ASP .NET on Justin Carmony

How I Became a Web Developer & CTO

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:57:56 +0000

Note: many of the screenshots of websites I had done in the past are from the Internet Archive and many of the images are missing. But it can give an idea on the projects I had worked on. One day I’ll try and track down the original files and update the screenshots.

Today some memories came from when I first started with web development. So before I forget anymore of the details, I thought I would share my unique way I became a web developer. I never went to school to learn Computer Science or Information Systems. I’ve had a total of 2 programming classes, which were my in sophomore and junior years of High School, one of which we lovingly nicknamed Warcraft 101, because we would spend the entire time getting out butts kicked in Warcraft 2 by my classmate Daren (We all got A’s, we had just finished the entire coursework in 2 and a half weeks).

Empowering JavaScript Through jQuery

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:31:27 +0000

Once I discovered jQuery, my life as a web developer changed. There are few libraries, tools, etc. that I can honestly say have completely changed the way I code. In all honesty, jQuery makes the difficult aspects of JavaScript and turns them into a strength. I recommend it over any other JavaScript library I know. It is smaller, leaner, straight forwards, and more powerful than anything out there. Large companies like Google, Microsoft, and Dell use it. Microsoft is now including jQuery in Visual Studio, their powerful IDE for making websites. If anything, I have yet to meet a person who has used jQuery and has gone to anything else.

ASP .NET, LINQ, GridViews, and GUID Errors

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:17:22 +0000

I found a simple problem today. Here is the deal, there were several times where I had to base a LinqDataSource off a Guid that I would set in the Page_Load(). I created an<asp:HiddenField /> to hold the value so all my DataSources could pull it from the control. The HiddenField control’s value is stored as a string, so I would have to convert the guid to a string. After doing this, I was getting the following error:

Page.FindControl() Returning Null Issues and Solutions Within Another Control

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:41:51 +0000

Alright, I’m going to have a lot of blog posts over the next few days going over my wonderful expereinces learning how to create advanced server controls, and just how hard it is to find good information on the subject. But the problem I ran into today was having Page.FindControl() not work as expected.

Problem

Page.FindControl() can be misleading. A developer without understanding the situation could assume FindControl() will return a control found within that page. This is completely wrong. The reason this does not work is because Page does not have its own FindControl() function. It actually inherits this from Control, because Page inherits control. So FindControl() is really more like a FindChildrenControls(), and it is not recursive.

ASP .NET Ajax - Straight forward and simple, the way it should be.

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:34:41 +0000

I have to say, I’m very impressed with the implementation of ASP .NET AJAX. After creating several projects in .NET, converting several of my pages to implement AJAX was beyond easy. It was incredible. It takes all the “thinking” out of AJAX and just makes it work. Now, I’m not familiar with the security and stability of it, but for simple AJAX to make your interface just “nicer”, its amazing. I’ll be posting a few tricks and tips that I discover as I play around with the AJAX capabilities of .NET.

ASP .NET, GridViews, SqlDataSource, and Guid Parameters

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:40:27 +0000

Another thing I ran into today. I actually ran into it awhile back but since I ran into it again today I’d thought I’d post on it to help anyone who happens to find it.

Problem

You have a GridView and a SqlDataSource that takes 1 or more Guids as a Parameter. You use the built in DataSource configuration and it doesn’t give any errors. However, when you actually run it and pass the Guid, you get this error:

ASP .NET & System.Threading.ThreadAbortException Error

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:02:15 +0000

While doing some work today I started to run into a ThreadAbortException error. While debugging it spit back this error:

Unable to evaluate expression because the code is optimized or a native frame is on top of the call stack.

I was really confused because everything seemed to be working just fine, then I found this forum thread. Turns out there are several causes for this error, but mine was caused by doing a Response.Redirect(); from within a Try-Catch statement. Apparently ASP .NET does not like that.

ASP .NET GridView Access to Data In Code

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:52:38 +0000

There are situations where you want to gain access to the GridView’s DataSet to display extra information outside of the GridView. I found the following code to work the best for me. You can get the information from the DataSource of a GridView by doing the following:

DataView dv = (DataView)sdsDataSource.Select(DataSourceSelectArguments.Empty); if (dv != null) { try { strName = (String)dv.Table.Rows[0][“Name”]; } catch { strName = “N/A”; } }

You should be able to access whatever information you need from the DataView.

ASP .NET Accessing Session, Request, Response, etc from within a Class

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:30:38 +0000

I remember it took me forever to figure this out and the headache before learning this that it caused. Because .NET is strongly typed you are unable to access the Session, Request, or Response (and many other Http/Web object) from within a class library like you can writing in a code-behind file or on the page itself. I battled for weeks (I almost think months) trying to find ways of passing information between my pages and class library, when I finally found the answer:

ASP .NET 2.0, GridViews, HyperLinkField, and JavaScript

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:34:00 +0000

I’ve found some interesting notes on ASP .NET’s GridView, it’s limitations and work arounds. For work I was looking for a way to execute JavaScript from clicking a link on a GridView Cell. An example would be to having a list of transactions and wanting to click a link to update it’s details. I noticed that many functions of GridView used tags to execute JavaScript. An example would be:

<a href="javascript:myFunction('variable');">Link</a>

Since I had experience with the HyperLinkField before, I thought I would add a HyperLinkField to my GridView and set the DataNavigateUrlFields to the needed fields and the DataNavigateUrlFormatString to use the fields properly. I was hoping to accomplish it by using the following code, which in turn I found out this solution does not work: