Tutorials & Tips

Random number generation is a common programming endeavor, but many developers are unaware of the true nature of the random numbers generated by a system. In this article I would explain about how to generating a random numbers and how to use them in your .NET applications Generating random numbers is often a hot topic for programmers. The reason is that seemingly random numbers are most often not genuinely random. This is due to the deterministic algorithm utilized by a platform like .NET. Deterministic systems leave nothing to chance; they're lawful out of necessity; and they conform to the ideal of a machine in which wear and tear and mechanical failures are absent. Modern computers are conceived as deterministic machines. The Random class The .NET Framework provides the Random class, which allows you to generate a number or a series of numbers to be used accordingly. You may be wondering why .NET bothers to include the Random class.

To select a date in your web form, we have built-in calendar control for this. But what to do when we need to select just month and year for our report? The simplest way is to use date select calendar and let user select any day in desired month and then throw day he selected, leaving only month and year. But, is this solution user-friendly; do you like it? So we decided to write our own control for selecting month/year pair, which can be used on pages where needed.

Sometimes we decide to separate process of form filling into several steps (pages). In past at using old ASP, we should solve this problem for example saving entered data into database table after each step. ASP.NET 2.0 offers more elegant solution where we can first fill multi page form completely and after store all entered data in table in database.

In this article, I would explain about View State in ASP.NET, What is it and how it works. Have you ever wondered why coding in ASP.NET is so much fun, easy, and less coding time compared to Classic ASP or any other languages such as PHP, JSP ?. One of the reason behind this was ViewState. Every Control in ASP.NET comes with ViewState enabled by default and with the power of ViewState, all your control can remember its values after page post back. ViewState can help you minimize your coding downtime however it has its own pros and cons. Read this article, and you can understand how to minimize your page ViewState data and improve your site performance. You can see the values of ViewState easily by viewing the source of aspx page. You should be able to see that there is hidden values called ViewState.

In this article, I would like to share and explain about Session objects in ASP.NET 2.0. How it is used and what new features has been introduced. I will also list out all the type of Session objects that you can use and the best practices for every Session objects type. In classic ASP, the Session object was held in process (as was everything) to the IIS process and therefore any crash to the IIS or apps pool being reset will cause the whole Session object being resetted. Hence this will make the Session objects not reliable at all and cannot be used to stored important data especially if your website is dealing with client login information or e-commerce type of website. In ASP.NET 2.0, new features has been introduced to make the Session objects more reliable and robust.

AJAX stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML." It is a technology that facilitates the development of responsive web applications. Responsive means that you can have your data refreshed without the need of full page postback which can significantly reduced bandwidth usage and faster performance. AJAX is a "cross-platform" technology and can be used across various operating systems, computer architectures and different web browsers as it is based on XML and JavaScript that are open standards. PHP, ASP.NET,ASP,JSP, Cold fusion all can integrate AJAX library into their code easily. But to use AJAX library it is not that simple and sometimes it is quite hard to code, therefore Mcrosoft has create their own set of AJAX library and named it as ATLAS. You need to download Microsoft AJAX library before you can start coding your Ajax applications. URL For downloading latest AJAX library is here

Simple C# / ASP.Net Color Picker using the and . Very easy to use. Feel free to use it in your projects.

In this tutorial I will teach you how using Dreamweaver 8 and its ASP.NET function to display information stored in a database you created.

Part 2 of a Multipart Series - In this step-by-step tutorial we will learn how to track referring domains and URLs to our website. Will also revisit the stuff we learned in part1; how to track unique users and page views. The source code is explained in detail and is available for download.

Before you continue to write your own aspx file, check your directory write permission. I have used Northwind sample database. We will write some of data from Employees table to XML file.

ASP.NET is Microsoft�s extension to HTML. It requires an ASP.NET compatible web server. Such as, Abyss or IIS (Internet Information Services from Microsoft). There are however plug-ins for Apache Web Server also. Before you continue you will need to know VB.NET which is required for the scripting part of the tutorial. You don�t necessarily need a compiler to build an ASP.NET script. Any text editor will work. Let�s start by building or first aspx file. Create a new text document in your favorite text editor. Call it default.aspx. Now lets jump in, shall we?

The Common Language Specification (CLS), which is a set of basic language features needed by many .Net applications to fully interact with other objects regardless of the language in which they were implemented. The CLS represents the guidelines defined by for the .NET Framework. These specifications are normally used by the compiler developers and are available for all languages, which target the .NET Framework.

MSIL Assembler (Ilasm.exe) is a command line tool provides by .Net. The MSIL Assembler generates a portable executable (PE) file from MSIL assembly language. You can run the resulting executable, which contains MSIL and the required metadata, to determine whether the MSIL performs as expected.

Common Intermediate Language (CIL) (formerly called Microsoft Intermediate Language or MSIL) is the lowest-level human-readable programming language in the Common Language Infrastructure and in the .NET Framework. Languages which target the .NET Framework compile to CIL, which is assembled into bytecode. CIL resembles an object-oriented assembly language, and is entirely stack-based. It is executed by a virtual machine. The primary .NET languages are C#, Visual Basic .NET, C++/CLI, and J#.

n assembly performs the following functions: It contains code that the common language runtime executes. Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL) code in a portable executable (PE) file will not be executed if it does not have an associated assembly manifest. Note that each assembly can have only one entry point (that is, DllMain, WinMain, or Main).

Assemblies are the building blocks of .NET Framework applications; they form the fundamental unit of deployment, version control, reuse, activation scoping, and security permissions. An assembly is a collection of types and resources that are built to work together and form a logical unit of functionality. An assembly provides the common language runtime with the information it needs to be aware of type implementations. To the runtime, a type does not exist outside the context of an assembly.

Metadata provides the following major benefits: Self-describing files � Common language runtime modules and assemblies are self-describing. A module's metadata contains everything needed to interact with another module. Metadata automatically provides the functionality of IDL in COM, allowing you to use one file for both definition and implementation. Runtime modules and assemblies do not even require registration with the operating system. As a result, the descriptions used by the runtime always reflect the actual code in your compiled file, which increases application reliability.

Assemblies contain tables of metadata. These tables are described by the CIL specification. The metadata tables will have zero or more entries and the position of an entry determines its index. When CIL code uses metadata it does so through a metadata token. This is a 32-bit value where the top 8 bits identify the appropriate metadata table, and the remaining 24 bits give the index of the metadata in the table. The Framework SDK contains a sample called metainfo that will list the metadata tables in an assembly; however, this information is rarely of use to a developer.

In the past, a software component (.exe or .dll) written in one language could not easily use a software component written in another language. COM provided a step forward in solving this problem. The .NET Framework makes component interoperation even easier by allowing compilers to emit additional declarative information into all modules and assemblies. This information, called metadata, helps components to seamlessly interact.

The CLS provides following advantages: Access to Complete .NET Framework hierarchy. High level of interoperability within languages.(e.g. - C# Class can be inherit from a Visual Basic class). Component is accessible from any programming language that supports the CLS. All CLS-compliant languages can produce verifiable code so the type safety of code possible.