Today I was reading www.asp.net forums for some Q/A  & I found one interesting Query regarding Gridview sorting. So I feel that let me share it with others also.

Query Posted by Kamran Shahid

I am using built in sorting in gridview. The links on the headers column shows like

javascript:__doPostBack(‘GridView1′,’Sort$au_fname’)

Is tehre any way I can change the display of that link like for example it may show # or au_fname only.

Solutions by Imran Baloch

With JQuery

<script language="javascript">
$(function(){
    $("a[href]").each(function(n){
        if(this.href.indexOf("GridView1")>-1)
        {
            var a=this.href;
            this.href="#";
            $(this).click(function(event){
                this.href=a;
            });
        }
    });
});
</script>

Without JQuery

<script language="javascript">
 var tags = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
 for (var i=0; i < tags.length; i++)
 {
      if(tags[i].href.indexOf("GridView1")>-1)
      {
            tags[i].custom1=tags[i].href;
            tags[i].href="#";
            tags[i].onclick=function(event){
                alert(this.custom1);
                thisthis.href=this.custom1;
            }
      }
 }
</script>  

Hope this will help !!!

Happy Programming

I always use firebug in firefox to check my web pages while developing my applications. I became use to of that. So I thought there must be some tool for IE also. So I googled on that and I came to know that IE Developer Toolbar is the tool that I works like firebug.

Download link : here

Same way I have searched Tools that work like Firebug on Crome & Safari. I have found that Web Inspector can help me to do so.

Web Inspector

The Web Inspector allows you to view the page source, live DOM hierarchy, script debugging, profiling and more!

•    Safari — Enable the Develop menu option in the Advanced preferences. Use the optional toolbar button, Develop menu or Inspect Element context menu to access to Web Inspector.

•    Google Chrome — Enabled by default, use the Inspect Element context menu to access to Web Inspector.

For download & more info : here

Introduction

ASP.NET Web services were developed for building applications that send and receive messages by using the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) over HTTP. The structure of the messages can be defined using an XML Schema, and a tool is provided to facilitate serializing the messages to and from .NET Framework objects. The technology can automatically generate metadata to describe Web services in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and a second tool is provided for generating clients for Web services from the WSDL.

WCF is for enabling .NET Framework applications to exchange messages with other software entities. SOAP is used by default, but the messages can be in any format, and conveyed by using any transport protocol. The structure of the messages can be defined using an XML Schema, and there are various options for serializing the messages to and from .NET Framework objects. WCF can automatically generate metadata to describe applications built using the technology in WSDL, and it also provides a tool for generating clients for those applications from the WSDL.

Protocol Support

WCF Supports following protocol: HTTP, TCP, Named Pipes, MSMQ, Custom, UDP.

Web Service Support only HTTP Protocol.

Hosting Support

Web Service can be hosted only with Http Runtime on IIS. WCF component can be hosted in any kind of environment in .NET 3.0, such as a console application, Windows application, or IIS.

WCF services are known as ’services’ as opposed to web services because you can host services without a web server.

Self-hosting the services gives you the flexibility to use transports other than HTTP.

Backwards Compatibility

The purpose of WCF is to provide a unified programming model for distributed applications.

WCF takes all the capabilities of the existing technology stacks while not relying upon any of them.

Applications built with these earlier technologies will continue to work unchanged on systems with WCF installed.

Existing applications are able to upgrade with WCF

Integration

WCF can use WS-* or HTTP bindings to communicate with ASMX pages

Advantage of WCF or Limitations of ASMX

An ASMX page doesn’t tell you how to deliver it over the transports and to use a specific type of security. This is something that WCF enhances quite significantly.

ASMX has a tight coupling with the HTTP runtime and the dependence on IIS to host it. WCF can be hosted by any Windows process that is able to host the .NET Framework 3.0.

ASMX service is instantiated on a per-call basis, while WCF gives you flexibility by providing various instancing options such as Singleton, private session, per call.

