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...

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...

When you provide downloadable content on your blog, you might want to keep track on downloads. With BlogEngine, it is incredibly easy to do – all you need is subscribe to one of the events exposed by core framework and log download information to any medium you like. For example, you want to log it in the tab delimited flat file so it is easy to export to Excel and do whatever kind of reporting you want to do.

First thing, we need More...

That is amazing how easy it is to fix any problem as soon as it gets to the status of the ex-problem. After I found the way to make my email work on GoDaddy with their Form Mailer, I took another look at SMTP and sure enough all peaces readily fall into place. Here is step-by-step instruction on how to setup and use SMTP with GoDaddy – the way God intended. More...

Remember those lazy days when you could kick your trustworthy CDONTS mail messages from anywhere inside juicy spaghetti code and it just worked? Well, those days are over. Even 1.x’s System.Web.Mail – also not a brainier to use – is outdated and big no-no our days.

Now we supposed to use SMTP^W. And sometimes this beast just refuses to cooperate. Complete showstopper. I’m not a quitter, but I’m not going to spend countless hours googling around for the fix either (although, I admit, it is kind of addictive). So after short hunt, when first four or five “guaranteed” solutions did not work out I started looking for workaround. More...