ASP.NET

Dumb little recursive, generic FindControl method...

Scott Galloway — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:32:39 GMT

Doing some app building and I needed to use FindControl to manipulate a control in the OnItemCreated event in a Repeater...well, to save a bit of typing I came up with this extension method:

namespace Presentation

{

public static class ControlHelper

{

public static T FindControl<T>(this System.Web.UI.Control root, string controlId, bool recursive) where T: System.Web.UI.Control

{

if(root.Controls!=null && root.Controls.Count>0 && root.FindControl(controlId) != null)

{

return root.FindControl(controlId) as T;

}

else if(recursive)

{

return FindControl<T>(root, controlId, recursive);

}

return null;

}

Pretty simple but it lets me do the following :

var link = e.Row.FindControl<HyperLink>("MenuLink", true);

if(link!=null) link.NavigateUrl="http://www.mostlylucid.net";

Not a HUGE time-saver but it just makes my code a bit tidier...

My secret project....NET 3.5 SP1 Beta (well, the release bit)

Scott Galloway — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:53:33 GMT

I should have made this a better post but anyway. Brad Abrams just posted about the .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta release .
We've also posted a bunch of new Screencasts covering the new features for ASP.NET in this release, as well as a readme which has some getting started and upgrade information for migrating from the previous release...

The state of the art...spelunking in the .NET Source

Scott Galloway — Thu, 01 May 2008 04:08:59 GMT

One of the nice things about being on the ASP.NET team is that I finally get to scratch the various itches (on that topic, Poison Oak...very itchy!) that have been bugging me for a few years. I finally get to play around with the source and see what effect changing various bits and bobs has on how stuff works. I really do recommend spending some time spelunking in the .NET Source code. You can actually get this source (in a very non-official and non-supported way) using .NET Mass Downloader. This is just such an awesome resource...want to see how a server control like the Repeater works...look at the source! Trying to figure out why Viewstate behaves in a weird way...well, you get the idea. Right now you can get the source for these .NET 3.5 assemblies...that is a LOT of source!

Mscorlib.DLL
System.DLL
System.Data.DLL
System.Drawing.DLL
System.Web.DLL
System.Web.Extensions.DLL
System.Windows.Forms.DLL
System.XML.DLL
WPF (UIAutomation.DLL, System.Windows.DLL, System.Printing.DLL, System.Speech.DLL, WindowsBase.DLL, WindowsFormsIntegration.DLL, Presentation.DLL, some others)
Microsoft.VisualBasic.DLL

I don't know the official word on this yet but I'd be surprised if we don't continue adding to this list in future. From my team you can of course get the ASP.NET MVC source already in Codeplex and we'll be adding even more projects to this site in the very near future...in fact we now operate a 'why can't we release the source policy'...

Where should the ASP.NET team release stuff?

Scott Galloway — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 05:17:42 GMT

What about Code Gallery? I'm changing this post slightly. The consensus right now is that Codeplex releases must have source, the ASP.NET site is the right place for release (mainstream, public stuff). What about the non-mainstream, early preview, binary only releases? Would you prefer these to stay on Code Gallery (e.g., like Dynamic Data) and just link to the site from somewhere on ASP.NET site or should we create a 'special area' on the ASP.NET site (like 'thelab' or somesuch) and provide details and link to specific downloads...or do you prefer these stay on Connect?

So, dear customer I have a question for you (as apparently I've lost all perspective)...as I've written before I'm working on the releases for the ASP.NET team and one of the challenges I've been facing is *where* we should release stuff. Scott Hanselman wrote about this topic at the bottom of this post and it's been something which has been vexing me for a few weeks. Right now we have 4 main places where I can stick content:

1. Connect; old and faithful (and a bit clunky to use) we use this site for giving specific group access to really early previews / documents etc...this stuff has to be covered by confidentiality and legal agreements so we have to know who gets it.

2. ASP.NET main site; the 'main' site...I think of this as the place where you can expect to find stuff 'you can just use', more like the network tv channels, mainstream stuff.

3. Codeplex; fairly new to our team, I hae fairly strong views on this and want to keep it for mainly source code focused releases, i.e., you should expect to always be able to browse the source, download, compile and mess around with what you find there. The stuff here will be around for a while and will be updated regularly.

4. Code Gallery; the wild-card and partly the reason for ScottHa's post. In essence this site is fairly similar to CodePlex (it shares the same code-base for the site) but it's reserved for MS internal use...in other words only Microsoft people post on there. I chose to use this site to host the Dynamic Data Preview over the Connect site...mainly because it's easier to use and just seems better. In addition the Dynamic Data bits are really mostly binary...and will go away once we wrap the bits into a release at some point.

