How to setup an asp.net website on localhost

First lets start by setting up the site in IIS…

1.Open IIS by double-clicking on Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Internet Information Services

2.Right Click on Web Sites->Default Web Site

3.Click on Properties->Home Directory and choose the location of your website

Now lets give the ASPNET account the appropriate permissions to access that directory…

1. Using My Computer or the Windows Explorer, navigate to the folder containing the website you choose in the previous step

2. Right click on the folder and and go to Properties->Security

3. On the Security tab, click on Add to locate the ASPNET account
   

4. Click on Locations and select the local machine
   

5. Click on Advanced->Find Now to list all the user accounts on your local machine
   

6. Choose ASPNET and click on OK. (If you don’t see ASPNET account in there, go to step 11)

7. Return to the security tab. Select the ASPNET user account and check the Full Control checkbox under the allow column. Click OK.
   

8. Thats it! You should now be able to go to http://localhost/ in your browser window and see your website.

If you don’t see an ASP.NET account in Step 8 then…

1. Run “C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ aspnet_regiis.exe -i -enable” in the command line window and then repeat steps 1 through 10.

Following steps are optional. They help you configure your web project to automatically reference the local web-server when you run or debug a site instead of launching the built-in web-server itself…

1. Open Visual Studio and select your web-project in the solution explorer, right click and select Property pages.

2. Select the Start Options from the left navigation, and under Server change the radio button value from ‘Use default Web server’ to ‘Use custom server’. Then set the Base URL value to be: http://localhost/

Now, when you click on any page in the app and then hit F5 or Ctrl-F5, the IDE will use the local web-server instead of popping up its own.

How To Load & Reference An Usercontrol From Code Behind

First lets create a sample user control called MyControl for demonstration purposes

public partial class _Controls_MyControl : System.Web.UI.UserControl
{
    private string _myProperty;

    public string MyProperty
    {
        get { return _myProperty; }
        set { _myProperty = value; }
    }

    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

    }
}

Now register this control in the web.config

<pages>
  <controls>
    <add tagPrefix="uc" tagName="MyControl" src="~/_Controls/MyControl.ascx"/>
  </controls>
</pages>

Now this is the most important part, you have to reference your user control in the .aspx page to be able to access its partial class members -

<%@ Reference Control="~/_Controls/MyControl.ascx" %>

Now finally lets instantiate and load the control from the code behind…

_Controls_MyControl myControl = (_Controls_MyControl)LoadControl("~/_Controls/MyControl.ascx");
myControl.MyProperty = "Hello World!!";
Page.Controls.Add(myControl);

That’s it

How To Clear All Items From Cache

if (Cache.Count > 0)
{
	string currentKey = string.Empty;
	System.Collections.IDictionaryEnumerator cacheContents =
	System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Cache.GetEnumerator();

	Response.Write(string.Format("Following {0} cache keys were cleared:<br /><br />", Cache.Count));

	while (cacheContents.MoveNext())
	{
		currentKey = cacheContents.Key.ToString();
		Response.Write(currentKey + "<br />");
		System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Cache.Remove(currentKey);
	}
}
else
{
	Response.Write("Nothing to clear. Cache is empty.");
}

ASP.NET Inline Tags

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 no admin fool!
<%} %>

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178135(vs.80).aspx

<%= ... %>

Used for small chunks of information, usually from objects and single pieces of information like a single string or int variable:

The Date is now <%= DateTime.Now.ToShortDateString() %>
The value of string1 is <%= string1 %>

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6dwsdcf5(VS.71).aspx

*note: <%= is the equivalent of Response.Write() -  Courtesy of Adam from the US,thanks!

<%# .. %>

Used for Binding Expressions; such as Eval and Bind, most often found in data controls like GridView, Repeater, etc.:

<%# Eval("MeetingName") %>

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178366.aspx

<%$ ... %>

Used for expressions, not code; often seen with DataSources:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d5bd1tad.aspx

<%@ ... %>

This is for directive syntax; basically the stuff you see at the top your your aspx pages like control registration and page declaration:

<%@ Page Language=”C#” MasterPageFile=”~/MasterPage.master” AutoEventWireup=”true” CodeFile=”Default.aspx.cs” Inherits=”_Default” Title=”Untitled Page” %> <%@ Register TagPrefix=”wp” Namespace=”CustomWebParts” %>

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xz702w3e(VS.80).aspx

<%- ... -%>

This is a server side comment, stuff you don’t want anyone without code access to see:

<%- sometimes end users make me angry -%>

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/4acf8afk.aspx

And that’s that.

Source: Naspinski

How to easily parse HTML without RegEx

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 which has a css class called “scrape” assigned to it:

using HtmlAgilityPack;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
        doc.Load(Server.MapPath(filePath));
        Parse(doc.DocumentNode);
    }
    private void Parse(HtmlNode n)
    {
        foreach (HtmlAttribute atr in n.Attributes)
        {
            if (atr.Name == "class" && atr.Value == "scrape")
            {
                Response.Write(n.InnerHtml);
            }
        }

        if (n.HasChildNodes)
        {
            foreach (HtmlNode cn in n.ChildNodes)
            {
                Parse(cn);
            }
        }
    }
}

That’s just a very small part of what it could do. I’ll expand upon this and post a few more examples in the future showing some interesting things you could do with this.