September 1, 2003

Persistent session state

In ASP.NET 1.0 you have the option to maintain the session state on an external process, in SQL Server, by setting the mode attribute of the sessionState tag in web.config to SQLServer. The problem is that the data is stored in the SQL Server’s Temp database, and thus the data

Associating a custom bitmap to a web or Windows custom control

When you create a custom Windows or Web control, compile it and add it to the Visual Studio .NET’s Toolbox, the control is added to the toolbox with a default bitmap representing a gear. This might be fine if you’re developing the controls for your own use, but it surely

Referencing external config files from Web.Config

Anybody programming with ASP.NET knows that you can store custom application’s settings in the web.config file, under the section, and programmatically read the values through the ConfigurationSettings class. When the application starts, the web.config is read and all its settings are cached, so that there isn’t a IO operation every

Creating a scrollable DataGrid

When you create a DataGrid, it would be often good to specify its height, and have the DataGrid show a scrollbar if the content is longer than the given height. This would allow to make up a fixed layout that doesn’t get messed up if there are a few or

Input validation in ASP.NET 1.1

ASP.NET 1.1 automatically validates input posted to the server against a list of potentially dangerous strings (the values are hard-coded, unfortunately, it would have been nice to be able to edit this list). For example, by default it prevents the user to submit text that contains “”, to protect the