Joel Varty's Blog

Now, Amazon has added Versioning as an out of the box feature that you can simply enable!

One of the features we added this year was the ability to write Input Forms for Content Definitions and Module Definitions that are for "client side save", which means that the values of the content item are saved using Javascript instead of a postback.

I love the jTemplates plugin for jQuery. 

So how did we get around this problem?

Shrinking your SQL Server 2005 Transaction Log

According to an article from CNET News on October 19th, Visual Studio 2010 will launch in March, 2010. 

We do our own routing with Agility CMS, however we are looking at switching to the more standardized routing built into Asp.Net (as of 3.5sp1).

Personally, I love the “Browser Capabilities” project on codeplex that does a nice job of extracting the actual things that a browser can do, saving you from doing things the following:

There are a plethora of explanations for JSONP (JSON with Padding, I think it stands for) out there – just search for “how JSONP works” and you’ll get a ton of descriptions.  Here's my take.

If you were ever looking at some code and wondered who actually changed the line of text you were currently looking at, there is a way to do just that!

When you run a background thread or async handler in asp.net, the thread will not run with the same identity specified in the impersonate tag of the web.config.  Read on for how to get around it.

This is something that is super easy, yet I get asked about it quite often.

If you want to do Friendly Urls or other things in an Agility website that requires you to add an Http Module, you should do it by extending Agility.Web.HttpModules.ExtensibleAgilityHTTPModule.

If you get a 404 on a WCF web service (SVC) in IIS7, you may need to re-register WCF on the machine.

Do you want to get rid of the dashed border that appears when you click on links, flash controls, etc? Try this!

This is the update to the VS 2008 Database Edition and adds support for SQL Server 2008 and no longer requires a local database server to operate.  It was released back in April, but I just realized I needed it when I installed SQL Server 2008 on my local development machine, and found out that the base install does NOT support SQL Server 2008.

This is a process that is becoming more and more important as we offload a ton of our page processing to .js files as opposed to HTML files processed by the server.  This is because we are doing more client templating and logical processing on the client and not on the server.

One of the things about online file storage is getting the first massive data dump onto the server.  If you have a lot of data to store, it would be more prudent to simply take an external drive to the physical data center and do a transfer that way.

Besides losing any code you may have written that you’ll never get back, those pending changes or locks will be stored on the server until someone does an “undo” or a workspace delete.

Amazon CloudFront announced today that they have added support for access logs.  This means that any of the objects being access from your S3 Account via Cloudfront can be tracked and reported on without any additional work.

This has been explained a bunch of times – most notably here – I just thought I would capture here what I did to update our TFS instance to solve this issue.

Sometimes you have to load jQuery, but you don’t know if it has already been referenced somewhere else in the website.

If you want to pass a name/value collection of untyped data to a webservice with JSON, do it like this guys, Joost van Schaik, says:

If you are using the web.config to determine security for aspx pages, you may have noticed that you don’t get the chance to determine whether a security exception has been thrown.  The user will simply be return to the login page with a ReturnUrl query string pointing back to the url they were trying to access.

I have just been editing the project templates to enable HTML in the description field.  As it turns out, the description field is locked down as plain text.

Love it:

• Generate a class structure based on database tables.
• Makes coding transactions really easy and seamless.
• Makes working with store procedures more like methods.
• Makes it easier to validate database field names at compile-time.

There is a ton of examples on the web of how you can force IE8 into IE7 compatibility mode using a meta tag in the header.

Even if you want the user to be notified of the fact that an AJAX web service call has errored out, don’t use an alert() to do it.

Check out the following C# code:

One of the things we see a lot of these days are web apps that call other web apps via web services, RSS, or REST APIs.

This plugin for windows live writer called "Insert Code", lets you do this:

I am using jQuery for everything these days - it really is an awesome add-on to any web application, and what is even better that you can get intellisense on it for the latest version.

This is how you get a handle on a server elemment in Javascript without using <%= elem.ClientID %>.

I saw this posting on the webdevtools blog and was intrigued by its promise.

I work on a product called Agility CMS.  Agility CMS is a hosted web content management system - including a web application dedicated to actually editing website content, pages, sitemaps and other good stuff.

This is one of those javascript errors that makes me shake my head a bit, but with more and more Ajax style apps being built in Asp.Net, I have started seeing this quite a bit.

This is one of those javascript errors that makes me shake my head a bit, but with more and more Ajax style apps being built in Asp.Net, I have started seeing this quite a bit.

It's always good to know the distance between 2 points.

Always remember that if you are using Control output caching, RegisterClientScriptInclude will NOT run if the used control is returning a cached version.

