Virtual-Essential's DotNetNuke, .NET, and SQL Tips For the Developer

With the help of the .NET framework, it is simple to download files via FTP sessions programmatically. In this example, I am going to download a stylesheet from my FTP directory and display it in the console window. You'll see how easy it is to begin using FTP in your programs.

If you are working on a project in Visual Studio and are presented with the error: Name 'ConfigurationManager' is not declared you can easily resolve the error with a couple mouse clicks.

...But, if you want to create a drop down list instead of a textbox in the gridview you can easily do this. Click on the smart tag for the gridview and go to click on "Edit Columns". Find the column that you want to change from a textbox and click on "Convert this field into a TemplateField".  Close the box and return to the smart tag options and click on "Edit Templates" Any columns that you have turned into templateFields will show up as on option in the new view (you may have to click on the smart tag again). Each templated column will have a view for the Item {read only/default view}, Edit {what you see when the grid view is in edit mode...you can make things read only, or invisible here if you don't want them to be seen in edit mode}, also templates for Insert {insert view of the gridview insert mode}, the Footer and Header also.

While surfing the web, I found the most useful little snippet of code that can help quickly troubleshoot and track down session and application variables. Just throw the code on an .aspx page and view in browser while you have your application running. A little F5 here and there and you can easily keep up with what's going on with your session and application level variables.

It doesn't take long for a web.config file to get large and hard to read. But, there is one thing you can do to make managing multiple connection string a snap. Best of all, you can do this in less than 60 seconds.

I just wanted to share one quick and easy way to add a tooltip to a mouseover on a gridView. To show you how, I created a simple .aspx page with the following code (NOTE: this page was created using a simple query from the core DotNetNuke database. You can replace with a simple select statement from Northwind or whatever database you wish. I just use DNN and that's what this site is for, so why not...)

Here's a quick tip for any of you out there who are dealing with CSS and website layout hell due to all the browsers and their different rendering of our hard work. Check out BrowserShots.org, enter your URL and select the browsers that you want to see render your site. You'll have to wait a few minutes while it collects the info, but you needed to get something to drink anyway, right?

Ever wished you had an easy way to see what you're site was looking like in different versions of Internet Explorer without having to set up a Virtual PC just to do it? All of us as web developers have wanted to rip our arms off as we judiciously try to get our sites to look right in a myriad of browers, switching back and fro from IE to FireFox, etc, but it's not quite as simple to run differing versions of IE side by side. . . until now.

Recently, I was working in the a solution that I had been working on for the last several days and received this error when I tried to compile the application: The project file ' ' has been renamed or is no longer in the solution. I had been loading and unloading other projects around the same time, but nothing happened (as far as I am aware) to the particular project that I was trying to build now.