ASP.NET membership provides the ability to authenticate users to your web application using forms based authentication against a database of users or directory services.  This article explains the steps required to provide authentication against Active Directory, either for new sites with no au... [More]

When developing web sites for clients, a simple yet powerful value added proposition is to allow your customers the ability to easily change text on their web site, such as updating contact details, news items, or promotions.  This article will show you how to integrate the popular FCKeditor H... [More]

SQL Server 2008 Express edition with Tools has finally been released (It was launched on August 11th, but only today are the management tools available).  As I've been building web servers today, I've put together this comprehensive guide to setting up your website to work with SQL Server 2008.... [More]

Yesterday I managed to take down my development web server.  I changed one of my customer's web sites from an SQL database to Microsoft Access, and as I am running 64 bit Windows Server 2008 and there is no 64-bit OleDB driver for Access, I had to change the Advanced Settings in the site's app... [More]

While Microsoft have released their new Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control, I still haven't found a decent wrapper that converts addresses to langitude and longitude co-ordinates.  There is a Geo coder web service available here (this shows the co-ordinates for the White House) but it seems to only ... [More]

The Listview control introduced in ASP.NET 3.5 fixes a number of issues with the old Gridview and Repeater controls.  In particular, one of my biggest problems with the Gridview was the inability to add an item through an empty row in the Gridview footer.  While there are several workaroun... [More]

Full details and download link at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx. Visual Studio 2008 SP1 delivers: Improved WPF designers SQL Server 2008 support ADO.NET Entity Designer Visual Basic and Visual C++ components and tools (including an MFC-based Office 2... [More]

I wrote an article recently explaining how to create a Gridview that exports selected rows to Excel, and have received a number of queries about how to do the same with a Listview.  The Listview, like the Gridview, doesn't automatically remember whether a checkbox is selected or not for each ro... [More]

Continuing on my Gridview series, the next project which had me reaching for Google was a requirement to highlight the returned search results in a Gridview.  Digging around, I found an article on 4guysfromRolla titled Highlighting Search Keywords in a DataGrid Web Control which formed the ba... [More]

If you have a Gridview that exports rows to Excel (see my article Gridview that exports selected rows to Excel for an example) and you are using Master Pages, you are likely to run into the following error: "Control 'ctl00_MainContent_Gridview1' of type 'GridView' must be placed inside a form ... [More]