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

Hi,

Today I have a very bad news for those who work on SharePoint 2007 and want to work with Visual studio 2008 and take advantage of the latest feature in JavaScript debugging etc. The visual Studio extension for SharePoint Visual studio 2008 is being planned to be released in June 2008. This is way far down the road then what I would have expected.

For current its best to forget about it and work on the Visual Studio 2005. For those of you who are thinking on working on SharePoint 2007 do not throw away your visual studio 2005 (after getting the multi targeting feature in VS 2008) for next 6 months or so.

Note you can use STSDEV tool for SharePoint development in Vs 2008 with dot net frame work 3.0

Hi,

Today I was discussing with my friends about some of the cool stuff available in the request class but rarely used or talked. After the talk I discussed on posting them in the blog.

The first in the list is the Request.AcceptTypes. The property returns an array of all the mime types supported by the browser. The results were interesting for me. The number of mime type supported by IE7 are far more than Firefox. The extra mime types included in IE are image//gif, image//x-xbitmap, image//jpeg, image//pjpeg, application//x-ms-application, application//vnd.ms-powerpoint, application//vnd.ms-excel, application//msword. This means that IE can easily recognize these file types and open them in correct application.

Request.IsLocal property in the Request (httpRequest) object is used to know if the request is made locally or not. This can be very helpful and allow us to write code that needs to

Hi,

When using JavaScript many a times we have a requirement to find if a value is number or not. With JavaScript its pretty easy, as it gives us a function isNaN which tells us if the string is a number or not. But how can you tell in C# if a string is number or not?

When I confronted with the problem, one of the solution was to use the int.Parse() method inside a try catch block. Below is an example of what I meant

try

{ int.Parse("5000"); }

catch

{ }

If there is an exception that means the value is not a number otherwise the value is a number. The only problem with this method is the use of try catch block. It’s never good

Hi,

Of late I have found this one question related to finding controls inside the page dynamically and apply some similar function to them. Like put a css class to all the textbox (or for that matter any control) in a page. Remember a page can have textbox as a control directly under it, or the textbox can be inside another composite control (like login control, gridview, detailview) inside the page.

Many a times we do not want to do this work for individual control but rather have a function, which will do this for all the control in the page. This way it becomes more maintainable and easy to implement.

To get this work done all we need is to make a function, which finds all the textbox (or for that matter any control) controls. The function needs to call itself if there are child controls in the control being parsed. Below

Hi,

What do you do when you need to find the values of various environment variables in the system like USERDOMAIN, PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE, COMPUTERNAME, USERNAME, PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER, etc. well with asp.net this can be a very simple Job. You can get all these value along with a set of other values with the help of

Environment.GetEnvironmentVariables().

The static function returs the IDictionary collection of the Envirement varibales. To view the value you need to know the key for each value. But its not always known to us.

So what you can do is bind the dictionary to a grid view and see all the keys and values avilable.

You will not be able to bind the collection directly to a gridview with AutoGenerateColumns property true

Hi,

One of the very rich security feature and also one of the least known is the ViewStateUserKey. The key is used to add an identifier to the individual user in the viewstate variable for the page.

The value of the variable needs to be set in the page’s init phase. If you try and set the value in page load then it will give an error. Normally the value will be set to a value which is unique to individual users. Setting a constant value for all the users is equivalent to keeping it null. Normally we can fill the value with the userId or sessionID. For many technical reasons it is best to use the sessionID for the same (SessionID are unique, varies from time to time and are different from individual users.).

What it does is add a value (provided in the ViewStateUserKey variable) in the viewstate variable. This value is now validated in the

Hi,

One of the very simple and common that one of the commenter asked me a few days ago was why does the SQL query analyzer show only results unto 255 character only and not full column text. This is common to any data type in SQL server Query Analyzer.

The maximum number of character displayed using the tools->Option menu. Go to the result Tab and change the 'Maximum characters per column'. BY default the value is set to 255. The maximum value allowed here is 8192 character.

In SQL Management studio (for SQL server 2005) go to Tools->Options, expand Query Results // SQL Server // Results to Text, and change the setting for "Maximum number of characters displayed in each

Hi,

An interesting question asked to me by one of my colleague quite some days back. How do we find all the SQL server running in the network in SQL? Well the requirement was unique, but the way to do it is pretty simple.

All we need to do is use the XP_CMDShell stored procedure in the master database with a parameter 'OSQL -L'. So the full code for the same is

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.ListOFLocalServer 
AS 
BEGIN 
 
CREATE TABLE #tempserverTable(servername VARCHAR(255)) 
 
INSERT #tempserverTable EXEC master..XP_CMDShell 'OSQL -L' 
 
DELETE # tempserverTable WHERE servername ='Servers:' 
 
SELECT LTRIM(servername) FROM #tempserverTable WHERE servername!= 'NULL' 
 
 DROP TABLE #tempserverTable
END

Continued...