When working with strings of text, there are certain characters that you can’t represent in a normal string variable because the key required on the keyboard simply doesn’t exist or because of how strings are represented in text. Fortunately, modern programming languages provide “escape sequences,” or ways to represent certain characters that otherwise could not …
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My "Finding a Windows VPS" Adventure
For the last week or so, I’ve been looking for a Virtual Private Server (VPS) for use on some of my websites and personal web-development projects. My adventure began by doing a Google Search for “Windows VPS” and found dozens of different providers that had different features at different pricepoints. At first, I found it …
How to Create a JQuery File Browser with JQuery File Tree
While looking at various tools that might aid in the development of an ASP.NET based file manager, I came across a JQuery based tool called jQuery File Tree. Typically we would think of a file browser for a web-server that would be something that’s almost uniquely server-side, but jQuery File Tree does a nice job …
Using System.IO to Create, Read, Rename and Delete Files and Folders in C# and Visual Basic
If you’re making use of C# or Visual Basic for Windows Forms, ASP.NET Web Forms or ASP.NET MVC, you have access to a very powerful file-system access library that’s included with Visual Studio. The library, System.IO, will allow you to create, rename, edit and delete files and folders on your system. If you are using …
LINQ 101: Getting Started with LINQ
LINQ has been out for around a year now, but I never have been able to get away from using traditional SQL queries and data-access classes. Today, I thought I would try to do the “Hello World” equivalent of a LINQ program and share that with you today. So What’s LINQ? LINQ stands for Language …
Using JQuery? Let Google Host It
In the last decade, Google has given us a lot of amazing free services, and web developers haven’t been left out of the party. For a while now, Google has been hosting popular JavaScript libraries on their CDN (content delivery network) and letting any website make use of them for free. On face, you might …
How to Format a DateTime in C# / ASP.NET
When I was a new developer making websites in .NET, I ended up doing some pretty screwy things to make date’s and time’s look how I wanted to. I would do things like: DateTime thisDate = DateTime.Now; string AMPM = String.Empty; if(thisDate.Hour>=12) {AMPM = “PM”;} else {AMPM = “AM”;} String FormattedDate = (thisDate.Hour%12).ToString() + “:” …
360 WebCMS Feature Look: Multisite Management
I’ve spent the better part of the last 3 months developing the new version of our company’s content management system that’s called “360 WebCMS”. It’s a product that Factor 360 has and is used to develop all of our client websites. One of the cool features that I built into it was multi-site management. Essentially, …
Make Custom URLs in ASP.NET with the Global.asax File
If you’re looking to do URL rewriting for a content management system or another .NET based website, there are a number of ways to accomplish the task. There’s a very mature free product called URL Rewriter.NET which gets the job done, and Microsoft has made their own URL Routing solution which was originally developed for …
Write Your Own Database Access Class in C#
If you use C# or VB.NET through the ASP.NET stack (or just as a desktop application) to connect to a SQL database, you’ll have a few options. There’s the new entity data model from Microsoft, there’s also last year’s notion of LINQ. They both do a reasonably good job, but are sometimes on the over-kill …