http://www.calistomind.com Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:54:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There are all sorts of different inline tags, and I haven't found a place that explains them all in one place, so here is the quick and dirty... <% ... %> The most basic inline tag, basically runs normal code: <% if (User.IsInRole("admin")) { %> You can see this <% } else { %> You are ... http://www.calistomind.com/2008/06/25/aspnet-inline-tags/ I recently discovered an absolutely amazing HTML parsing library for .NET called HtmlAgilityPack. It completely takes away the pain of parsing complicated HTML with regular expressions. Here's a very simple example of what you could do with it - I'm just extracting inner HTML from any element inside a HTML file ... http://www.calistomind.com/2008/05/06/how-to-easily-parse-html-without-regex/ This is a simple little random fact generator which will show a new fact every time the page loads. After the initial load it will store the XML in the cache until the file is changed again. XML: (Facts.xml) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <facts> <fact> The numbers '172' can ... http://www.calistomind.com/2008/04/23/how-to-create-a-random-fact-generator-using-xml/ Based on the reader comments on my previous entry on this topic I was able to fix some of the issues that others were experiencing. I changed how the output is read, instead of reading the entire stream at once, its now read line-by-line as ErrorDataReceived and OutputDataReceived events are raised. ... http://www.calistomind.com/2008/04/22/how-to-manipulate-video-in-net-using-ffmpeg-updated/ Recently I was involved in a project where I had to make heavy use of AJAX. I realized there are a few simple things you could do to improve performance. 1) Combine scripts <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="TSM1" runat="Server" EnablePartialRendering="true" CombineScriptsHandlerUrl="~/CombineScriptsHandler.ashx" /> As the name of the property suggests, it will pretty much combine all the needed JS ... http://www.calistomind.com/2008/04/18/three-quick-ways-optimize-ajax-driven-websites-in-aspnet/ In my previous post about exception logging, I show how to log several different parameters related to the exception in the database. Request.Browser.Crawler is one of them and its used to track browser crawlers. It warrants its own separate entry since it requires some extra bit of setup in the ... http://www.calistomind.com/2008/04/08/requestbrowsercrawler/ This is a simple technique I use to log exceptions in all my web applications. First lets start by adding the following to the web.config: <appSettings> <add key="LogUnhandledExceptions" value="true"/> </appSettings> Second, we add the following bit inside the Application_Error event of the Global.asax file. This will capture all the unhandled exceptions and log them into ... http://www.calistomind.com/2008/04/08/exception-logging-using-the-database/ Recently I was trying to write a little C# function for cropping images. I expected it to be a quick 5 minute task but I ended up spending a huge amount of time getting it to work correctly. I kept getting a very stubborn and mysterious error - "Invalid Parameter ... http://www.calistomind.com/2008/03/29/the-mysterious-invalid-parameter-used-error/ SharpZipLib is a great open source library for handeling all kinds of gzip/zip compression/decompression. More Info - http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/ In the following example I'm passing the HtmlInputFile object directly into the ZipInputStream to decompress the PostedFile and save its contents on the server. . . using System.IO; using ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Zip . . private void UnzipAndSave(HtmlInputFile objFileUpload) { ZipInputStream ... http://www.calistomind.com/2008/03/12/how-to-unzip-files-in-net-using-sharpziplib/ In this case I'm resizing the video and converting it to FLV format. For more ffmpeg commandline options - http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg-doc.html private void ConvertVideo(string srcURL, string destURL) { string ffmpegURL = "~/project/tools/ffmpeg.exe"; DirectoryInfo directoryInfo = new DirectoryInfo(Path.GetDirectoryName(Server.MapPath(ffmpegURL))); ProcessStartInfo startInfo = new ProcessStartInfo(); startInfo.FileName ... http://www.calistomind.com/2008/03/12/how-to-manipulate-video-in-net-using-ffmpeg/