ASMX provides the way for interoperability but it does not provide or guarantee end-to-end security or reliable communication.

Reference : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa702755.aspx

There are lots of way show color picker on web site. Today I was search for such color picker which I want to use it in one of my website.

I have searched a lot of color picker that can be useful, so here I m writing about it.

ColorPicker AJAX Extender

ColorPicker is an ASP.NET AJAX extender that can be attached to any ASP.NET TextBox control. It provides client-side color-picking functionality with UI in a popup control. You can interact with the ColorPicker by clicking on a colored area to set a color. It requires a binary reference to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

ColorPicker extender is multi-browser compatible: it works with IE 6/7/8, Firefox, Safari and Goggle Chrome. ColorPicker is built on top of ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and internally utilizes a Popup extender. ColorPicker is compatible with the UpdatePanel: can be placed inside the UpdatePanel.

ColorPicker is included in Ajax Control Toolkit since Release 30512. For those who use previous release of Ajax Control Toolkit this ColorPicker project will continue to evolve and stay in sync with the Ajax Control Toolkit.

Read more…

Color Picker using javascript

This widget is used to select a color, in hexadecimal #RRGGBB form. It uses a color "swatch" to display the standard 216-color web-safe palette. The user can then click on a color to select it.

This script is very simple to implement, and can add a lot of style to your page that requires color values!

Because of the size of the table, this color picker may be slow on lower-end machines. Consider your target users when deciding whether or not it operates fast enough.

Read more…

These functions allowed you to do commonly-requested actions with select boxes.

For example, you can easily pass values between two select boxes. This makes a nice Windows-style interface for choosing components, adding and removing items from a list, etc. Options are re-ordered as they are added and removed from the lists.

Several other functions are included in the source that are not in the examples. This includes copying items in lists instead of moving them, copying/moving all items, and automatically selecting all items in a list.

read more

Other related articles 

• using jQuery moving Items in Listboxes
• using javascript moving Items in Listboxes

This article explains how to get started with digital signatures, using X509 certificates in .NET.

The purpose of digital signatures is to identify data in a way that cannot easily be faked.  Phishing, infected software and illegal contents published by unknown subjects can be prevented with digital signatures. Digital signatures will allow data and digital documents to be used as if they were signed paper. Browsers are now able to recognize X.509 certificates and know which Certificate Authorities are trusted. The X.509 system has grown to be the standard format for public key certificates, and is therefore the best way of proving that a document comes from the source it claims to come from.

This article will introduce X509 certificates, explain a little about the asymmetric cryptography that is at their heart, and end by describing how to use and manage these certificates within the .NET Framework classes.

Asymmetric Cryptography and Digital Signatures

Digital signatures are created using asymmetric cryptography, the approach on which digital signatures are based. Asymmetric Cryptography is distinguished by having two different keys, a private key to encrypt messages and a public key to decrypt them. The cryptographic private key K0 (a suitable array of bytes) is used with an appropriate algorithm to  transform the initial human-readable message into a different message that is encrypted.

A second public cryptographic key K1, which is related to the private one, is used to change the encrypted message back to its original decrypted form via a second related algorithm.

With this mechanism, your recipient is sure that the message that she/he received is your message, because only you hold the private key that is related to the public, shared, key. You digitally ‘sign’ your message.

In practice, you will hash the message beforehand (with hash algorithm such as MD5 or SHA1), obtaining the hashed message M1. Then you will encrypt M1 with your private key K0, digitally signing your message, and, finally, you will send your message M, the encrypted hash M1 (the signature) and the public key K1 to your recipient. Your recipient will compute the hash of your message M and will compare it with the decrypted value of M1. If the two hashes matches, the signature is valid.

You will notice that the signature is obtained by encrypting the hash of a message, rather than  the message itself. This is done for performance reasons.  Asymmetric cryptography is a slow process and the time required to encrypt, or decrypt, a message is directly related to the message length.  You can make better use of the processor by reducing the amount of data to be processed. Sometimes, a very large (in bytes) message, can be reduced, by hashing it, to a much smaller hashed message. It is more convenient to transmit a the bulk of the data as clear text and just attach less than a hundred encrypted bytes attached to it than to encrypt the entire message and send it in the encrypted form.

