Code Snippets Gallery from CSS-Tricks has a nice collection of really useful code snippets.

We all know that CSS-Tricks is one of the most useful websites out there to learn about CSS tips and tricks. For those of you who has some exposure to CSS-Tricks would remember those wonderfully useful screencasts by Chris Coyier. On top of everything useful at CSS-Tricks they’ve even put out a Code Snippets Gallery section where you can discover code snippets that would be absolutely useful in your day-to-day web development work.

Code Snippets Gallery hosts code samples that are really simple in nature but are terribly useful for most of the common programming job. The code snippets are grouped into,

• CSS
• htaccess
• HTML
• JavaScript
• jQuery
• PHP
• WordPress

The code snippets include a wide range of common scenarios, like for example,

• Center DIV with dynamic height
• Cross Browser hr styling
• Fixed Footer
• PNG fix for IE6
• Remove file extensions from URLs
• Embedding Flash
• Meta tag to force IE8 to behave like IE7
• The common DOCTYPES
• Auto-select textarea
• Modern JavaScript Event Handling
• Prevent background image flickering in IE
• Check if jQuery is loaded
• Equalize heights of DIVs
• Persistent headers on tables
• Simple jQuery Accordion
• Create URL Slug from post title
• Display a user Gravatar from email address
• Get users IP address
• Intelligent PHP Cache Control
• Server side image resizer
• And much more…

You must have got a feel of how much those code snippets would be helpful.

If you use Textmate or Coda as your code editor you can directly import these code snippets directly into those code editors. Even though it’s not a big deal it’s a slight convenience factor.

Overall, Code Snippets Gallery is a fantastic place to find out about many of the most commonly use code snippets. I hope Chris keeps the Code Snippets Gallery more and more up to date so it can be one of the most useful tool for web developers.

Visit Code Snippets Gallery on CSS-Tricks.

Learn the various media types that can go with your CSS file.

When you link to a CSS file from your web page you must have noticed the “media” attribute and must have plain simply used “screen” or “print” for the most part. Ever wonder what the different media types that you can link your stylesheet to? Here is the list,

Learn how to retrieve just the list of file names from an FTP site in .NET.

When dealing with a remote FTP before we start downloading those mega files we wanted to exercise extra caution to make sure we don’t unnecessarily put strain on the corporate network. One precautionary way to deal with this is to make sure we download or upload what exactly we want.

Many times, our implementation might require you to just list the files on a page and let the user download what they want. The real download happens only when the user choose a filename. So, how do we get the list of filenames from an FTP site location without downloading the actual file?

Well, .NET has an answer for you with FtpWebRequest on System.Net. FtpWebRequest has a property “Method” which can be used to indicate your intentions with the request, in this case, “ListDirectory”. Once set, a call to GetResponse() will list you the filenames on the FTP location. Of course, when the user chooses to download a file then you can use the “DownloadFile” property to start streaming the file from that FTP site.

Create a simple method that establishes connection with a FTP site (optionally passing-in the parameters).

protected virtual FtpWebRequest CreateFtpWebRequest(Uri uri, string ftpUsername, string ftpPassword)
{
FtpWebRequest ftp = FtpWebRequest.Create(uri) as FtpWebRequest;
if (!(string.IsNullOrEmpty(ftpUsername.Trim())))
{
ftp.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(ftpUsername, ftpPassword);
}
ftp.UseBinary = true;
return ftp;
}

“Uri” parameter takes in a System.Uri with a valid location to a FTP site. If you have the FTP site secured then you can pass-in the “ftpUsername” and “ftpPassword” properties. If you don’t pass-in the values then it will connect to the FTP location as “Anonymous”.

