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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]