Tips & Tricks for ASP.NET, IIS, and Visual Web Developer : Development

Tip#63: Did you know…How to specify a fixed port for Visual Studio Development Server while using WAPs?

WebDevTools — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:59:18 GMT

In Tip#21 we showed you how to set a fixed port for the Developer Web Server in Web Sites.

Here is how you will be able to configure this for Web Application Projects.

1. Go to the properties page of WAP. Right Click on your Web Application and click on Properties in context menu. This will take you to the Properties page.

2. Select Web Tab in this page.

3. Under Servers section, select the Use Visual Studio Development Server option. Then select Specific Port and enter the port on which you want your App to run.

4. View your page in browser and you will see that Visual studio has assigned the port you configured for your Development Server.

Enjoy!

Reshmi Mangalore

SDET, Visual Web Developer

Tip #26: Did you know... How to have C# and VB.NET files inside your App_Code directory?

WebDevTools — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:13:00 GMT

If you are taking advantage of the App_Code folder to develop an ASP.NET WebSite some times you need to use code files that are written in different .NET languages. For example, you may want to use C# files and VB.NET files in the same web site:

To be able to do this you can use a feature of the compilation section in web.config to configure sub folders inside App_Code to be compiled separately.

<compilation debug="true">
    <codeSubDirectories>
        <add directoryName="VBFiles" />
    </codeSubDirectories>
</compilation>

Federico Silva Armas
SDET, ASP.NET QA Team

Tip #15: Did you know... How to use tracing with ASP.NET Ajax?

WebDevTools — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:15:07 GMT

If you are using ASP.NET Ajax and you are having problems with a web page one quick and dirty way to debug it is to add tracing statements. You do this by using the "Sys.Debug.trace" function. For example:

        1: <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">   1:     2:     function PositionDiv() {   3:         Sys.Debug.trace("Entering PositionDiv Function");   4:         //some other code   5:         Sys.Debug.trace("Exiting PositionDiv Function");   6:     }</script>
  

In order to see the trace output you need to add a TextArea tag into the page and give it an id of "TraceConsole". This limits the usability of tracing, since once the application is deployed it would mean that the TextArea must be manually added to see the output. However, traces are also written to the Output window of VisualStudio when debugging a web site as well as the FireFox's output console, which is definitely more useful.

One of the nice things about trace is that you can leave the trace calls in your debug scripts, so that if a problem occurs in a production server you can flip to debug scripts and analyze the trace output.

The Sys.Debug class has a lot of other nice methods, for example:

assert: If the condition being tested is false, a message box will be used to display a message.
fail: Causes the program to stop execution and break into the debugger.
traceDump: Output an object's data in a readable format.

Federico Silva Armas
SDET, ASP.NET QA Team

Tip #14: Did you know…How to enable debugging of your Web Site?

WebDevTools — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 03:09:21 GMT

To run a page in Debug mode you will have to choose Debug –> Start Debugging or just press F5.

Debugging support is not enabled by default and if you have not run the debugger before on this web site, you will need to configure it. This is internally driven by a setting in Web.cong file. By default, debug is set to ”false” in compilation section of web.config file.

 <compilation debug="false" strict="false" explicit="true">

 </compilation> 
When you hit F5 for the first time, you will see the Debugging not enabled message box as 
shown below.

If you click OK, Visual Web Developer will modify web.config to show debug=”true” as shown below.

<compilation debug="true" strict="false" explicit="true">
</compilation>

Reshmi Mangalore

SDET, Web Development Tools

Tip #13: Did you know... How to get the browser agent using ASP.NET Ajax ?

WebDevTools — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:40:29 GMT

When writing JavaScript for a web application, there may be times when you want to do something different depending on the browser that is requesting the page. ASP.NET Ajax has an easy way to this with the Sys.Browser object.

For example, let's say you want to do something different if the requesting browser is Opera. The code snippet below shows how to do that:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
function DoSomething() {
    if(Sys.Browser.agent === Sys.Browser.Opera)
    {
        // opera specific code here
    }
}
</script>

There are other useful properties of the Browser object. For example, Sys.Browser.version.toString(); will return the version of the browser, if you need further granularity when deciding what to do for each browser version.

Federico Silva Armas
SDET, ASP.NET QA Team