Here's a question for you...have I made things worse? Would you prefer that we:

1. Put all mainstream stuff on the ASP.NET site and everything else on the one Codeplex site (http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet)? Bearing in mind the Codeplex site has limited navigation and we could be talking about a lot of stuff!

2. Put everything on ASP.NET with some sort of subdivision within the site for 'mainstream' and 'edgier, less stable stuff'. Possibly 'randomizing' the purpose of the ASP.NET site...

3. How we have it right now (only maybe linked from the main ASP.NET site to Codeplex and Code Gallery). Lots of sites maybe not obvious where you find stuff.

4. Something else I haven't thought of?

This is a topic where you can make a real difference, these releases are for you (as I can no longer think like a customer...pah!), where do you want them?

Should add if you don't want to comment openly you can mail me at scott.galloway_at_microsoft.com or through the contact form on this site.

UPDATE: Thanks to ScottHa for 'Twittering' this post...great responses and I WILL take the feedback seriously...watch this space!

UPDATE: And so the floodgates open...BradA has just linked to this post...looking forward to a lot more feedback!

Work in progress, Response.RelativeRedirect

Scott Galloway — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:00:43 GMT

Inspired by this post, only covers simple cases but it's a start. Essentially this is an extended version of Response which only allows redirection to pages within the same site...so allows /default.aspx, does not allow http://www.evildomain.com/default.aspx. I've also ripped off a member of my team's excellent work on Response.Redirecting to a new window. This method uses extension methods, to use it just drop the file in App_Code and Response gets two new members. Oh and it's incomplete because I didn't account for encoded / obfuscated URLs...I'll update when I do...

using System;

using System.Web;

using System.Web.UI;

public static class EnhancedRedirect

{

public static void RelativeRedirect(this HttpResponse response, string path)

{

RelativeRedirect(response, path, "_self");

}

public static void RelativeRedirect(this HttpResponse response, string path, string target)

{

RelativeRedirect(response, path, target, string.Empty);

}

public static void RelativeRedirect(this HttpResponse response, string path, string target, string windowFeatures)

{

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(path) && !path.StartsWith("http:") && !path.Contains("//"))

Redirect(response, path, target, windowFeatures);

else

{

throw new InvalidOperationException("Cannot redirect outside of the current site.");

}

public static void Redirect(this HttpResponse response, string url, string target, string windowFeatures)

{

Redirect(response, path, target, string.Empty);

}

public static void Redirect(this HttpResponse response, string url, string target, string windowFeatures)

{

if ((String.IsNullOrEmpty(target) || target.Equals("_self", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) && String.IsNullOrEmpty(windowFeatures))

{

response.Redirect(url);

}

else

{

Page page = (Page)HttpContext.Current.Handler;

if (page == null)

{

throw new InvalidOperationException("Cannot redirect to new window outside Page context.");

}

url = page.ResolveClientUrl(url);

string script;

if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(windowFeatures))

{

script = @"window.open(""{0}"", ""{1}"", ""{2}"");";

}

else

{

script = @"window.open(""{0}"", ""{1}"");";

}

script = String.Format(script, url, target, windowFeatures);

ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(page, typeof(Page), "Redirect", script, true);

}

The boring bit at the end...

Scott Galloway — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:56:27 GMT

I've posted about this before but one of my main functions on my new team is managing all of our releases. We have a large number of these both public and private (to closed groups like ASPInsiders). Of course I really just do the bit at the end, people like Phil, Eilon, Scott and David (to name but a few) do 99.9% of the actual work.
Anyway, I mention this by way of an opening to our latest release of the MVC source code complete with Unit Tests, Visual Studio Templates and just some great changes which my boss³ Scott Guthrie just announced. I spent most the day and made a grand total of 3553 changesets before getting the source code uploaded correctly. The observant will have noticed that the post yesterday was a little diffing tool...which I built a new source tree updater system on for our Codeplex releases; I'll release it once I clean the source up a bit...I probably wound up rewriting 3/4 of it today!
Anyway, nice to do some coding again, but stress, Guarana, coffee and little sleep make me a bit on the frantic side...and feeling very spaced all day. Just as well that most of my colleagues were OOF at the MVP Summit. Anyway, I should now be in bed...lots to do again tomorrow (last couple of releases took longer than I'd planned so I have a backlog...hmmphh...). Oh, and of course I have to do some cleaning before my cleaner comes...yup, I know weird!

Why do single chances make me nervous...life should come with an undo function...

