ASP.NET

Switching to MySQL in 2008

Stefan Holmberg — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:48:56 GMT

My directions for 2008

I will do some major changes when it comes to technology in 2008. Being an independent consultant (contractor) is not
all about being totally independent, of course. As in any business you need to adapt and be able to offer what your clients need. Not what you might consider the best/optimal (you can of course always come with suggestions), but in the end the client makes the decision about which platform and solution to choose, and things like existing ardware/software/knowledge often plays an important role in it. Therefore I have been doing a lot of ASP.NET, C# against MSSQL Server. However, if it was just up to me, and not taking any old luggage into consideration, I'd actually switch the MS SQL backend to MySQL!

Which is the direction I will try to take for this year. Lately I've been doing a image gallery system for a client, and since I had the freedom to choose the architechture I went for ASP.NET, C# and MySQL. Even though I live and bread MS SQL server and sps I can't say I made the wrong choice. Yes, some initial problems, no doubt, but, I must say there are certain things making MySQL the optimal database engine for a web solution.

+ price of course. Nothing more to say. The SQL 2005 Express limitations needs to be removed ASAP in my opinion, cause to me it's very much a developers database...

+ built in full text index. I have never needed full text index until a project I entered a few months ago. I looked at getting it up and running on my SQL 2005 Express development box. However, an extra download of 250 MB was needed. I also *think*

+ paging. My favorite! This is SOOO typical a web application. Implementing paging in MSSQL is not fun at all. Getting acceptable performance out of it is possible, but coding hard to generlize and reuse. In MySQL it's a matter of adding LIMIT X,Y to the end of the select statement. And not to talk about SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS. Cause typically you need to get the page of rows but also the total number of rows, as if we were not using the limiting. Typically you do
two queries, one select count(*)... and one select * limit x,y. But with SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS you get that anyway.
Yes, might not be SQL standard, but I don't care. I don't get paid by creating the most standardized solution, I get paid by delivering a solution with good performance and preberable a low footprint. I have published an article on this, ASP.NET, MySQL and efficient paging.

On the minus side:
- Microsoft default medium trust configuration. Medium trust is a good thing, it's not about that, I just feel that a lot of webhosts has no idea about what it's about. They take the default configuration (recommended by Microsoft) and uses that. And the default medium trust configuration only allows for MSSQL database access...I've had numerous of conversations with webhosts about it and many, I say many, still doesn't understand what it's about. Sure they advertise on their website of supporting asp.net, mssql, mysql etc, but still when firing up your ASP.NET 2.0 app you get the
ecurity exception cause they are not allowing MySQL from medium trust...A lot of respectable webhosts has indeed made the changes needed, GoDaddy is one of them. Hat off for them!

AdMentor PRO will always have a SQL Server driver and I will still do a LOT of SQL server gigs, since I have a lot of clients using it, but for myself and my own servers I will make the transition.

- I might be wrong here - SQL2005 installs some extra services and stuff. In MySQL it was just a matter of specifying it in the create table statement and start querying...You do need a decent stemmer though, making words in normal form.

More about code structure

Stefan Holmberg — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 08:20:30 GMT

Long time, no blogging. Sorry about that, but I have had a LONG summer vacation. Really nice.

Lately I have actually been doing some Wordpress stuff. What started out with some simple customizations for
a client quickly turned into some deep WP hacking. I can say this, I am really impressed with the product. As a
pure publishing tool I doubt there is nothing beating it. If you can live with using Apache (well, technically IIS is possible, but when doing some url rewrites etc, which you most certainly want in Wordpress, it's a lot easier with Apache) . You also have to live with being tied to PHP and MySQL, of course.

My first reflection after a few weeks of PHP hacking: I miss the ASP coding days in a way. If you don't know it,
coding in ASP and PHP are very much alike. You typically insert some PHP/ASP tags inside your HTML and just upload the page. Done... It simply allows for quick coding and quick results. While you *could* program the same way with ASP.NET there is almost like an unwritten law saying you should use code behind (what moron wrote that - oh, right, it was me...), you should create multitiered (three layers are an absolute minimum, you know) applications etc.

And I agree, myself I *almost always* do use code behind, I almost always separate business layer/database layer/GUI in different dll:s etc and I really do believe in that model. But lets face it - we must question ourselves - WHY should
we separate our layers? And is it possible to achieve in some other way?

Take code reuse for one example. If you implement your FooBar business class inside a dll it means your ASP.NET app as well as your Windows app as well as your console batch routine etc can use it. Fine! But that could also be done with ASP and PHP, not involving any dll:s, but simply including a the FooBar.php/asp file.

Cause, back to Wordpress now, I am amazed over how well organized that code project is. Using a "simple" untyped language they have implemented a model which still allows for event handling etc, third party plugin registration etc.
Yes, it's all string based, meaning you register a hook for say "wp_footer" (in this example your function will be called each time the page footer is being rendered) - but it's still really easy because of the structure. The "correct" ASP.NET equivalent would be having the server app define an interface and the plugin implementing it.

