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

Tip#100: Did you know… How to view ASP.NET trace information?

WebDevTools — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:24:00 GMT

You can enable ASP.NET tracing either at an Application level or at a page level; see Tip# 77: Did you know… How to enable Page Level Tracing for your ASP.NET pages? for more information.

With the tracing enabled, you can view the trace output in a trace viewer by navigation to trace.axd from the root of your application. For example, if the URL of your application is http://localhost:11423/Website, then the trace viewer can be accessed at http://localhost:11423/WebSite1/trace.axd.

You can click on the “View Details” link of a requested page to see further information about that specific page.

To write to the trace output, you can add the statment Trace.Write(“This is an action in my page.”) into your code.

The trace request limit and whether the most recent tracing data is kept and shown in the viewer can be specified in the web.config file as follows:

<system.web>
<trace enabled=”true” mostRecent=”true” pageOutput=”true” requestLimit=”20” />

Anh Phan

SDET, Visual Web Developer

Tip#97: Did you know… How to Display Hidden Information in Design View

WebDevTools — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:20:01 GMT

The design view in Visual Studio can display glyphs and borders for the hidden non - graphic elements (such as div, span, form, and script elements). This feature helps you to see where the elements are and avoid inadvertently deleting the non-graphic elements from your page while editing.

To enable it in designer click on View -> Formatting Marks -> Show

Now you will start seeing the hidden elements on the designer surface.

Hope this helps,

Deepak Verma
SDET | Visual Web Developer

Tip#96: Did you know…You could publish your SQL databases using the SQL Publishing Wizard?

WebDevTools — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:05:51 GMT

You can use the SQL Publishing wizard in VS 2008/VWD 2008 to deploy a local database from your development machine to a hosting environment on a remote machine.

This is how you will accomplish this:

Step 1: Create a new web site by selecting menu File ->New Web Site. Switch to Server Explorer and add a new Data connection and connect to a database. In this case we will use the Northwind database that comes with SQL Express. You should point to the database you want to publish.

Step 2: Select Northwind.dbo node in Server explorer and right click to bring up the context menu. In the Context menu you have a “Publish to provider…” option.

Step 3: Click “Publish to provider …” to launch the Database Publishing Wizard.

Step 4: Click Next to select the mode. Let us go with “Script to file” mode. We will need to specify the .SQL file name and location.

Step 5: Click Next and you will get to the Publishing Options. On this page, select the script for target database (SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005) and the types of data to publish (Schema, Data or Schema+Data). You also have the option to drop existing object in script if you want to.

Step 6: Keep the default selection and hit next and generate the .SQL script.

Step 7: The .SQL file generated contains a script that you can run on any SQL server to re-create all the tables, sprocs, views, triggers, full-text catalogs, etc. for a database, as well as import and add all of the table row data that was in the database at the time the .SQL file was created.

Step 8: The .SQL file is a plain text file. You can open it in your favorite editor and customize it as you need.

Step 9: Now that we have our .SQL files, we can go about using them to install our database at our hoster. Exactly how to install the .SQL files will vary depending on how the hoster give access to our SQL account. Some hosters provide an HTML based file-upload tool that allows you to provide a .SQL file - which they will then execute against the SQL database you own.

Other hosters provide an online query tool (like below) that allows you to copy/paste SQL statements to run against your database. If you have a hoster which provides an online query tool like this, then you can open the .SQL file with a text-editor and copy/paste the contents into the query textbox and run it.

You can find my original post here.

Reshmi Mangalore
SDET, Visual Web Developer.

Tip #95: Did you know… That Web Application Projects and Class libraries are now available in Express edition?

WebDevTools — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 02:27:39 GMT

Creating a Web Application Project was possible only in VS standard SKU and above in VS 2008.

But with VS 2008 SP1 we went ahead and added support for WAP and class libraries in Visual Web Developer Express edition SP1. You can now create WAPs by going to File –> New Project.

Reshmi Mangalore
SDET, Visual Web Developer.

Tip #92: Did you know … How to select a master page using 'Select a Master Page' dialog?

WebDevTools — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:02:20 GMT

Master page for a Web form can always be set manually in the source code, but here is an option to select the master page while create the webform using the 'Select a Master Page' dialog.

The path to select a Master page using the 'Select a master page' dialog is different for a Web application project than for a Web site.

For a Web Application project:

Right click solution explore. Select Add and then select New Item
From the Add new Item dialog select Web content form and click on Add button.
Select a Master Page dialog would appear. Navigate thru the project folders to select the Master page & click on OK button. The aspx added would now be using the selected master page.

For a Web site project:

While adding a Webform, check the select master page checkbox and click on the Add button.
Select a Master Page dialog would appear. Navigate thru the project folders to select the Master page & click on OK button. The aspx added would now be using the selected master page.

