Mads Kristensen

A blog about everything technology.

October 2006

20 articles published in October 2006

  1. Spam proof your website using an HttpModule

    · 3 min read

    Every time an email address is written on a website, it allows spam robots to collect it and abuse it. If you have a website (e.g. blog or forum) that displays the users e-mail address it would be a nice service to mask...

  2. Speed up web services using the SoapDocumentMethod attribute

    · 1 min read

    I’ve done a lot of web services during the last couple of years and I simply love Service Oriented Architecture using SOAP. The power of using services as a means to create large connected systems are enormous but...

  3. A better string control in ASP.NET

    · 1 min read

    Whenever I had to add a string to a web controls control collection I’ve always used the Literal control like this: Literal str = new Literal (); str.Text = "hello world" ; Page.Controls.Add(str); I have always thought a...

  4. Validate a URL using regular expressions

    · 1 min read

    Today, I had to build web form that took user input from standard ASP.NET input controls. In one of the text boxes the user must to enter a valid URL, so I had to make some validation logic. But first of all, I had to...

  5. Where is .NET?

    · 2 min read

    The developer community has gotten big on the Internet the last couple of years – very big. New blogs are constantly adding value to the blogosphere which seem to grow by the second . There is no doubt in my mind that...

  6. Export a DataTable to Excel in ASP.NET

    · 1 min read

    Back in February I wrote a post on how to export DataTables to XML and Excel and I still get a lot of search engine traffic to that post. People have been asking me to simplify the example and only concentrate on the...

  7. Server-side and client-side caching in ASP.NET

    · 2 min read

    Caching is a very easy solution to many performance related issues on almost any website. There are many different ways to use server-side caching and they all have their own unique advantages. But client-side caching is...

  8. IE 7 final release is here. Come get it

    · 1 min read

    IE 7 final will be released very soon, but already now you can download it. The final version number is 7.0.5730.11. It doesn’t appear to be much different from the last beta. I've just downloaded it and the installation...

  9. Set HTML header items programmatically in ASP.NET 2.0

    · 1 min read

    Among the differences between version 1.1 and 2.0 of .NET Framework is the many new controls. Even though most of them don’t add new functionality they make a lot of things much easier and cleaner than before. Some of...

  10. Traditional developers vs. web developers vs. CSS

    · 1 min read

    In the year of 2006 it can be hard to avoid doing web development to some extend no matter what kind of developer you are. The lines between the traditional windows applications and the more web based ones have become...

  11. Examine animated Gif’s in C#

    · 2 min read

    Recently at work, we had to find a way to examine Gif images to find out if they were animated or not. It’s a good thing to know when dealing with banner advertising. The solution was to create a method that would return...

  12. Download album art for free through a web service

    · 2 min read

    I recently played with building a C# media player with built-in music library and wanted it to show album covers like Windows Media Player 11 does. It proved quite difficult because there is no free service for downloads...

  13. It’s good to be a control freak

    · 2 min read

    Custom web controls for your ASP.NET application are a brilliant way to separate, reuse and “refactor” your code pieces. In that sense I consider myself to be a control freak and that's a good thing! In our product...

  14. Long hours and crappy posts

    · 1 min read

    I regret to tell you, that this is the best I could come up with today. No code samples or anything interesting or any kind at all. The reason is that we had to meet an important deadline at work today and that kept me...

  15. Add variables to standard CSS stylesheets in ASP.NET

    · 3 min read

    After reading a post on The Cafes about the lack of dynamics in the CSS language, I found myself inspired to do something about it. It became clear that something had to be done and that we couldn’t wait for the W3C to...

  16. Solution to the Firefox port problem

    · 1 min read

    The built in webserver in Visual Studio 2005, formerly known as Casini, uses a dynamic or static port on the localhost machine (e.g. http://localhost:2049/default.aspx). It is dynamic by default, but you can make it...

  17. Add a MicroSummary to any ASP.NET page

    · 2 min read

    Scott Hanselman showed us how to add MicroSummaries to a website using an .ashx file. It was clean and simple, but it would be really cool if we could use the description meta tag instead so we don’t have to maintain two...

  18. A whitespace removal HTTP module for ASP.NET 2.0

    · 1 min read

    I’ve written about whitespace removal before , but I think this is the best solution so far. It is a plug n’ play HTTP module that works simply by adding the class to the App_Code folder. It uses regular expressions to...

  19. Add social bookmark links to any ASP.NET page

    · 2 min read

    Social bookmarking is often thought of as being something used only on blogs. That’s probably because you only see them on blogs, when they in fact could be used at most other types of websites as well. It is a feature...

  20. XML membership provider for ASP.NET 2.0

    · 2 min read

    ASP.NET ships with a SqlMembershipProvider and a ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider that makes user authentication and authorization very easy to implement, but for some reason those are the only membership providers...