Ran into an interesting and esoteric problem today when working with a client. This client had a legacy ASP.NET 2.0 application deployed on IIS6 that used global themes. First, a little background… A theme is: “a collection of property settings that al...

A couple weeks ago I had a client call me up with a perplexing build error. He had an ASP.NET 4 Web Application project open in Visual Studio 2010 that he was working on when, suddenly, the following error cropped up when building: Resource name ‘xx...

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In a recent project we needed to block a series of IP addresses from accessing our website. IIS makes this easy with its IPv4 Address and Domain Restrictions feature, which lets the webmaster specify specific or ranges of IP addresses that are either al...

ASP.NET has long offered the FileUpload control, which simplifies uploading a file from the client’s computer to the web server’s file system. This control provides a very simple, straight-forward user experience – the browser renders a “Browse” or “Sel...

Boggle is a word game trademarked by Parker Brothers and Hasbro that involves several players trying to find as many words as they can in a 4x4 grid of letters. At the end of the game, players compare the words they found. During this comparison I've al...

ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) is my ASP.NET logging facility of choice. It can be added to a new or running ASP.NET site in less than a minute. It’s open source and it’s creator, Atif Aziz, remains actively involved with the project and can...

Here’s the scenario: you have a database table with an integral numeric column used for sort order of some other non-identifying purpose. Let’s call this column SortOrder. There are a many rows in this table. Every row should have a unique, sequentially...

A fellow ASP.NET developer asked me today how he could have the text in a TextBox control automatically selected whenever the TextBox received focus. In short, whenever any textbox on the page receives focus you want to call its select() function. (The...

In addition to my regular articles on 4GuysFromRolla.com, I’ve recently authored a number of articles that have appeared on other websites: Use ASP.NET and DotNetZip to Create and Extract ZIP Files - This article shows how to use DotNetZip to create...