Arnold Matusz's Blog

In my last post I blogged about how jQuery $(document).ready() and ASP.NET Ajax asynchronous postbacks can be made to behave well together. The issue is that normally $(document).ready() is called when the DOM is ready to be manipulated. But this doens’t happen after an ASP.NET Ajax asynch postback occurs.

This means that the initial jQuery bindings won’t be automatically available after the asynchronous postback is over. I underline “automatically” here because my last post describes more possibilities, how this issue can be worked around. » Continue reading ...

I’ve been a bit skeptic about the thought of combining ASP.NET Ajax with jQuery, partly because I didn’t really know what the impact was going to be. But jQuery is very fast, very appreciated throughout general opinion, there are extremely many plugins available for free, writing your own plugins only requires little JavaScript knowledge (opposed to writing your own extender in .NET, like controls in the AjaxControlToolkit).

To be sincere, there is a very short learning curve so there is no reason for not trying jQuery. I’ve tried with regular web applications, but when I coupled jQuery with ASP.NET Ajax on little niggle stood out. » Continue reading ...

Syntax highlighting code excerpts in our blog posts are visually pleasing. I prefer a nicely highlighted piece of code because it’s allot easier to read and comprehend rather than plain and simple lines of code.

It’s not just a coincidence that our development environments do syntax highlighting as standard, and it’s not just a coincidence that high level development tools like Visual Studio do “auto formatting” of our code, by making indentations, moving begin and end markers, etc. » Continue reading ...

Using Ajax in a web application makes a better user experience and if used well, it even improves performance! But it's not all advantages. With the change of a technology, of an approach we need to adjust our way of thinking and the way we apply our solutions for different task.

This might be a bit abstract, so I'll get specific about what I mean. As often met, when you click certain controls on a webpage, you expect to see an outcome, a result or a message as a response to your "request". What Ajax does is ... it replace only certain regions of your webpage. If that region isn't in the visible in the current scroll position of your page in the browser, you won't see the effect. » Continue reading ...

Most .NET developers write their code in a Visual Studio IDE. There are several reasons to use Visual Studio, but only few people really explore more advanced features than the basic controls / windows: Solution Explorer, Class View, Model Browser, Toolbox, Find and Replace :).

This is why I' ld like to take the opportunity to write about Visual Studio Macros for those of you who haven't had the chance meet Macros until now. » Continue reading ...

Lately I’ve come across an interesting situation involving BlogEngine.Net. I normally use Windows Live Writer to write my blog posts, and as I really love to post some programming related articles I use Syntax Highlighter. Sadly I don’t have Windows Live Writer set up (with all the plugins) on each workstation I work on, so whenever I need to change something in a post (typos, updates, etc.) and WLW is not at hand I get down and dirty and edit the XML files which the posts are saved in.

I hear you asking: Why you stupid idiot are you doing that when you can edit your posts in a nice WYGIWYS editor? Well, the only reason is that when I post code samples those need to be in pre tags where each and every space i very important. And after I edit/save a post in BE’s (online) the formatting is lost. » Continue reading ...

It is widely known that the in the software development process testing and debugging take much more time than actually writing the lines code. Some pessimistic articles talk about a ratio of up to 80% to 20% (debugging and test vs. code writing).

This is a very strong reason to get down and dirty to get to know the tools we are working with. Because in many cases the debugging activity is very long and without any fixed forecast of it's end exploring hidden features of the Visual Studio debugger can save you allot of time. » Continue reading ...

In my post about LINQ to XML - XPath I've mentioned how Microsoft warns about the performance bottleneck when using LINQ to XML with the Extension class from the System.Linq.XPath namespace.

"There is some performance penalty for using these methods. Using LINQ to XML queries yields better performance. So it is only advisable to use such LINQ to XML with XPath queries if and only if your application won't suffer from the slight loss of performance!"

The scenario: I’ve been using Visual Web Developer 2008 for a web application and after I moved the application from the inbuilt ASP.NET Development Server to IIS I encountered the following exception message:

Failed to map the path '/App_GlobalResources/'

There are a few blog posts out there which may apply to your case, especially if you have Crystal Reports 8 installed. Worth mentioning is: www.thejoyofcode.com. If your situation is proior to Visual Studio 2008 you might find your solution immediately in the blog content, but if the concern is a bit newer reading through each comment might be helpfull. » Continue reading ...

LINQ to Entities does not recognize the method 'Int32 ToInt32(System.String)' method, and this method cannot be translated into a store expression.

This is a shortcomming of LINQ to Entities, and indeed the ADO.NET Entity Framework at the current release! The reason for a similar exception message is that in queries on the Entity Framework, custom methods and extensions methods cannot be translated into store expressions.

There are workarounds to still enjoy LINQ to Entities and as an example please read the following: » Continue reading ...