If you’re developing on a laptop with a smaller screen, you can use all the screen real estate that you can get. I have recently optimized my Firefox in order to maximize the amount of screen space available for web pages.

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In .NET, serialization is the process of converting a complex object into a bit stream or XML string, which can be saved into a file or sent over a network connection. Serialization is extensively used in web services to transfer information from client to server, and for saving .NET objects into an SQL database.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to implement binary serialization in .NET; you’ll quickly find that many objects in .NET are not natively serializable, so I’ll also show you how to customize an object to manually make it serializable.

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I use the same machine to do development and to do all of my web surfing/school work/e-mails. Often times I don’t want MSSQL server and IIS running when I’m not working because it wastes resources and slows down my computer.

Customize your environment
Windows makes it simple to customize your environment so services like IIS, MSSQL, WebClient, etc. can be started and stopped just by running a small BAT file. To create your own development environment BAT file: Read the rest of this entry »

Controls that are embedded in an ItemTemplate of a GridView can be tricky to reference in Javascript. For example, if you want to pass the ClientID of a textbox to a function, the following example will not work:

<script language="Javascript" type="text/javascript">
function AlertValue(SomeObject) {
    alert(SomeObject.value);
}
</script>
[...]
<asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server">
    <Columns>
        <asp:TemplateField>
            <ItemTemplate>
                <asp:TextBox ID="SomeTextbox" runat="server"
                    onclick=’AlertValue(document.getElementById("<%# SomeTextbox.ClientID %>");’>
                </asp:TextBox>
            </ItemTemplate>
        </asp:TemplateField>
    </Columns>
</asp:GridView>

Why doesn’t it work?
You can’t use ASP.NET’s ClientID property to return the object because the server id ‘SomeTextbox’ is present in every row in the GridView — it’s not unique. You can reference ‘SomeTextbox’ in the code behind using the .FindControl method, but it’s much more involved than the work around below.

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Occasionally an ASP.NET application needs to be recycled, particularly during testing, usually due to poor coding. An application can be recycled in IIS, but if you don’t have access to IIS, you can programmatically recycle your ASP.NET application.

What is a recycle?
An application recycle releases all the resources and memory associated with an application, and restarts the application with a clean slate. This process prevents memory-hog applications from taking up all a server’s resources with memory leaks and poor resource allocation.

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