Once you’ve created a FTP request then you can use a similar method like below to get the filenames.

public List GetFileNames(string remotePath, string ftpUsername, string ftpPassword)
{
List result = new List();
WebRequest ftpWR = BuildFtpWebRequest(new Uri(remotePath), ftpUsername, ftpPassword);
ftpWR.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.ListDirectory;
using (WebResponse response = ftpWR.GetResponse())
using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
{
string itme = reader.ReadLine();
while (item != null)
{
result.Add(item);
item = reader.ReadLine();
}
}
return result;
}

Note the usage of the “Method” property on the FTPRequest object. “ListDirectory” indicates that with this request we are intending to get the FTP headers only which will contain the filenames. We then build a list out of it and return the list as List.

Technorati Tags:
.NET, How To, FTP, Source Code, Code Sample

Start using Oracle as the database from .NET with this simple Oracle connectivity tip.

Connecting to a SQL Server database from any .NET application is as simple as ABC. But when it comes to connecting to Oracle databases it’s not as simple as you think.

If you have access to the TNS file (tnsnames.ora) then you can pull out most of the information that you need to connect to an Oracle database. If you don’t have access to the TNS file then you need to gather these information prior to making an attempt to connect to an Oracle database,

· Database Name
· Primary TCP Host IP Address
· Primary TCP Port Number
· Secondary TCP Host IP Address
· Secondary TCP Port Number
· Oracle Service Name
· User ID
· Password
Once you have the above information you can then update your web.config file’s section to reflect the below connection string (replace the entries appropriately, of course!)

Once you have these setup then it becomes ABC to really connect to the database. If you are using ODP.NET then you can use a similar statement like below to establish a connection to the Oracle database,


using Oracle.DataAccess.Client;
private string connString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["databaseName"].ConnectionString;
try
{
OracleConnection conn = new OracleConnection();
conn.ConnectionString = connString;
conn.Open();
return conn;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
// handle the generic exception if you wish
}


Keep in mind that the databaseName is nothing but the name given to the connection string on web.config.

Technorati Tags:
How To, .NET, Programming, Oracle, Oracle Connectivity

Quince, from Infragistics helps you explore some of the best user interface patterns.

If you are into Web development or into desktop applications development I’m sure you must have been craving for a library of samples for your user interface (to get influence, may be). Of course, there are plenty of websites that we tend to mock but to get an understanding of the user interface patterns there are not many obvious choices.

Quince from Infragistics fills that gap a little bit by exposing some of the most common user interface patterns in use.

At its home page Quince allows you to explore the different UI patterns by “User Tasks”, “Tag Relations”, “Wireframe” or you can explore “All Patterns”.

When you explore All Patterns, it neatly arranges the patterns by names such as Action Links, Breadcrumbs, Button Groups etc. There are a whole sleuth of patterns that you can explore on.

It also lists a wide range of filters to help you narrow down to the pattern that you are interested.

Once you click on a pattern to explore Quince brings up the details page with some image thumbnails so you can visually see it in action along with some descriptive text to help you understand the pattern.

Overall, it seems to a decent solution to find out about the various user interface patterns that’s in use in the everyday web/desktop. If you find any different usage of Quince please let us know in comments.

Visit Quince.

Technorati Tags:
User Interface, UI, How To, Patterns, Quince

Typed DataSets in ASP.NET is a pretty nice and handy feature. It gives you greater control of what the table relations should be and it pretty much reflect what the database holds. It’s pretty nice. But one thing I hate about Typed DataSet is that when you serialize your Typed DataSet your XML looks little messed up.

For the most part the XML serves the purpose but it has all sorts of primary key/foreign key references that are serialized into the XML that at times we might not need and might be confusing. Rather if we can get an XML that makes more sense and readable would suffice.

Adding an XSD file to your project won’t help right away as Visual Studio.NET 2005 doesn’t directly generate datasets (.Designer.cs files) out of it. But, there is a work around that you can use to make Visual Studio.NET 2005 generate typed-dataset from an XSD files. Here is what you should do,

• Select the XSD file you want Visual Studio.NET 2005 to generate typed-dataset from
• Right click and choose “Properties” to go into the XSD file’s Properties list
• Set the “Build Action” to “Content”
• Set the “Custom Tool” to point to “MSDataSetGenerator”

And that’s it. The next time you save the XSD file in Visual Studio.NET 2005 you should be able to see the dataset file, .Designer.cs (or .vb) file, that’s more meaningful to read.