Hope this helps,

Deepak Verma
SDET | Visual Web Developer

Tip #90: Did you know … How to rearrange menu items in Visual Web Developer?

WebDevTools — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:36:19 GMT

You can use the Rearrange Commands dialog box to do this. To get there:

Launch the Tools->Customize dialog. Now select the Commands Tab.

Click on the Rearrange commands… button, and this will launch the dialog that will help you with arranging your menu and toolbar items. Now choose a menu or toolbar to rearrange. You can rearrange the items by selecting them and moving them up and down. You can also use this dialog to add your own menu options.

Rearrange Commands Dialog:

Reshmi Mangalore,

SDET, Visual Web Developer.

Tip #89: Did you know…You could customize Toolbars in Visual Web Developer?

WebDevTools — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:53:02 GMT

Visual Web Developer by default shows the standard toolbar. To expose the remaining tool bars, you will have to right click on the standard tool bar area. This will bring up the list of all toolbars available. Select in this list to show or hide toolbars. In the picture below, I have chosen the formatting toolbar and the HTML Source Editing toolbars to be shown.

You can further customize the tool bar using the Tools->Customize menu option. This will launch the Customize dialog box.This dialog gives you the option to Use large Icons, Show Screen Tips on Toolbars and Show shortcut keys in ScreenTips.

Reshmi Mangalore

SDET, Visual Web Developer.

Tip #88: Did you know… To not stress your server, limit the number of concurrent requests

WebDevTools — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:07:43 GMT

The other day somebody ask me if there was a way to limit the amount of work that Site Analysis in IIS SEO Toolkit would cause to the server. This is interesting for a couple of reasons,

You might want to reduce the load that Site Analysis cause to your server at any given time
You might have a Denial-of-service detection system such as our Dynamic IP Restrictions IIS module that will start failing requests based on number of requests in a certain amount of time
Or If you like me have to go through a Proxy and it has a configured limit of number of requests per minute you are allowed to issue

In Beta 1 we do not support the Crawl-delay directive in the Robots exclusion protocol; in future versions we will look at adding support this setting. The good news is that in Beta 1 we do have a configurable setting that can help you achieve this goals called Maximum Number of Concurrent Requests that you can configure.

To set it:

Go to the Site Analysis Reports page
Select the option "Edit Feature Settings..." as show in the next image
In the "Edit Feature Settings" dialog you will see the Maximum Number of Concurrent Requests option that you can set to any value from 1 to 16. The default value is 8 which means at any given time we will issue 8 requests to the server.

Carlos Aguilar Mares, IIS Team

View the original post

Technorati Tags: IIS,SEO,tips and tricks

Tip #87: Did you know… How to reuse a web page by converting into an ASP.NET User Control?

WebDevTools — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:10:03 GMT

If you want to reuse a web form's content in other places in your application, you can easily convert the page into an ASP.NET User Control. Then you can add that user control to any other page.

For example, you have a page in your application that looks like the following:

Now, you need to rename to the file to have a .ascx extension. Then remove html, head, body, form tags from the page. Change the "@ Page" directive to a "@ Control" directive. Remove all attributes of the "@ Control" directive, except Language, AutoEventWireup, CodeFile, and Inherits. You also need the change the Inherits to have your new UserControl code behind file's name, like in the image below. Close and re-open the file to make squiggles go away.

If you have a code-behind file, its name will be changed properly for you automatically. Open the file and change the class it inherits from to UserControl, and the class name to match your .ascx file. See below.

More information can be found here.

Tip #86: Did you know… Visual Studio has several different search options?

WebDevTools — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:24:00 GMT

The standard methods for searching can be found under the Edit --> Find and Replace menu.

The “Quick Find” method (Ctrl+F) allows users to search inside of the current document, all open documents, the current project, the entire solution, and the current block by changing the Look in selection.

If you set Look in to be the current project or the entire solution, Visual studio will open files that have matches as you navigate between matches.

You can also adjust the settings under Find options to make the searches more specific by having them match on case or whole words or control how it searches by deciding whether it should search up or down or if it should look at hidden text (collapsed regions).

The Find in Files method (Ctrl+Shift+F) allows users to see all the occurrences of the search in one place, changes the Look in options by removing the current block, but allows users to search custom locations by using the “…” button next to the Look in drop down, and allows the user to restrict the types of files searched.

If you use Ctrl+F or select the Quick Find option from the find and replace menu by mistake, hitting Ctrl+Shift+F or selecting the drop down in the upper left corner of the dialog and selecting Find In Files will quickly get you to the Find in Files dialog.

Using the Result options section you choose to have the results displayed in either the “Find Results 1” or “Find results 2” window. Allowing you to switch between results if needed.

The Find What field also keeps a history of searches. To access this history click the down arrow of the Find What field. You can avoid using the history or typing search terms by having the value you want to search for selected in the editor before opening one of the find dialogs.

