify this we can say there is some issue regarding the way that VB.NET projects and C# projects being organized. Is that true? Yes that's true!!

To figure out this issue I created simple solution conations a VB.NET project and a C# project. and add an image to each of them as our embedded resource. I changed the Root Namespace property for each project to make it clear that the assembly name has nothing to do with WebResource name. By default the Root Namespace == assembly name but in some certain scenarios you need to change that so by choosing the project properties you can change the assembly name property and the RootNamespace property.

After building our solution let's have a closer look to the embedded resources after being compiled into assembly. So let's open EmbResVB.dll and EmbResCSharp.dll using Reflector. If you take a quick look to the image below you can note that the Sunset.jpg image resource name differs from the Vb.Net assembly to the C# one.

But we said that the resource name should follow this convention: (RootNameSpace).(SubNameSapce).(Filename).(Extension) so what's happens??!!
Here's what happen: in the C# projects if you add a new class to your solution you will find that the IDE put's this file in a namespace regarding to the solution folders hierarchy. But in VB.NET projects this is not occur. Let's take the ImagesUrl class as example, this class which exists's under the images folder in our testing C# and VB.NET projects but it will look like this by default in C#:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace EmbeddedResourcesCSharp.Images
{
public class ImagesURL
{

}
}

while in the VB.NET project it will be added to the root namespace by default:

Public Class ImagesUrl

Sub New()

Technorati Tags: asp.net,embbede resources,.Net

End Sub

End Class

C# is doing this because of the VC# wizards which work in the background when you add new items to your project. Here's an article for one of the VS team descriping this issue http://blogs.msdn.com/joen/archive/2004/03/15/90002.aspx.

Anyway it seems that C# IDE is handling the other files like our image in the same way. So our Sunset.jpg image have been listed under the images namespace which actually it's parent folder name. But in the VB.NET project Sunset.jpg is being added to the root namespace never mind in any sub folder it exists.

Ok, that's it, the reason of all the misunderstanding. Many VB.NET developers reading posts or articles about embedded resources written in C# and they didn't notice the different in embedded resources names between the VB.NET and C# projects.

The result

In a C# project embedded resources names follows this convention (RootNampeSpace).(Path).(FileName).(Extension) where Path is the folders path in which this resource exist Root/Folder/SubFolder/.../ResourceFile .In A VB.NET project embedded resources names follows this convention (RootNampeSpace).(FileName).(Extension) and the resource path does not affect its name.

Hope that help. Happy asp.net

Huthaifa

Another simple use of extension methods!!

Huthaifa Afanah — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:43:00 GMT

While my team and I doing our daily work. One of our new team members asked that he needs the user to select a value from drop-down list and this value should be converted to a nullable integer value.

The small issue he faces that he need to parse the value selected in one line of code and make sure that if the user does not select a value the default value will be parsed to null and do not cause a problem -in each drop-down there is a "[Select]" item with empty string value -

I wondered a int.Parse function returns null when the parsed value is null but throws "Input string was not in a correct format" exception when try to parse an empty string. And when use int.TryParse it will result with 0 value when parsing operation failed.

In such simple scenario extension methods proof it self. Simply we can create an extension method call it SafeParse for example ....

public static int? SafeParse(this String Value)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(Value))
            return null;
        else
            return int.Parse(Value);
    }

and then you could simply use it like this:

int? MyNullableValue;
MyNullableValue = DropDownList1.SelectedValue.SafeParse();

Extension methods provide a simple and easy use which will ease programmer day day work, and make simple issues disappear just like 1,2,3

Thanks for VS2008,thanks for extension methods, thanks for Microsoft team

Happy programming...!!