Asymmetric key encryption by itself is not enough because it is necessary to trust the public key received. An attacker can deceive you by signing a message with his private key and send you a digitally confirmed message with its (related) public key, whilst  pretending he is someone  else.

The public-key infrastructure (PKI) avoids this by utilizing a third-party entity, called Certification Authority that, under its responsibility, binds a public key to its owner. The binding occurs when the Certification Authority digitally sign a message that contains the public key and the identity of its owner. A digital certificate is obtained.

Read more

Question:

for should be used instead of foreach to iterate over collections in performance-critical loops.

Answer: True

foreach uses an enumerator which can sometimes be slower than the simple iteration of a variable in a for loop. Enumerators, such as those contained in the .NET Framework, have both managed heap and virtual function overhead. The amount of overhead depends on the collection used and the version of the .NET Framework. As always, the best way to determine the overhead between techniques is to run a performance test and compare.

To illustrate the performance impact, 10 strings were concatenated 100 times using the techniques outlined below. 

Running against .NET Framework 3.5 using an ArrayList, a generic List and a LinkedList with 5,000 strings, the following results were obtained using Ants Performance Profiler 5:

Except for the LinkedList, the for loop is faster.

The for loop is thought by many developers to be less readable and maintainable than foreach. Using foreach also makes it possible to iterate across anything that’s IEnumerable, allowing for the creation of more general algorithms and the use of "yield" to build custom collections.

It is normally good practice to code for clarity rather than micro-optimization.

Reference : Rad-gate

Introduction

In this article I have explained how to upload multiple files using file upload control. I have used jQuery plugin for uploading multiple files.

I have also explained how to check for file type, file maximum size limit using jQuery & also using server side validation code.

Download the Following Files

• jQuery 1.3.2
• Multiple File Upload Plugin

Namespace used

using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

Step 1: Include the jQuery Files needed on the page.

Assuming you have downloaded these files, create a reference to these files in the <head> section of your page as shown below:

  <head id="Head1" runat="server">
        <title>Multiple File Upload using JQuery</title>
        <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.3.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="Scripts/jquery.MultiFile.js" type="text/javascript">
        </script>
    </head>

Step 2: Add File Upload Control & Button on the Page.

 <asp:FileUpload ID="FileUpload1" runat="server" class="multi" accept="gif|jpeg|bmp|png|jpg"
        maxlength="5" />
    <br />
    <asp:Button ID="btnUpload" runat="server" Text="Upload All" OnClick="btnUpload_Click" />
    <br />
    <asp:Label ID="lblMsg" runat="server" Text="">\
    </asp:Label>

Step 3: Double click on Upload Button & Write the code that is used to upload files.

 protected void btnUpload_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (ServerSideValidation() == true)
        {
            string SavePath, Msg = null;

            // Get the HttpFileCollection
            HttpFileCollection hfc = Request.Files;
            for (int i = 0; i < hfc.Count; i++)
            {
                HttpPostedFile hpf = hfc[i];
                if (hpf.ContentLength > 0)
                {
                    SavePath = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["PatientPhotoImages"].ToString()
                        + GetUniqueKey() + GetFileExtension(hpf.FileName);
                    hpf.SaveAs(Server.MapPath(SavePath));
                    //SavePath can be saved in DB.
                    Msg += GetFileName(hpf.FileName.ToString()) + " , ";
                }
            }
            lblMsg.Text = Msg + " Uploaded Successfully.";
        }
    }

Step 4: Write the private function which helps to Upload files.