Scott Galloway — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:01:34 GMT

Spent most of the day not doing what I should've been doing. I have a number of balls in the air at the moment and it feels like I've just added a spinning plate act at the same time...noisy disaster may ensue. Right now I'm working on another Codeplex release, working on a private build of some beta bits for the Insiders, getting our bugs migrated to the right place so we can get cracking on ASP.NET v.Next, getting the notes together for the last meeting (before the next one happens!) as well as getting the Hands-On-Labs ready for this thing...All of which are pretty much due right now...oh and I just got out of a multi-month relationship with my now ex-girlfriend...so let's say my time is now exactly my own right now. (Ideally I'd be sitting in a little boat in the Caribbean for a couple of weeks but alas...). Anyway in the heart of this perfect storm I managed to do a bit of fiddling with code...Essentially I'm putting a method together to help us make quicker, less onerous Codeplex releases (we want to get as much stuff there as often as possible). I've been writing (and I've written about it before) a little directory comparer tool which I'm about to expand into adding changed items into TFS (for Codeplex pushes)...for various reasons the current way TFS makes us do this is a bit problematic for us...which meant we were using a python based tool which was 1. a bit flaky (poor errors) and 2. unmaintainable since of all the languages used in my team, Python ain't one...

Well, here's some code for the most recent incarnation (solution for follow)...it's getting a few add-ons like the ability to ignore certain directories / file extensions, multi-part configuration system and just a few general performance fixes.

Oh, and next week I plan to take a deep dive into the ASP.NET Page framework, giving an overly detailed guided tour of how it does it's stuff...

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Collections;

using System.Collections.Specialized;

using System.Text;

using System.IO;

namespace MergeDirs

{

class Program

{

#region Sample Config

/* Sample code for default config creation

* { ConfigurationGroup cg = new ConfigurationGroup();

cg.ConfigurationItems.Add( new Config() { SourceDirectory = "source1", DestinationDirectory = "dest1", ClearDestination = true, ExtensionsToExclude = new List<string>(new string[] { "vssscc", "dll", "pdb", "vspscc" }), DirectoriesToExclude = new List<string>(new string[] { "bin" }) });

cg.ConfigurationItems.Add(new Config() { SourceDirectory = "source2", DestinationDirectory = "dest2", ClearDestination = true, ExtensionsToExclude = new List<string>(new string[] { "vssscc", "dll", "pdb", "vspscc" }), DirectoriesToExclude = new List<string>(new string[] { "bin" }) });

cg.Serialize(@"C:\TestConfig\ConfigGroup.xml");

return;*/

#endregion

private ConfigurationGroup Cfg { get; set; }

private static string ConfigFile = string.Empty;

static void Main(string[] args)

{

Program pgm = new Program();

pgm.Run(args);

}

public void Run(string[] args)

{

Cfg = new ConfigurationGroup();

if (args.Length > 0)

{

foreach (string argument in args)

{

string tokenName = argument.Substring(1, 1);

switch (tokenName)

{

case ("f"):

ConfigFile = args[0].Substring(3).Trim();

break;

}

Cfg.Deserialize(ConfigFile);

if (Cfg == null)

{

Console.WriteLine("No config file at " + ConfigFile + " and no arguments...I can't guess!");

Console.ReadLine();

return;

}

foreach (Config cfg in Cfg.ConfigurationItems)

{

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(cfg.SourceDirectory) && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(cfg.DestinationDirectory))

{

if (Directory.Exists(cfg.SourceDirectory))

{

if (!Directory.Exists(cfg.DestinationDirectory))

Directory.CreateDirectory(cfg.DestinationDirectory);

if (!Directory.Exists(cfg.DestinationDirectory))

throw new IOException("Failed to create directory:" + cfg.DestinationDirectory);

CompareDirs(cfg.SourceDirectory, cfg.DestinationDirectory, cfg.ClearDestination, cfg.ExtensionsToExclude, cfg.DirectoriesToExclude, cfg.ExtensionsToLeave);

}

else

{

Console.WriteLine("Both source and destination directories must already exist!!");

}

else

{

Console.WriteLine("You must specify both source and destination directories!");

}

Console.WriteLine("Finished!");

#if DEBUG

Console.ReadLine();

#endif

}

private bool CompareDirs(string sourceDir, string destDir, bool clearRight, List<string> extensionsToExclude, List<string> directoriesToExclude, List<string> extensionsToLeave)

{

List<string> srcFileNames = new List<string>(GetFSItems(new DirectoryInfo(sourceDir).GetFiles()));

List<string> dstFileNames = new List<string>(GetFSItems(new DirectoryInfo(destDir).GetFiles()));

foreach (string fileName in srcFileNames)

{

//Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Comparing:{0} and {1}", Path.Combine(sourceDir, fileName), Path.Combine(destDir, fileName)));

bool excludeFile = false;

foreach (string excludeExt in extensionsToExclude)

{

if (fileName.EndsWith("." + excludeExt))

{

excludeFile = true;

break;

}

if (excludeFile)

continue;

if (!dstFileNames.Contains(fileName))

{

File.Copy(Path.Combine(sourceDir, fileName), Path.Combine(destDir, fileName));