To finish this ranting off - I will not leave my "structured way" of ASP.NET coding, it works really well for me,
but the Wordpress work I have done has kind of opened my eyes a little. I kind of have this idea "best practice is not what someone else says is best practice - best practice is what best for me" (maybe a luxury of being self employed being able to define my own models) so therefore I think it's important to think always try out new and different things.

Adding controls and pages to a CMS

Stefan Holmberg — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:37:49 GMT

I have talked earlier on codebedind vs inline code and this topic touches that area.

The problem:
Client is running a website, using a CMS they don't have the source for, but rather a binary license. Now they wanted to integrate
a) a control reading from database and showing some stuff
and
b) a 404 handler (preferably ASPX). It should update a database

If you know me you know about me being a "need of control" freak. I'll take my own code over 3rd party binary components any day a week, if possible. So, I felt a little lost. Then it struck me, it's so easy actually.

For a)

Create the control - nothing special about it. Lets say it's called RefController.
Then we can add the dll to the bin directory - and it to the webpage
<%@ Register TagPrefix="RefCtl" Namespace="RefController12" Assembly="RefController" %>

bla bla html stuff
<RefCtl:RefControl id="hhh2222" runat="server" The Property="thevalue"></RefCtl:RefControl>
bla bla html stuff

And next time the page is accessed our control will be used like anyother control on the page.
Even though we havn't recompiled the main web application.

As for b)
This is really cool if you ask me. Cause you can of course also add ASPX pages to a website without needing to
recompile the webapp.

I created a file 404handler.aspx and out all source as inline:

<%@ Page language="c#"   %>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >
<HTML>
<HEAD>
  <title>404Handler</title>
  <meta name="GENERATOR" Content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.1">
  <meta name="CODE_LANGUAGE" Content="C#">
  <meta name="vs_defaultClientScript" content="JavaScript">
  <meta name="vs_targetSchema" content="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5">
</HEAD>
<body MS_POSITIONING="GridLayout">
  <form id="Form1" method="post" runat="server">
  <script language="C#" runat="server">
  protected void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
  {
   string DBConn = "Server=dbconn";
   string sPage = Request.QueryString["aspxerrorpath"];
   if ( sPage == "favicon" )
    return;

   string sExt = System.IO.Path.GetExtension(sPage).Replace(".", "").ToLower();
   if ( sExt.Length == 0 )
    return;
   if ( sExt != "aspx" && sExt != "php" && sExt != "asp" && sExt != "html" && sExt != "html" )
    return;
   if( sPage != "" )
   {
    //Add to database
   }
   else
   {
   }

   sPage = "http://www.wwwwwwwwww.com/hello.aspx"
   Response.Redirect(sPage, true );
   return;

}

Pay NO attention to the actual code, what I doing on Page_Load is of no matter.
The cool thing is that we, by this technique, are able to create independent components and
pages and just throw them into a site whenever needed. Regardless of what CMS (well, it rather be
ASP.NET based of course).

New stuff on my sites

Stefan Holmberg — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 10:55:28 GMT

Just a "new stuff" article. I've been working really hard lately which hasn't given me much time to publish stuff. But today I made some progress:

The two articles are worth reading I'd say. In short I needed some performance improvements from my laptop, thounsands of sequential calls to do DNS lookups were dead slow because of network latency over the wireless network. So I created a small ASP.NET page, uploaded it to my webserver (connected to Internet with 100MB fiber line), and sent a batch to it from my client. All DNS calls were then made from the server and the result sent back as a singe batch. Really improved the overall performance!

Posting to blogs with C# code

Stefan Holmberg — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:44:03 GMT

If you have a couple of blogs you soon get tired of logging in (oh wait, first find the right userid and password) and then clicking some menu buttons to get to the post page.

So I have started to look into a Windows client (create my own of course, heck I'm a developer, am I not) for that. It has been some "fun" trying to get the posting API:s to work and today I added a new one to the list - LiveJournal. I never even knew about it (don't know much more than wordpress and blogspot to be honest) and it was not too easy to get the posting right from the C# client.

However, a quick and dirty solution, turning into concatenating XML parts into a long string, hehe - well not big biggest moment of pride - but who cares about cred and "slick" solutions...I prefer working solutions.

AdMentor.NET and textads

Stefan Holmberg — Fri, 04 May 2007 21:58:35 GMT

Sometimes everything just falls into place.

