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My C# program threw an exception from the following method: SizeF size = Graphics.MeasureString( text, font ); Unfortunately, the exception’s message was rather obscure: “Parameter is invalid.”  After an investigation, I discovered the error occurred because the font had been previously disposed.  Unfortunately, the Font class does not have the typical IsDisposed property, so there Related posts: Change Font Size Convert Between Synchronous and Asynchronous Change Font Style

While surfing the web you may have come across websites with images and other multimedia content that, when clicked, were displayed in a floating window that hovered above the web page. Perhaps it was a page that showed a series of thumbnail images of products for sale, where clicking on a thumbnail displayed the full sized image in a floating window, dimming out the web page behind it. Have you ever wondered how this was accomplished or whether you could add such functionality to your ASP.NET website? In years past, adding such rich client-side functionality to a website required a solid understanding of JavaScript and the “eccentricities” of various web browsers. Today, thanks to powerful JavaScript libraries like jQuery , along with an active developer community creating plugins and tools that integrate with jQuery, it’s possible to add snazzy client-side behaviors without being a JavaScript whiz. This article shows how to display text, images, and other multimedia content in a floating window using FancyBox , a free client-side library. You’ll learn how it works, see what steps to take to get started using it, and explore a number of FancyBox demos. There’s also a demo available for download that shows using FancyBox to display both text and images in a floating window in an ASP.NET website. Read on to learn more! Read More >

Cascading Style Sheets , or CSS, is a syntax used to describe the look and feel of the elements in a web page. CSS allows a web developer to separate the document content – the HTML, text, and images – from the presentation of that content. Such separation makes the markup in a page easier to read, understand, and update; it can result in reduced bandwidth as the style information can be specified in a separate file and cached by the browser; and makes site-wide changes easier to apply. For a great example of the flexibility and power of CSS, check out CSS Zen Garden . This website has a single page with fixed markup, but allows web developers from around the world to submit CSS rules to define alternate presentation information. Unfortunately, certain aspects of CSS’s syntax leave a bit to be desired. Many style sheets include repeated styling information because CSS does not allow the use of variables. Such repetition makes the resulting style sheet lengthier and harder to read; it results in more rules that need to be changed when the website is redesigned to use a new primary color. Specifying inherited CSS rules, such as indicating that a elements (i.e., hyperlinks) in h1 elements should not be underlined, requires creating a single selector name, like h1 a . Ideally, CSS would allow for nested rules, enabling you to define the a rules directly within the h1 rules. .LESS is a free, open-source port of Ruby’s LESS library

As developers, we all make assumptions when programming. Perhaps the biggest assumption we make is that those libraries and tools that ship with the .NET Framework are the best way to accomplish a given task. For example, most developers assume that using ASP.NET’s Membership system is the best way to manage user accounts in a website (rather than rolling your own user account store). Similarly, creating a Web Reference to communicate with a web service generates markup that auto-creates a proxy class , which handles the low-level details of invoking the web service, serializing parameters, and so on.

Twitter is a popular social networking web service for writing and sharing short messages. These tidy text messages are referred to as tweets and are limited to 140 characters. Users can leave tweets and follow other users directly from Twitter’s website or by using the Twitter API. Twitter’s API makes it possible to integrate Twitter with external applications. For example, you can use the Twitter API to display your latest tweets on your blog. A mom and pop online store could integrate Twitter such that a new tweet was added each time a customer completed an order. And ELMAH , a popular open-source error logging library, can be configured to send error notifications to Twitter. Twitter’s API is implemented over HTTP using the design principles of Representational State Transfer (REST) . In a nutshell, inter-operating with the Twitter API involves a client – your application – sending an XML-formatted message over HTTP to the server – Twitter’s website. The server responds with an XML-formatted message that contains status information and data. While you can certainly interface with this API by writing your own code to communicate with the Twitter API over HTTP along with the code that creates and parses the XML payloads exchanged between the client and server, such work is unnecessary since there are many community-created Twitter API libraries for a variety of programming frameworks. This article shows how to integrate Twitter with an ASP.NET website using the Twitterizer library, which is a free, open-source .NET library for working with the Twitter API. Specifically, this article shows how to retrieve your latest tweets and how to post a tweet using Twitterizer