If you have to find the versions of .NET Framework installed on your computer,

Step-1:

Click the "Start” button and click on the “Control Panel”.

Step-2:

Click on the “Programs” option then click on the “Programs and Features” option.

Step-3:

Scroll down to locate Microsoft .NET Framework entry and the version number would be listed there.

If you are using Windows XP, go into the Control Panel and then click on the “Add/Remove Programs” and scroll down the list to locate Microsoft .NET Framework.

Ever wonder how to write comments within an aspx file? <!– Some Comment –> won’t cut it as it gets processed on the server side and the resulting HTML will contain the commented code as processed. Enter, <%– –%>. There are 2 ways you can truly comment on an aspx file.

If you prefer to type then use the <%- some comment –%> tags to enclose comments like below,

<%–

Anything within this block will not be parsed/handled by ASP.NET.

<asp:TextBox runat=”server”></asp:TextBox>

–%>

If you prefer to click then here is the visual way of doing the same,

There is a common practice with some development teams that they prefix any user defined stored procs with “sp_”. It’s a bad practice in a way that it was a recipe for disaster when you strike the bulb.

What I mean is that, the system stored procs in SQL Server are named starting with “sp_”. Now, when you try to name your user-defined stored procs starting with “sp_” what happens is that in addition to bringing down the performance it might give you a “gotcha” moment.

Here is how SQL Server looks for a stored proc starting with “sp_” in this hierarchy of databases,

1. Master DB
2. The stored procedure based on the fully qualified name provided
3. The stored procedure using dbo as the owner, if one is not specified

So, when you’ve named your user-defined stored proc starting with “sp_” in a database other than Master database, the Master database is always checked first when you explicitly don’t specify the database name and so when you’ve accidentally named your user-defined stored proc similar in name as the system stored proc then the user-defined stored proc will never get executed.

For example, let’s say you’ve accidentally named your user-defined stored proc as “sp_help” with the definition,

create proc sp_help
as
select * from dbo.login

Now, when you try to execute the above created proc using the

Exec sp_help

you’d be surprised to see that the sp_help under Master database has got executed than from your database.

To deal with this it is a best practice to use “usp_” rather than “sp_”. At least that’s what I prefer to use.

Ever needed to convert a System.Type to its corresponding System.Data.SqlDbTye? Here is a nice little utility function that helps you convert a System.Type to it’s corresponding System.Data.SqlDbType.

  1: private SqlDbType GetDBType(System.Type theType)
  2: {
  3:    SqlParameter param;
  4:    System.ComponentModel.TypeConverter tc;
  5:    param = new SqlParameter();
  6:    tc = System.ComponentModel.TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(param.DbType);
  7:    if (tc.CanConvertFrom(theType))
  8:    {
  9:        param.DbType = (DbType)tc.ConvertFrom(theType.Name);
 10:    }
 11:    else
 12:    {
 13:        // try to forcefully convert
 14:        try
 15:        {
 16:            param.DbType = (DbType)tc.ConvertFrom(theType.Name);
 17:        }
 18:        catch(Exception e)
 19:        {
 20:            // ignore the exception
 21:        }
 22:    }
 23:    return param.SqlDbType;
 24: }

Server.Transfer() method on ASP.NET has its own advantages and so once we get hooked up with the Server.Transfer() method we tend to avoid Response.Redirect() method as much as we can. But there are circumstances when you want to avoid Server.Transfer() to let the client know about the exact URL location and so we might end up using Response.Redirect().

When you try to redirect from a page with Response.Redirect(”url”) some times you might end up with a ThreadAbortException. The cause of the exception is that at times ASP.NET, instead of calling the Thread.Abort() method it calls HttpApplication.CompleteRequest() and that messes up the ASP.NET call stack and throws the ThreadAbort exception.

