Earlier this week, I wrote up a tutorial about how to make a testing environment for Joomla on the windows platform. I went through the instructions of setting up WAMP, making the database, and installing and configuring Joomla. It turns out there’s a much easier way to create a testing environment for Joomla, Magento, MySQL, …
Select Category:
JQuery Date Picker: One Step Torwards Making Forms That Work
While attending Microsoft Mix earlier this spring, I stumbled upon a book called “Making Forms That Work“, which was written by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney. The book focused on building web-forms that aren’t intimidating and that people will actually fill out. One of the focuses was making sure to use the right controls for …
How to Export Data to Excel in C# and ASP.NET
If you develop a web-application for a client that involves creating and viewing reports, it’s very likely that they’re going to want to be able to export that data to excel very readily. Fortunately, you won’t need any special libraries or hundreds of lines of code to make that happen in ASP.NET. All you need …
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Your WordPress Blog or Website
WordPress is without a doubt the most popular blogging platform on the web. It’s easy to use, relatively secure, very extensible and best of all free. Unfortunately, it’s not optimized for search engines terribly well out of the box. The URLs that it generates don’t have any keywords in them. There’s no way to customize …
How to Generate Random Passwords in C#
If you’re developing a site that requires users to logon, chances are you’re going to need to be able to generate passwords at some point, whether it be when users initially create their accounts or after they lose their passwords and need to reset their account credentials. Here’s a very customizable function that will generate …
How to Build a Joomla Testing Environment on Windows
In the next couple of weeks, I’m planning on developing a Joomla 1.5 module so that I can flex my PHP muscles and get some more experience developing for Joomla. As part of this, It will be very helpful to have a local environment where I can test out the component that I’m plan on …
A Simple Way to Hash Passwords in ASP.NET
If you’re developing a website that requires your users to create an account, it’s a very good idea to not store their passwords in plain-text in the database. A good chunk of users use the same password for just about everything, so if your database is compromised, there’s the possibility of having some real reprocussions …
How to Crop Images in ASP.NET with "Web Crop Image Control"
When researching various web-based imaging cropping tools, I’ve found that there are a lot of good looking JQuery, MooTools, and other JavaScript based solutions out there, but there’s not a ton of good server-side support. The one ASP.NET control I found that I really did like was “Asp.net 2.0 Web Crop Image Control“. It’s actually …
ASP.NET Caching Techniques and Tools
One of the most frequent criticisms of the ASP.NET stack is that it’s less efficient than some of its open-source counterparts. However, Microsoft has actually built in a lot of neat technology into the framework related to caching that allows for much more scalability than you might think. Not only is there caching support built …
How to Set File Permisisons to Upload Files in ASP.NET
If you plan on doing any sort of file manipulation on a web-server using ASP.NET, you’re going to have to become intimiately familiar with the System.IO library and learn how to properly configure the permissions for the directories you would like to write to on your Windows Server ’03 or ’08 web-server. Fortunately, the process isn’t …
Make an AJAX-like Multiple File Uploader with Uploadify
I’m currently working on an file manager that will be integrated with the content management system software that we developed. In doing this, I’ve been looking for a solution that would allow users to upload multiple files at once, does so in a very easy to use way and shows a progress bar. For this …
Making Use of Escape Sequences in C# and Visual Basic
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 …
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 …
How to Safely Display Your Email Address Online Without Getting Spammed
If you have a website or blog, one of your motivating factors is that you’d like to promote yourself, your services or your ideas. Typically most bloggers don’t want to be writing anonymously and would like to provider their readership an easy way to contact them. Unfortunately, it’s a really bad idea to let your …
Building a Simple Image Rotator with JQuery
I was recently working on a new website for an adult fellowship group at my church and one of the tasks I had was to create an image rotator that had various bible verses on it that would transition every few seconds. Since the site was Joomla-based, I initially searched for a free plugin that …