Vikram Lakhotia Blog on Asp.Net, Dot Net, SQL, VIsual Studio, C# etc

Hi

Many a times when we send Emails from the site we want to make it a high priority Email. In Asp.Net 2.0 the Email functionality is governed by the System.Net.Mail namespace.

The headers in the above-mentioned class control the priority of a mail. But the name space also exposes a property to set the priority of the mail. We can use the Priority property of the MailMessage class to set the priority. The priority can have one of the three values High, Low, Normal (from the MailPriority Enumeration)

Here is an Example that shows the how to change the priority of the mail to high.

static void
                

Hi

The path class of the System.IO namespace is very useful to work with file paths. This class contains many static properties to work with file path. Some of the functions of the class are listed below

Path.Combine(string, string)

This function combines 2 paths together and returns a singe path. This function is very useful if we have directory path and the file path differently. In that case we can use the function to combine them to a single path. A simple concatenation can give us a problem with whether to put the “//” string or not. But with this function we do not need to test these conditions.

Path.GetExtension(string)

If we want to get the extension of a file

Hi

Does the Email Sent from you site built in ASP.NET go in the Spam filters of most of the client? Its been happening with me a lot. Most of the Client complains about not getting the Email to finally realize that the mail has gone to their Spam folder.

Of late I have been working with the new System.Net.Mail class for sending emails from the Site. I found that all the mail sent from the Site had their headers added in lower case. This problem was not there in Asp.Net 1.1 when I used the System.Web.Mail class

Because of no proper capitalization of the headers many of the Spam filters treat is as a Spam. Many Spam filters restrict the messages, which do not have proper

Hi

A few days back I talked about the event in the Asp.Net application Life cycle. It talked about the entire event that takes place when a request is made. You can read the article here. In this Article I am going to talk about the event that takes place in the Page.

PreInit()

In this event all the page level controls are created. The property assigned in the HTML is also assigned to the controls in this event. This event is only there for page and not present in user control (Hence not present in Master Page also). If we want to change the Theme and master page of a page, we need to override this event.

[Note: When you override this event remember to call the base pages preInit command.]

There is a big difference in the event when we have a master page for the page. If there

Hi

So after a long period of time we again have a new theme for the site. This one is called Candle Light. This one took quite some time.

You can change the theme of the site by using the Change the Theme button on the left. It will give u a list of theme and you need to select a theme and that will be loaded.

I have to again thank Farghana on making this theme. Although it

Hi

Today I have added another new functionality to the Site. Now the site also has an Image search feature. The Link in the top to find image takes you to the images search page. I am using the Flickr API to search Image. After searching the Image I load them.

When you hover over an image you will see the enlarged version of the Image. This was done with the use of Ajax Extension. I am using the Popup extender to display the enlarged image when the user hovers over the image.

I am not a user of Flickr.com of you will not find any image of mine when you search with my name but hope you find some interesting ones in the image search page.

Hope this helps
Thanks
Vikram

Hi

After quite a few days I have added anew feature to the Site. A favicon for the Website. The Icon gives an Identity to the site. A favicon is that little icon beside a URL in the address bar of your browser.

You can already see the in the Title and address bar. It was fairly simple. Create an .ICO file. The ico file will be the icon. Add a small code to the header of the site. As I am using the Master page this was fairly easy. All I had to do was add a tag in the HEAD section of the master page.

<link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="iconName.ico">

The size of the icon should be 16 * 16 and should be saved (you should be keeping the icon file) in the root of the application.

He Icon also works with IE7 ad Firefox. Hence no problem with different browser also

Hope you like the

Hi

Finally it's over!! The last 16 hrs had been no less than a nightmare for me. Last night, as I was wrapping up my day on a positive note with one new theme almost ready to be uploaded, I realized that my site was not available online. Immediately called up the so-called 24x7 customer service of my providers. No response from them which came as a shocker to me, for they had promised me tech support round the clock.

I guess its true promises are made to be broken. Anyway, my sleep was ruined, and the night passed with me tossing on my bed. My day began with me constantly calling up these useless people and finally they did respond to me.

Finally the problem has been resolved, with me constantly pestering them ...somebody explain to them what customer service and tech support is all about! I know it’s not my fault at all but I still regret the inconvenience it has caused to all my visitors. Here's hoping there are

Hi

Many a times we have to insert multiple data on click of one button. Like inserting all the checked records in the favorite table of the member. It is not a good idea to insert the records by using as many insert queries.

At these points we should insert all the records with only one call to the database. We can use a stored procedure that takes a comma (or any separator you want to use) list of values and insert them in the database. This way the whole process will be very fast and efficient.

In this example we will insert data in the MemberProductfaveriote table. We will be insert the member ID and the MemberProductId(all the product selected as favorite from the list). We will pass the MemberID and the comma separated list of MemberProductId.

The stored procedure will insert each of the record in the database.

In the stored procedure we also check if the

Hi

Earlier in asp.net 1.1 when we wanted top validate only a few fields on the click of a button and a few fields in the click of another button on the same page, there was no way to this using the validation control of Asp.Net.

In Asp.Net 2.0 this problem is solved. Now when we want to perform separate validation scenarios on the same page we can use the validationGroup property. With the help of this property we can group the validation control and then tell the post back control to validate a particular group only.

This is very useful for the editing scenarios of the data controls. We need to set the ValidationGroup property to the same value for all the validators that belong to a particular group. On the button control or the postback control (with causes validation property set to true) set the validationGroup property to the name of the group that the control needs to validate when there is a

Hi

In Asp.Net 1.X there was a problem in using the custom validators. The custom validators never fired if the control to validate was empty. So it was not very useful in all the places. In Asp.Net 2.0 this problem has been solved.

The custom validators have a new property called ValidateEmptyText. If we set the value of this property to true then the custom validators will validate even if the control to validate was empty.

Hope this helps
Thanks
Vikram

Hi

Many a time we use the forms authentication in our application. When using the forms authentication we need to configure it in the web.config file. There are many attributes to the configuration, which are many a time not utilized properly. Here is a look at the attributes of the Forms Authentication.

[Note: remember Forms element is the sub element of the authentication element inside System.web element in the web.config]

cookieless -  we can store the forms authentication ticket either in a cookie or in a cookieless representation of the URL. The default value is UseDeviceProfile. This means that ASP.Net determines storage of ticket on the basis of pre-computed browser

Hi

When we want to work with hot spot regions in an image, we can use the ImageMap control. We can define the Hotspots regions for the image and when the user clicks the Hot spot region, the control can either generate a post back to the server or go to a specified URL.

If we use the control to display a map of geographical region and the use clicks a specific region on the map, the control can navigate to the URL that will provide the additional data about the region clicked. This control is also very useful if we want to capture the response of the user for the votes (the region user clicks for the vote).

We use the top, left, bottom and right property to define the location of the hot spot. We need to provide the hotspot mode property to define what will this hotspot do (navigate or postback). We use these properties inside the hot spot template (like asp:RectangleHotSpot

Also we can use

Hi

Many a time we want to get random number in SQL server. There is an easy way to do this. Use the RAND function to generate a random number. Here is an example of the RAND Function

SELECT RAND()
Returns result 0.5144366554661576

What if we want a random number with each record in the result set. But the RAND function will give you same value if used (as a column) in a query. This is not what you want. So what is the solution?

We can create user-defined function that returns the Random values. This way we will get a random number for each record in the record-set.

We can also use the NEWID() function. The NEWID function returns a unique identifier for each row. The syntax to use this would be like

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