Issue: 2007 - March/April

Mar/April 2007 Editorial by Rod Paddock

Do you ever feel like you’re beating your head against a wall? I know I do; quite often, in fact. It seems like developers spend half of their time bending technology to their purposes when the technology doesn’t really quite fit. Well, I’m actually thinking of one problem in particular right now, namely that of validation. Can you think of a more boring topic? There are few, but I think you can agree that it is an extremely important one in business software.

So you finally have a product to sell, and a site to sell it on. But wait; how do you prevent unauthorized users from downloading your products? Forms Authentication provides only part of the solution. In this article, I’ll show how to prevent specific users from accessing specific files on your site; even by browsing directly to them.

Lookup and navigation screens initially seem like no-brainers, when compared to other parts of an application-yet by the time a developer has met all the user requirements and requests, he/she has expended much more time than expected. This issue of The Baker’s Dozen will build a lookup Web page using ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and C# 2.0. The lookup and results page will contain optional lookup criteria and custom paging of the result set. The solution will utilize n...ew language features in SQL 2005 for providing ranking numbers to correlate with custom paging, and new capabilities in .NET generics to pump the results of a stored procedure into a custom collection. Just like Mr. Mayagi taught Daniel the martial arts by doing exercises, the example in this article will demonstrate some common design patterns, such as factory creation patterns, using .NET generics. The article also subtly presents a general methodology for building database Web pages.See More

ASP.NET provides a couple of page-level state persistence mechanisms in ViewState and the new ControlState.While both mechanisms work, they both have some limitations in that they are not deterministic for the application developer-ViewState can be turned off and can be very bulky, and ControlState can only be set from within a control implementation. In this article I’ll show another, more flexible state mechanism using a PreservePropertyControl that allows automatic pe...rsistence and restoration of field values automatically without requiring ViewState.See More

You may think of generics as a Ferrari that you only take out for special occasions; but they are better compared to your trusty pickup, perfectly suited for everyday use.

Working with big applications requires extending the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Membership API to handle more detailed member records.In this article, I’ll present one of the available techniques used to extend the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Membership API to solve some of the limitations of that API.

Mar/April 07 Carl Franklin .NET Rocks Column

Mar/Apr 07 Doc Detective column.

Ken Getz Mar/April Finalize column.