As a follow-up on my post from yesterday about generating shorter GUIDs , I’ve created a small helper class in C#. The class encodes a GUID into a 22 character long string and decodes the string back to the original GUID...

The System.Guid is used whenever we need to generate a unique key, but it is very long. That’s in many cases not an issue, but in a web scenario where it is part of the URL we need to use its string representation which...

I’ve noticed that there are two different ways developers locate private variables used by properties. One way is to locate the private variable next to the property that returns them and all other private variable...

A web page with a data bound GridView control can take a long time to load. The page is not rendered until all the controls are, and the GridView cannot render before data has been retrieved from the database. So, let’s...

A couple of days ago, I had to store some very big strings in an XML file. To keep the file size down I wanted to compress the strings using a GZipStream and then decompress them later when needed. I modified the methods...

The blogroll has become a standard element on most blogs today. If it is an ASP.NET blog, the blogroll probably contains links to other ASP.NET blogs and that gives the visitor an opportunity to surf to other related...

Some of my friends have been considering moving to Vista and have therefore asked me if it’s worth the money. My answer is an unconditionally yes, but then they ask why that is and what features are worth the upgrade?...

On a small test website I’m building in my spare time, I wanted a way to count the number of clicks to the outgoing links from that site. Imaging hosting banners or other affiliate links where you get paid per click, it...

Finally I had the chance to install Vista on my work PC - something I've wanted to do since November when it became available on MSDN. Now the installation is over and it went incredibly smooth. It installed all my...

At work, we are about to build a new internal tool for administration of different systems. We developers need certain applications and the sales department needs some other ones. All the different people need to be able...