I have been on a business trip and it involved some hours waiting on the airport for my flight - so I just took up some papers and a pencil and starting scetching on how I wanted textads to be integrated into AdMentor PRO. I soon came up with the idea(s) that

targetting for a textad should be the same mechanism as for a "usual" ad. I.e zoning, max clicks, max impressions, random/even distribution as well as the new advanced filtering such as IP/country filter, browser etc
you should then "enable" textads for a certain adposition

different templates could be used - you just create a xml/html template and place it into the /textadtemplate/ directory and the system picks it up and makes it available for usage
a textad is a banner of type "Textad" so now you can add such an ad as well

for each textad you can set click url, a header and description

The good thing about this scheme is that it is doesn't need you to do any changes to the admentor call code you already have in all your webpages.

You just create some text ads, enable it for an adposition and it will be rotate all banners (regular and textads) for the current zone. Meaning you will be able to show image/html/flash ads AND textads on the same spot. Using the same admentor code.

Here is an example on how it looks on a dummy page:

What made me SO happy was that I had plabbed to work with it for THRE whole days - but believe it or not, today I have one of those moments - as it needed some major changes in sp:s, DAL interface, MySQL+MSSQL DAL, business layer, GUI, banner serving engine, cache dependency for template files and XML eading of the same etc I wrote code for 2 hours without even trying to compile - and the first time I got ZERO compilation errrors. And even better - it worked as well!!! I have since then made some minor changes, and even found and fixed out one major flaw in my implementation, but still - tomorrow is saturday and I am really thinking of buying some lottery tickets :)

Finally - I know you are all wondering when it will be available to you - well, 15th of May 2007 is the date set. And keeping that date sure is looking good as of now.

ASP.NET 2.0 and medium trust

Stefan Holmberg — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:06:05 GMT

I have started creating ASP.NET 2.0 versions of my commercial products, AdMentor and KBMentor - and one of the the most important goals I have is having them run under medium trust.

Here I have published some of my findings:

http://www.aspcode.net/articles/l_en-US/t_default/ASP.NET/ASP.NET2.0/Medium-trust/category_69.aspx

I have also created a GPL project with the goal to offer a recompiled version of the official MySQL.Data.DLL driver - just adding the [assembly: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers()] attribute so we don't get the "Additional information: That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers" error.

Information and downloads for that project is here

http://www.programmingado.net/l_en-US/t_default/MySQL/Medium-trust-ADO.NET-driver/category_10.aspx

ASP.NET and Ajax - Checkboxcontroller

Stefan Holmberg — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:08:52 GMT

This month (february) I have been working really hard on a clients project creating a ajax enabled website, and the hard part is not how to get it working the way I want but rather to create some nice looking (and reusable) extender controls from my javascript behaviours.

I have published a free extender control available for download - and the purpose of it is to ease parent/child checkboxes - you know "Select/Deselect all". The Checkbox extender control lets you also define an associated label - so that when all child checkboxes are selected the label for the parent switches to "Deselect all" - or whatever (user defined).

I have turned to the Ajax Control Toolkit to aid my control crafting, usually I don't like adding ANY dependency at all to my controls making deployment as easy and small as possible but honestly - this one looks worth it full 1 MB.

Please download - but first - don't miss the demo

Need to restructure the site

Stefan Holmberg — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 10:44:47 GMT

I have found it necessery to restructure the ASPCode.net site. While I in theory believe the article structuring is pretty decent and not too hard to follow, in practice you need too many clicks to get where you want to go,

So I tiik the easy way out - registered some new domain names and have created some totally new sites. Here are my ideas on how to split the content between my sites

ASPCode.net - asp/asp.net scripts and articles

Programmingado.net - database related articles

AjaxAndASP.net - asp.net and Microsoft Ajax

One thing that has been invaluable to me now when I start to move content is a url rewriter tool - Ionic's ISAPI Rewrite Filter. This lets me, by just changing some ini files, redirect (and flagging as 301 permanently if desired) requests to some articles to my new domains.

While it's not hard to do a 301 redirect with ASP.NET code I simply didn't feel like needing to change the sourcecode for my CMS just for that reason - I am using a special code branch which I don't feel like updating anymore cause I have taken a completely new road for KBMentor - which you can see on AjaxAndAsp.net - ASP.NET 2.0 and more of a blogging type of end user interface.

Ajax and ASP.NET paging solved

Stefan Holmberg — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 16:07:41 GMT

I have solved the paging problems of ASP.NET and Microsoft Ajax, meaning

a) accessible links (regular href instead of linkbuttons)

b) ajax paging when possible (i.e javascript is available etc), still all pages are bookmarkable

The whole stuff is available as a free download ASP.NET Ajax paging solution - and packaged as "ASPCode.net.History"

I have also relased another free livrabrary for clientside cookie management - "ASPCode.net.cookie".

On my free games site I have both parts implemented - the paging as of now might not be all that user friendly - I turned to a semiautomatic solution where I set the url hash value to the hidden fields control name (control names are never beatiful in ASP.NET) along with the actual value - however it's easily modified to read something like "page-123" or whatever you are looking for.