Console.WriteLine("Adding:" + Path.Combine(destDir, fileName));

}

else

{

DateTime srcInf = new FileInfo(Path.Combine(sourceDir, fileName)).LastWriteTime;

DateTime dstInf = new FileInfo(Path.Combine(destDir, fileName)).LastWriteTime;

if (dstInf != srcInf)

{

File.Copy(Path.Combine(sourceDir, fileName), Path.Combine(destDir, fileName), true);

Console.WriteLine("Overwriting:" + Path.Combine(destDir, fileName));

}

foreach (string fileName in dstFileNames)

{

string extension = fileName.Substring(fileName.LastIndexOf('.') + 1);

if (!srcFileNames.Contains(fileName) || extensionsToExclude.Contains(extension))

{

if (extensionsToLeave.Contains(extension))

{

Console.WriteLine("Leaving:" + fileName);

continue;

}

else

{

File.Delete(Path.Combine(destDir, fileName));

Console.WriteLine("Deleteing:" + fileName);

}

List<string> sourceNames = new List<string>(GetFSItems(new DirectoryInfo(sourceDir).GetDirectories()));

List<string> destNames = new List<string>(GetFSItems(new DirectoryInfo(destDir).GetDirectories()));

foreach (string dirName in sourceNames)

{

if (directoriesToExclude.Contains(dirName))

{

Console.WriteLine("Skipping: " + dirName);

continue;

}

//Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Comparing:{0} and {1}", Path.Combine(sourceDir, dirName), Path.Combine(destDir, dirName)));

if (!destNames.Contains(dirName))

{

string newDestDir = Path.Combine(destDir, dirName);

Directory.CreateDirectory(newDestDir);

Console.WriteLine("Adding:" + Path.Combine(destDir, dirName));

CompareDirs(Path.Combine(sourceDir, dirName), newDestDir, clearRight, extensionsToExclude, directoriesToExclude, extensionsToLeave);

}

else

{

CompareDirs(Path.Combine(sourceDir, dirName), Path.Combine(destDir, dirName), clearRight, extensionsToExclude, directoriesToExclude, extensionsToLeave);

}

foreach (string dirName in destNames)

{

if (!sourceNames.Contains(dirName) || directoriesToExclude.Contains(dirName))

{

Directory.Delete(Path.Combine(destDir, dirName), true);

Console.WriteLine("Deleteing:" + Path.Combine(destDir, dirName));

}

return false;

}

private IEnumerable<string> GetFSItems(FileSystemInfo[] dirInfos)

{

foreach (FileSystemInfo dinf in dirInfos)

{

yield return dinf.Name;

}

The ASP.NET MVC Framework Source goes live on Codeplex!

Scott Galloway — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:54:33 GMT

This is the first big thing I worked on in the ASP.NET team, the release of the ASP.NET MVC Source Code to Codeplex. Scott Guthrie announced this a few minutes ago and as he says it's the first of a number we have planned over the next while.
What is surprising is how much time and how many people it takes to pull a release like this together...but I really think it's the start of something really amazing and to quote a corny phrase 'you ain't seen nothing yet!'

Ack Ack!

Scott Galloway — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:18:52 GMT

Well, it's the last day in my first week with the ASP.NET team (kind of, a few people are off to MIX) . It's been a pretty interesting week...lots to learn etc...I'm still getting used to the team dynamic and my place in that (I think everyone else is a senior...I'm not due to some dubious career choices over the years). Still, I have lots of responsibility and a lot of work to do over the next short while...mostly focused around releases and our process for some future work (I *did* come from Project remember ;-)). It has been a blast playing with all the latest and greatest features (many of which we just released new previews of) and getting a lot of insight as to where ASP.NET is going (and yes, having pangs for my old life where I got to use this stuff to build applications for customers). Still I have a ton to learn and it's going to be an interesting journey...whish me luck!

Yik yak

Scott Galloway — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:34:33 GMT

So, anyone remember my ASP.NET forums password? Umm...actually it's been so long since I've used it I think it expired (the password reminder page gets my hopes up). Anyway just signed up for a new account and answered a couple of questions. Really can't wait to get started in my new job!
Anyway, hope to see some of my faithful reader on the ASP.NET forum in future and expect to see a few posts with me making a fool of myself when getting up to speed on all the new hotness my future team is working on. I have some embryonic stuff I might wind up writing soon, number one is an XML configuration method for ASP.NET MVC...which I have no doubt completely goes against some core philosophy of the framework but I think it'd be cool to separate the controller mapping from code into some external config file (note, I have NO idea if this already planned...ain't joined the team yet!).
Right, off to bed...going to the dentist tomorrow to have my pizza fractured teeth fixed (as in a pizza caused one of my very british teeth to fragment...)