This universe is fun.  Last week I was having a conversation with a budd about a validation regex and just a few days later I had the need to dig it out for myself ... lucky I put it on the sitelett (thanks Universe!).

In my case I needed to make a double listbox picker for Keywords.  Over the years I've just used Telerik controls but this is a lean webapp and I didn't want the extra baggage so I rolled my own.  ASCX with serverside needs plus Jquery/JS Ajax hitting an ASMX web service for adding new keywords on the fly without page reloads.

Demo here.  Code and some notes ...[more]. 

Huh?  What?

Oh sorry, been heads down the past few ... months?  Sheesh.

Ok.  There is one thing I did the other day that I'll forget if I don't put it here.  I'm working on a few new sites and all of them at one place or another need a textarea with a character limit.

I know, we've all done these since before the beginning in one way or another.  It's no big deal to just check the length  in the postback or add a key event javascript method with an alert or whatever, and these days even adding a countdown span means just grabbing someone's freebie jquery sample. 

Those all work fine mostly.  But for this project there was a twist that threw me a fail...

Wow.  If this is what a "Professional" is now expected to know, I'm sad for .Net.

[more]

Last month an alert went out from Microsoft about a severe vulnerability in ASP.Net.  A quick workaround was stepped through but the kernal of the issue remained.

I just got this email blast from the DotNetNuke folks (very very nice of them even as I am no longer a Nuke user) about the official patch now being available as direct download AND NOW Windows Update.

No matter your OS, if you run ASP.Net you should get the updates.  If money is on the line then of course you have to check the fine print and scan the comments of Scott Guthrie's blog post and do extra testing ASAP in case you are doing some off-kilter code that hits a boundary of the patch. 

Still caching after all these years

I was making a forms based ASP.Net login system, a pretty typical one that used an ascx across all pages to display a hyperlink "Log In" or "Log Out" depending on whether HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name had a value or not. The "Log In" link would redirect to a logon page and the Log Off link would of course redirect to a page that killed the authentication cookie in it's Page_Load and gave the user the message that they were logged off successfuly.

When I did the log offs, I killed the ticket and just for good measure called Session.Abandon, and with that extra line I felt smug that I did more than I needed.

(by smith first published in Feb 2000 Visual Basic Programmers Journal)

 Need the same simple power in .Net? Use Process.Start([mailto string as described below])

One of the most used lines of Win32 API code is ShellExecute.   It's great because you can pass any file name and if the file's extension is associated to a registered program on the user's machine, then the correct application will open and the file will be played or displayed.

It's almost common knowledge that ShellExecute also has internet power.  If you pass a URL, the user's default 32bit web browser will open and connect to the site. If you preface an email address with "mailto:" then the user's default 32bit eMail client will open a new email with the address filled in.