Arnold Matusz's Blog

Whenever you do maintenance work on a website it is advisable to show the visitors a nice message telling them politely to come back later, rather than a nasty error, or even worse: a big Yellow Screen of Death.

Since ASP.NET 2.0 came out of the labs of Microsoft, there is a way to take a web application down using the “app_offline.htm” approach. You simply create a HTM file, which you then upload to the server, and if there is any request to this web application, IIS will automatically show the contents of the app_offline.htm file. Once uploaded, most people only rename the file so that it doesn't catch up with IIS anymore, and the site is already back online. » Continue reading ...

LINQ is one feature I could not live without anymore. It is always a pain to work on projects using older technologies. The gap between .NET 1.1 (VS.NET 2003) and .NET 2.0 (VS.NET 2005) was huge and it was difficult to develop anything in ASP.NET v1.1 after you got your hands on .NET 2.0. But the gap between .NET 3.5 SP1 coupled with Visual Studio 2008 and the prior version is far bigger.

There is LINQ, LINQ to SQL, Lambda Expressions, the Entity Framework (and allot more) which simply boost your development speed. Anyone who hasn’t tried these yet: you definitely need to have a go! » Continue reading ...

This post may be most relevant to those who haven’t had the chance to work with jQuery yet. Lately there is a great hype around jQuery, very many people talk about it, very many write excellent example but most of them target more advanced users.

jQuery is a lightweight (~19KB Minified and Gzipped) JavaScript library which easily enables us to traverse the DOM (Document Object Model), handle events, animate elements, and do asynchronous requests (AJAX – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). » Continue reading ...

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 ...