The Release Candidate (RC) for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 is now available to the public.  The biggest change from Beta 2 is a major improvement to Visual Studio performance, specifically as it relates to loading solutions, typing, building and debugging.  The RC includes a “go-live license” for companies that wish to deploy Related posts: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2 Documentation Available for .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Now Available for MSDN Subscribers

In most usage scenarios, the data displayed in a Microsoft Chart control comes from some dynamic source, such as from a database query. The appearance of the chart can be modified dynamically, as well; past installments in this article series showed how to programmatically customize the axes, labels, and other appearance-related settings. However, it is possible to statically define the chart’s data and appearance strictly through the control’s declarative markup. One of the demos examined in the Getting Started article rendered a column chart with seven columns whose labels and values were defined statically in the <asp:Series> tag’s <Points> collection. Given this functionality, it should come as no surprise that the Microsoft Chart Controls also support serialization . Serialization is the process of persisting the state of a control or an object to some other medium, such as to disk. Deserialization is the inverse process, and involves taking the persisted data and recreating the control or object. With just a few lines of code you can persist the appearance settings, the data, or both to a file on disk or to any stream. Likewise, it takes just a few lines of codes to reconstitute a chart from the persisted information.

Like every Web control in the ASP.NET toolbox, the GridView includes a variety of style-related properties, including CssClass , Font , ForeColor , BackColor , Width , Height , and so on. The GridView also includes style properties that apply to certain classes of rows in the grid, such as RowStyle , AlternatingRowStyle , HeaderStyle , and PagerStyle . Each of these meta-style properties offer the standard style properties ( CssClass , Font , etc.) as subproperties. In ASP.NET 4.0, Microsoft added four new style properties to the GridView control: SortedAscendingHeaderStyle , SortedAscendingCellStyle , SortedDescendingHeaderStyle , and SortedDescendingCellStyle . These four properties are meta-style properties like RowStyle and HeaderStyle , but apply to column of cells rather than a row. These properties only apply when the GridView is sorted – if the grid’s data is sorted in ascending order then the SortedAscendingHeaderStyle and SortedAscendingCellStyle properties define the styles for the column the data is sorted by. The SortedDescendingHeaderStyle and SortedDescendingCellStyle properties apply to the sorted column when the results are sorted in descending order. These four new properties make it easier to customize the appearance of the column by which the data is sorted. Using these properties along with a touch of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) it is possible to add up and down arrows to the sorted column’s header to indicate whether the data is sorted in ascending or descending order. Likewise, these properties can be used to shade the sorted column or make its text bold.

In the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, Microsoft introduced ASP.NET Routing, which decouples the URL of a resource from the physical file on the web server. With ASP.NET Routing you, the developer, define routing rules map route patterns to a class that generates the content. For example, you might indicate that the URL Categories/ CategoryName maps to a class that takes the CategoryName and generates HTML that lists that category’s products in a grid. With such a mapping, users could view products for the Beverages category by visiting www.yoursite.com/Categories/Beverages . In .NET 3.5 SP1, ASP.NET Routing was primarily designed for ASP.NET MVC applications, although as discussed in Using ASP.NET Routing Without ASP.NET MVC it is possible to implement ASP.NET Routing in a Web Forms application, as well. However, implementing ASP.NET Routing in a Web Forms application involves a bit of seemingly excessive legwork. In a Web Forms scenario we typically want to map a routing pattern to an actual ASP.NET page. To do so we need to create a route handler class that is invoked when the routing URL is requested and, in a sense, dispatches the request to the appropriate ASP.NET page

Do you need help convincing your boss that your company needs to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010?  Or perhaps you are looking for additional ammo in your .NET vs. Java religious wars with your programming colleagues? Microsoft has produced a Silverlight-based “Myth Busting Matrix” for Visual Studio.  This nifty web tool details the benefits of upgrading Related posts: Microsoft Unveils Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2 Documentation Available for .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010