Ben Byrd
SDET | Visual Web Developer

Tip#85: Did you know… You can now do Multiple Selection of controls in your Designer with VS 2008 SP1?

WebDevTools — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:15:45 GMT

Visual Web developer 2008 SP1 supports multiple selection of controls on your designer using Ctrl+Click.

You can see that the designer:

Displays the primary selected control with a white tab. Button3 in the image below.
Enable you to set property for the selected controls using Property Grid. Note that the property grid would show you only the properties that are in common for all the selected controls.
Enables you to make use of the Align, Make Same Size and Order Menu commands in your Format Menu options.

However VWD 2008 SP1 does not support the ability to drag drop multiple controls and Cut/Copy/Paste of multiple elements.

Thanks!

Reshmi Mangalore

SDET, Visual Web Developer

Tip #84: Did you know… How to set a Start page for your Web Site in Visual Web Developer?

WebDevTools — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 01:49:00 GMT

As you are developing your site, you may want to start at a particular page for testing your web site. By defaults, when you start debugging, Visual Studio runs the page that was currently in focus in your designer.

If you set this page, Visual web Developer will start your web site with the Set Page and not the current page in designer.

You can do this by right-click on the page and selecting Set As Start Page option from the context menu.

This could also be set in Properties page under the Start Options tab as shown below.

Enjoy!

Reshmi Mangalore

SDET, Visual Web Developer

Tip #82: Did you know... How to migrate Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project to Visual Studio 2008

WebDevTools — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:32:56 GMT

Following steps highlight how a Visual Studio 2005 Web application project can be migrated to Visual Studio 2008.

Take backup of the original project
Open Visual Studio 2008
Click File -> Open Project and browse to the folder to open the project
You will receive the following conversion wizard to help you convert the solution or project to the current version. Click Next.
Select Yes on this screen if you want the wizard to help you to take the backup, otherwise select No and Click Next.
Be sure to read the summary on this screen & click finish
As soon as you click finish, you will see an upgrade prompt. Click yes if you want to upgrade to the latest framework otherwise Click No. If you select yes to upgrade, the project file as well as web.config file is updated for the latest framework. It's recommended to select the checkbox to do the same for all webs in this solution.
The conversion wizard would show you the status, select Show the log to see the log and click close.

For projects using Ajax you might need to install ASP.NET Ajax Extensions 1.0 in VS 2008 if you said no to upgrade. Please see Tip #62 to learn how to install it.

Hope this helps,

Deepak Verma
SDET | Visual Web Developer

Tip #81: Did you know... How to Select the CSS Schema for Intellisense and CSS Properties?

WebDevTools — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:56:52 GMT

In Visual Studio 2008, there is a Style Sheet Toolbar (visible only when a CSS file is active) which allows the user to select a CSS Schema, as seen in this screen shot:

However, this setting only affects the CSS editor, not the Intellisense in aspx or html files, nor the properties/values displayed in the CSS Property Grid, as shown here:

Setting the CSS schema for aspx/html pages is actually a bit obscure; in VS 2008 the current CSS schema in use is deduced rather than selected, and the setting is not displayed. The CSS schema is selected to complement the HTML schema, selected via the HTML Source Editing Toolbar, as shown below:

Selecting a “Target Schema for Validation” in the HTML Source Editing Toolbar implicitly selects a corresponding CSS schema, which is used in all aspx/html and similar documents opened in the web designer (documents with Design/Split/Source buttons displayed at the bottom of the window.)

Here is the table of correspondence for Visual Studio 2008:

HTML Schema	CSS Schema
Internet Explorer 6.0	Internet Explorer 6.0
Internet Explorer 3.02/Netscape Navigator 3.0	CSS 1.0
Netscape Navigator 4.0	CSS 2.1*
HTML 4.01	CSS 1.0
XHTML 1.0 Transitional	CSS 2.0
XHTML 1.0 Frameset	CSS 2.0
XHTML 1.1	CSS 2.1

* For Netscape Navigator 4.0, no CSS schema is specified, but CSS 2.1 is used.

Hope this helps!

Van Kichline

SDET | Visual Web Developer

Tip #80: Did you know… How to show JScript validation errors as warnings?

WebDevTools — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:54:00 GMT

With Visual Studio 2008 RTM, JScript validation setting is an option on the HTML validation page on the Options dialog. Since Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and later, we added a new option page JScript on the Options dialog, see the blog "Introducing JScript Formatting in VS 2008 SP1" for more detail. With this change, now the JScript validation resides on its own tab "Miscellaneous" as shown below:

To view JScript errors as warnings, we need to launch Options dialog from Tool -> Options menu, then expand Text Editor -> JScript -> Miscellaneous, check the checkbox "Show errors as warnings". Some users like to have JScript syntax errors shown in the Error List since it would encourage standard compliance, while others don't like to deal with validation errors since they are browser errors.

Anh Phan

SDET, Visual Web Developer