Windows Home Server is a great OS for home users, it does a lot of stuff for you and you can find many useful plug-ins if you want more. One thing that it does not do out of the box though it does not work as a web server. It might be ok for average home user, but many advanced users, not to mention developers, would love to have their home server also serve web pages and applicatons. Fortunately, under the hood it is old good Windows server 2003, and you can make it do just about anything WS 2003 can do. More...
Wrapper around standard Membership provider that ships with ASP.NET MVC 1.0 out of the box fit well common scenario for social websites with self-registration and all users treated equal. When you have more complex requirements, in portal-like style application, you are very much out of luck. Account controller that comes with MVC 1.0 has very limited user management implementation and does not go into role management at all. It would be nice to have role management implemented the same way as account management, but if you need to roll right away I’ll show you quick and dirty way of doing basic user/role management with what we have now. More...
And why they don’t take over the world. If you ever wonder about it, you probably already came up with perfectly good explanation. I’ve heard and read quite a few and agree with most of them, but still want to add my two cents. IMO, in open source there are generally two kinds of approaches. More...
Either you run your web site in the shared hosting environment or on your local IIS server, you likely have several ASP.NET applications running in the same root directory. Each of them can be configured as a separate web application and run totally independent from others. Although BlogEngine is not (yet) multi-blogging platform, you can easily run bunch of BlogEngins on the same root for number of bloggers. Lets say, you have 3 bloggers contributing to your site and you want each of them have their very own blog, then you create similar structure: More...
This post is a sequel to Keeping things private and will explain how to secure images so that only authenticated users can see them. This is relevant when you want to publish private album on the web. All image files in the web application are viewable by default, you can right-click any image to see information about it in the properties, you can load image into browser directly (just type in http://rtur.net/blog/pics/rssbutton.gif for example), you can download any image by saving it to the local drive etc. Obviously, with private albums you don’t want this kind of behavior. More...
We all know about magic App_Code folder. Just drop class file in there and it will become a part of the web application. This is fine for scripts like PHP or "classic" ASP (VB script), but C# is strongly typed compiled language. How App_Code works? As any magic, mostly smoke and mirrors. Behind the scene, ASP.NET will create App_Code.dll and merge it with main application assembly at run time. This simple trick gives us best of both worlds - dynamism of scripting languages (ok, to the point) and all the good stuff coming with strong typing and compilation (whatever they are). More...
Do you use design patterns in your daily development? You probably should, and if you don't you might start with reading some books on the subject. I would suggest one from Head First series, although not everybody is a big fan of this book. But I found it fun and easy reading that can trigger your curiosity and encourage you to dig dipper. It is written for Java developers, but language samples presented in the book are minimal and, if you don't understand Java, you can refer to this project for C# translation. More...
Did it ever happened to you? You have a problem and, after research and brainstorming, finally come up with this nice elegant solution. Two month (and hundred problems) later, you are staring at the screen with basically the same task in front of you. And trying to figure out - how the hell did you do it in the first place? Yes, I'm talking knowledge base - not an original idea and lots of people use their blogs exactly for this reason. I'm joining the crowd and will publish here code snippets under "code snippets" category. Here is the first one. More...
Yes, I've heard about Ajax before - one would have to be hiding in the hole for the last year or two to avoid the buzz. I've read articles, seen videos and presentations, even used applications that utilize Ajax on a daily basis. So I’m not exactly a newbie. But somehow I managed to stay away from it - no projects I've been involved into for the last few years used Ajax. I decided it is a shame and I want to change it. Here is a plan: for starters I'll write two small applications ("gadgets", or user controls, for BlogEngine). The first one will be using "classic" JavaScript callback approach and the other one will be doing similar stuff the Microsoft way. Then I will compare experience. Sounds fair? More...
Every time someone tells how powerful today’s computers are
and how one should always trade performance for good architecture, testability
and thousand other great things - I want to hit guy on the head. And I'm not a
violent person. It just sucks to right click in the windows explorer and wait
20 seconds before context menu shows up or get "calculating remaining
time" when trying to copy files around (yes, I'm still getting those in my
all powerful Vista occasionally). Apparently, today’s computers have so much
power that they can't concentrate on such minuscule tasks, and processor has to
do complicated calculations in the background just to keep itself entertained. More...