I'm sure this has been blogged on a zillion times before, but this is super easy.  Look!

If you are hosting a WCF services in a console app, windows service or any other non-IIS application, you need to listen on a particular url address.  A normal user running an app or service doesn't have permission to do this unless that user is an admin (not a good thing for a wcf service).  So in order to grant permission to reserve the namespace, you need to run a little command.

This is because of the Scripts on the page, and is not related to Agility per-se.

Timed release in Agility happens in 2 ways:

OK - so I just started messing about with YQL on the Yahoo developer site, using the YQL console which is pretty awesome - it allows you to use a SQL variant to query the vast XML data sources.

Here's something I wasn't expecting: Microsoft has released its own chart control.

When you are working on a Windows Service and you have it running locally from the build folder, you need to stop it before you can build it.

Scott Guthrie has a blog post on this.

I was doing some load testing the other year and noticed one of the counters was going off the charts - ASP.Net exceptions.  I couldn't understand why my application, which was behaving fine in every other way, was throwing exceptions.

One of the biggest pain points that I find with Visual Studio 2008 is its inconsistency with IntelliSense (arguably, and ironically, its best feature).

There's nothing more gratifying than seeing someone else say something about a product you build...

If you’re coming from the ASP.Net world and you want to start building silverlight controls, databinding is one those things that works somewhat the same, yet somewhat differently from the standard DataSource, DataBind() world that you may be used to.

I thought you might be interested in a post I have on another blog - this one for the Agility CMS that I work on with Edentity.

Yes, folks - that title is not a joke.  Silverlight can completely change how we think about the web.  We're not writing activeX controls anymore, we're not coding "ActionScript" on a "Timeline" - we're talking about something revolutionary here.

Client side data binding, where we call a web service method via JavaScript and attach the resulting data to visual elements, is beginning to get a real foothold in this industry.

Often times when we get a set of html templates from a designer, we tend to see a lot of this:

If you were waiting for this to be incorporated into Asp.Net AJAX, you have no more excuses.  Scott Guthrie today announced in his blog that Microsoft will ship jQuery support with Visual Studio, and they will provide a vanilla and "intellisense-annotated versions,"  allowing for complete cooperation with the usage of the package.

Before I get into the great features and great dangers of LINQ, lets get a couple thing out of the way:

In Asp.Net apps, we are used to storing data in the current context.  Objects that are specific to the currently executing Request, like a User object retrieved a database, or another object that you want to make globally available without requiring multiple database trips, can benefit from this.

The web works better when web sites are tailored to the capabilities of the platform.

This can be a major time saver when you want to find some text and perhaps duplicate it or manipulate it throughout a bunch of files in your project.

I have had the unique pleasure of dealing with this conundrum countless times of the past eight years while architecting applications that operate in various web server and browser environments.

I will try not to double-post too much, instead I will keep my Edentity specific stuff in here, and simply link from here to any tech related stuff that might be of interest on this site.

This appeared on digg.com not too long ago, and I though the comments were almost as interesting as the article.

We recently rolled out a website using a hosting provider that enforces Medium Trust in all asp.net web applications.  Fine - we've done this many times before.  Except for one thing: we were using a custom configuration section, and our assembly wasn't allowed to go into the GAC.  What do we do now?

Scott Guthrie is reporting on his blog that the Framework will be available with source code as of version 3.5 under the Microsoft Reference License.  In my mind this makes up for a lot of the flack that has been doled out towards Microsoft in terms of the closed nature of their products and platforms.

Sometimes you need to call the "click" event of a button using javascript.  Well, in FireFox, this doesn't always work if the button is <input type="button">.

I used to ask myself what I wanted my computer to do, but since I am no longer tied to a single computer so much as I am linked to the internet via a plethora of devices, I figure “What do you want from the web?” is a more apt question.

I have been living in Ajax (the actual city, that is) for almost 10 years. Incidentally, I have been doing AJAX related web development for nearly all of that time. Although it wasn’t called AJAX at the time, I am glad they decided to name it for my hometown ;)

It used to be when we designed applications for the web, my boss at the time would nearly always look at the architecture and say “but where is this feature, can’t we do this on the web yet?” or “why can’t I do this like a normal application?” My answer was usually something along the lines of “what do you expect from the web?” That was how I thought about the web 10 years ago, when every new challenge was an attempt to bring more richness and responsiveness to the user interface.

Bertrand Le Roy has this on his blog today: http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2009/12/10/resizing-images-from-the-server-using-wpf-wic-instead-of-gdi.aspx