This function helps to extract file extension from the fileName.

 private string GetFileExtension(string FileName)
    {
        char saperator = '.';
        string[] temp = FileName.Split(saperator);

        return "." + temp[1].ToString();
    }

OR

private string GetFileExtension(string filePath)
    {
        FileInfo fi = new FileInfo(filePath);
        return fi.Extension;
    }

This function helps to get Unique Key, which is used to save files on server with different name that does not collied with each other.

 private string GetUniqueKey()
    {
        int maxSize = 8;
        char[] chars = new char[62];
        string a;

        a = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890";

        chars = a.ToCharArray();

        int size = maxSize;
        byte[] data = new byte[1];

        RNGCryptoServiceProvider crypto = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();

        crypto.GetNonZeroBytes(data);
        size = maxSize;
        data = new byte[size];
        crypto.GetNonZeroBytes(data);
        StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder(size);

        foreach (byte b in data)
        {
            result.Append(chars[b % (chars.Length - 1)]);
        }

        return result.ToString();
    }

This function help to get Filename from the filepath.

 private string GetFileName(string filePath)
    {
        FileInfo fi = new FileInfo(filePath);
        return fi.Name;
    }

Step 5: Add Server Side Validation Code

This is the function which is used to validate files that user wants to upload. If the client side validation does not work, this code will help us to identify the invalid files.

Validation rules like whether file type is correct or not, file size is valid or not.

If you do not want to validate the files on server side, you can ignore this code. But I prefer to use it.

 private bool ServerSideValidation()
    {
        string errorMsg = string.Empty, temp = null;
        bool errorFlag = true;

        // Get the HttpFileCollection
        HttpFileCollection hfc = Request.Files;
        for (int i = 0; i < hfc.Count; i++)
        {
            HttpPostedFile hpf = hfc[i];
            if (hpf.ContentLength > 0)
            {
                temp = ValidateImage(hpf);
                if (temp != null)
                {
                    errorMsg += GetFileName(hpf.FileName.ToString()) + " has error : " + temp;
                    temp = null;
                }
            }
        }

        if (errorMsg != "")
        {
            lblMsg.Text = errorMsg;
            errorFlag = false;
        }
        return errorFlag;
    }

This function used to check file type & file size. If file is invalid than it will return error message.

 private string ValidateImage(HttpPostedFile myFile)
    {
        string msg = null;
        int FileMaxSize = Convert.ToInt32(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["FileUploadSizeLimit"].ToString());
        //Check Length of File is Valid or Not.
        if (myFile.ContentLength > FileMaxSize)
        {
            msg = msg + "File Size is Too Large.";
        }
        //Check File Type is Valid or Not.
        if (!IsValidFile(myFile.FileName))
        {
            msg = msg + "Invalid File Type.";
        }
        return msg;
    }

This function is used to check whether the file that user want to upload is valid file type or not.

private bool IsValidFile(string filePath)
    {
        bool isValid = false;

        string[] fileExtensions = { ".bmp", ".jpg", ".png", ".gif", ".jpeg", ".BMP", ".JPG", ".PNG", ".GIF", ".JPEG" };

        for (int i = 0; i < fileExtensions.Length; i++)
        {
            if (filePath.Contains(fileExtensions[i]))
            {
                isValid = true; break;
            }
        }
        return isValid;
    }

Conclusion:

This code is complete solution that helps to upload multiple file using File Upload with jQuery plugin. I was always in a need of such code in my route work so I decided to write the code that helps others also.

Hope this will help !!!
Jay Ganesh

ASTreeView is a powerful treeview with drag drop, ajax loading, context menu, xml import/export, checkbox, selection, add/editing/deleting nodes with ajax.

ASTreeView is developed on .NET framework 2.0. Demo project is a Visual Studio 2005 project.

ASTreeView is FREE! That means you can use it anywhere!

for more detail : click here

hi readers ,

here is a very useful book that explore the jQuery usage with ASP.NET Controls. This is very handy book for the web developer who uses jQuery along with ASP.NET.

It helps to enhance your web experience & better understand how/where/when to use jQuery with ASP.NET Controls.

read more : here

read the content : here