Archives for category: examples

Keep your ASP.NET Master Pages light

April 27, 10 //
0

ASP.NET Master Pages are a great way to make reusable web page templates. A Master Page template file can hold all the common HTML markup, CSS and JavaScript references, and .NET controls that appear throughout the pages of your web site. Each of your web pages injects only its own specialized content into the shell of the Master Page.

Once you start using Master Pages as shared templates it’s tempting to start putting shared functionality into them. After all, Master Pages fire their own events like regular web form pages. They can be referenced as objects from the pages that use them. So they may seem like a good place to keep common functions and properties that you need throughout the pages in your site. But there are a few Master Page gotchas that make this a poor practice.

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Keep an Eye on Craigslist with Google Alerts

October 17, 08 //
19

Craigslist is my goto site for second-hand gear. Concert tickets, computer hardware, gaming systems… No matter what I’m looking for I know eventually someone will put one up for sale.

Scanning through endless listings of unrelated garbage though is boring. That’s why I use Google Alerts to do the boring work for me. Google Alerts keeps an eye on Craigslist and sends me an email whenever keywords that I’m interested in are posted anywhere on the site.

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Combine Integrated Windows auth and anonymous access

October 17, 08 //
2

One of the things I work on at Wharton is a student portal. The portal is a public web site but most features are protected by a web form log in. A common complaint from students is that they’re forced to log in to the web site after they’ve already logged into a school computer lab computer with the same exact account. Shouldn’t the portal already know who they are without another log in?

After doing some experimenting, I’ve found it’s possible to combine anonymous access, web form authentication, and Integrated Windows authentication. I’m throwing out my approach in case anyone needs to do something similar. We run ColdFusion on IIS servers to power our apps but you may be able to adapt this for other platforms.

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