One way to resolve this is to cover it up with a Try-Catch block.

try
{
   Response.Redirect(url);
}
catch (ThreadAbortException ex)
{
}

Even though it resolves the problem it truly is expensive as exceptions are always expensive. So what would be the right thing to do?

Here is the syntax of Response.Redirect()

public Redirect(string url, bool endResponse);

So to avoid the ThreadAbortException pass in “FALSE” as the second argument to the endResponse parameter,

Response.Redirect(url, false);

This should take care of the ThreadAbortException. When this parameter is set to ”false” the client is sent the redirect url, but the internal call to Response.End() is skipped. This skips the code path that would throw the exception, but the cost is that this thread doesn’t stop executing the Application events completely. Thankfully we can resolve that problem by duplicating the step that Response.End() takes under those rare circumstances, namely calling the HttpApplication.CompleteRequest() method explicitly.

HttpApplication.CompleteRequest() sets a variable that causes the thread to skip past most of the events in the HttpApplication event pipeline and go straight to the final event, named HttpApplication.EventEndRequest. This gracefully terminates the execution of the thread with a minimum of server resources.

Here is a great way to make some of your web toolbars resemble Windows Vista’s. The demo toolbar that they have is pretty impressive. It’s kind of hard to make out the difference. The steps look not that bad too.

The good thing about this trick is that it is compatible across browsers including, Firefox 2, IE 6, IE 7, Opera 9.2, Safari 3.0.3 for Windows.

Read the full article from here. Definitely it is worth a bookmark.

If you are developing web services with ASP.NET you must have faced this error,

EXECUTE permission denied on object ’sp_sdidebug’, database ‘master’, owner ‘dbo’.

It’s a pretty vague error with misleading and confusing information. Even if you search online you wouldn’t be able to find a solution that’s convincing. But here is a solution that worked for me. There is no guarantee that it would work for you but you can certainly give this a try.

Please note that this solution may only be effective if you are debugging your ASP.NET web page or web service and are manually attaching the worker process.

1. Attach to the ASP.NET worker process.

Click on the “Debug” menu and click on the “Attach to Process…” menu option. Then in the dialog box choose “aspnet_wp.exe” process and click on the “Select…” button at the top.

2. Choose to debug Managed Code.

You will get the “Select Code Type” dialog with the “Automatically determine the type of code to debug” selected. Instead choose the “Debug these code types” option and then choose the “Managed” checkbox.

Try to recreate the problem again and I’m sure it works this time without the “EXECUTE permission denied on object ’sp_sdidebug’, database ‘master’, owner ‘dbo’.” error.

Hope it helps. Let us know in comments of any other alternate solutions to this issue.

If you are a decently experienced .NET Developer who has to deal with ASP.NET/Visual Studio.NET IDE then I’m sure you must have came across an annoying Visual Studio error,

“Unable to get the project file from Web server. Unable to open Web project <projectname>. The file path <path> does not correspond to the URL <URL>. The two need to map to the save server location. HTTP Error 403: Access Forbidden.”

It’s very annoying because it wouldn’t let you open the project file in Visual Studio. This particularly happens when you move an ASP.NET website or web service to a different machine or to a different web host.

So, how do we fix this error?

From the above message it was obvious that it has something to do with the .webinfo file having a wrong mapping. Sometimes it might not be the case. Even if you make sure the IIS Virtual Directory points to the correct local path, recreated IIS application etc. you might still get the same error. Well, no worries, this simple fix would work.

Just delete the virtual directory in IIS and then recreate it again. Restart IIS and bingo, your Visual IDE should play nice with IIS again from now on.

Hope it helps.

PS: If the above solution doesn’t work or deleting the virtual directory is not a choice for you (for whatever reasons) then try this one. Find the “VSWebCache\<ProjectName>” folder under your Documents and Settings folder and delete it and try it again.