F9 Group Marketing and Technology Blog

Search engine optimization , or SEO, is the practice of improving a website’s position in search engines’ results using unpaid techniques. A better (higher) position in the search results will, in theory, lead to more click throughs, increasing the website’s visibility and audience. There are a number of simple steps you can take on your website to improve your search engine ranking. A good first step is to download and run Microsoft’s free Search Engine Optimization Toolkit . Point it at a remote website and the SEO Toolkit will crawl the links on the site and identify potential problems and offer suggestions on how to fix them. ASP.NET 4 includes a handful of new methods, properties, and libraries to assist with search engine optimization, including ASP.NET Routing , permanent redirects, and the ability to programmatically specify values for certain <meta> tags. This article examines these enhancements and shows how they can be used for SEO purposes. Read on to learn more! Read More >

XML is an increasingly popular way to encode documents, data, and electronic messages. Over the years Microsoft has offered a variety of libraries to facilitate creating, modifying, querying, and searching XML documents. LINQ to XML is a relatively new set of XML-related classes in the .NET Framework (found in the System.Xml.Linq namespace ), which enable developers to work with XML documents using LINQ’s features, syntax, and semantics. As discussed in an earlier article, Introducing LINQ to XML , LINQ to XML is a simpler and easier to use API than previous libraries. Because LINQ to XML can utilize LINQ’s query syntax and assortment of standard query operators , LINQ to XML code is usually very terse and readable.

One of the most sure-fire ways to improve a web application’s performance is to employ caching. Caching takes some expensive operation and stores its results in a quickly accessible location. Since it’s inception, ASP.NET has offered two flavors of caching: Output Caching – caches the entire rendered markup of an ASP.NET page or User Control for a specified duration. Data Caching – a API for caching objects. Using the data cache you can write code to add, remove, and retrieve items from the cache. Until recently, the underlying functionality of these two caching mechanisms was fixed – both cached data in the web server’s memory. This has its drawbacks. In some cases, developers may want to save output cache content to disk. When using the data cache you may want to cache items to the cloud or to a distributed caching architecture like memcached .

This is one of those “D’oh!” moments.  You’re creating your own UITypeEditor.  You know the UITypeEditor class is located in the System.Drawing.Design namespace.  So naturally you want to add to your Visual Studio project a reference to the System.Drawing.Design.dll, right?  Wrong!  When you compile your project, the following error may appear: The type or namespace name Related posts: Adding Assemblies to the Visual Studio "Add Reference" Dialog Web Service Stumper: “Ambiguous Type” IEventHandlerService Already Exists in the Service Container

Many websites that support user accounts require users to enter an email address as part of the registration process. This email address is then used as the primary communication channel with the user. For instance, if the user forgets her password a new one can be generated and emailed to the address on file. But what if, when registering, a user enters an incorrect email address? Perhaps the user meant to enter me@example.com , but accidentally transposed the first two letters, entering em@example.com . How can such typos be prevented? The only foolproof way to ensure that the user’s entered email address is valid is to send them a validation email upon registering that includes a link that, when visited, activates their account.

When you create a Form with a border, Windows automatically draws a drop shadow around the form, as shown here: However, if you set the form’s FormBorderStyle property to None, Windows draws neither the form border nor the drop shadow, as shown here: So what if you don’t want a form border, but you do want Related posts: Hide Form from Alt+Tab C# Focus TextBox on Form Load C# WinForms Form Event Order

Click the image above to download a .NET Framework 4 and Extensions poster from Microsoft. Want more .NET posters?  Devcurry has published a collection of .NET Framework and Visual Studio posters including keyboard shortcut, namespace and type posters. .NET and Visual Studio Poster Collection Related posts:Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Released TodayVisual Studio 2010 and Related posts: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Released Today Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate Documentation Available for .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010

Over the past two weeks I’ve showed how to build a store locator application using ASP.NET and the free Google Maps API and Google’s geocoding service. Part 1 looked at creating the database to record the store locations. This database contains a table named Stores with columns capturing each store’s address and latitude and longitude coordinates. Part 1 also showed how to use Google’s geocoding service to translate a user-entered address into latitude and longitude coordinates, which could then be used to retrieve and display those stores within (roughly) a 15 mile area. At the end of Part 1, the results page listed the nearby stores in a grid. In Part 2 we used the Google Maps API to add an interactive map to the search results page, with each nearby store displayed on the map as a marker. The map added in Part 2 certainly improves the search results page, but the way the nearby stores are displayed on the map leaves a bit to be desired. For starters, each nearby store is displayed on the map using the same marker icon, namely a red pushpin. This makes it difficult to match up the nearby stores listed in the grid with those displayed on the map. Hovering the mouse over a marker on the map displays the store number in a tooltip, but ideally a user could click a marker to see more detailed information about the store, such as its address, phone number, a photo of the storefront, and so forth. This third and final installment shows how to enhance the map created in Part 2