Chances are, there are several different URLs that point to the same content on your website. For example, the URLs http:// yoursite .com , http:// yoursite .com/default.aspx , http://www. yoursite .com , or http://www. yoursite .com/default.aspx are all likely valid URLs that results in the same content, namely the homepage for yoursite .com . While having four different URLs reference the same content may not seem like a big deal, it can directly impact your website’s search engine placement and, consequently, it’s traffic. To a search engine, those four different URLs represent four different pages, even though the all produce the same content. To understand how allowing duplicate URLs in your website can affect your search engine placement, first understand that search engines base a page’s placement in the search results based, in part, on how many other websites link to the page. Now, imagine that there are 1,000 web pages from other websites that link to your homepage. You might conclude, then, that a search engine would rank the importance of your homepage based on those 1,000 links.

Search engine optimization , or SEO, is the practice of improving a website’s position in search engines’ results using unpaid techniques. The driver behind SEO is that a better (higher) position in the search results will, most likely, lead to more click throughs, increasing the website’s visibility, audience, and profit. A previous article here on 4Guys, Search Engine Optimization Enhancements in ASP.NET 4 , explored some of ASP.NET 4’s new features designed to aid with SEO. Another helpful tool for SEO is Microsoft’s SEO Toolkit , a free IIS add-on that you can run from your computer to inspect a local or remote website and identify potential issues that may impact its search engine rankings. Using Microsoft’s SEO Toolkit is simple. Once installed, run it and specify the website you want to analyze.

DeveloperFusion offers a free .NET code converter.  Simply paste your C# or VB.NET code into this web-based tool, then select your target language: C#, VB.NET, Python or Ruby.  Supports syntax up to .NET 3.5. Code Converter Related posts:C# Universal Type ConverterFree Developer ToolsVisual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released Related posts: C# Universal Type Converter Free Developer Tools Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released

The ASP.NET Web Forms model strives to encapsulate the lower level complexities involved in building a web application. Features like server-side event handlers, the page lifecycle, and view state effectively blur the line between the client and the server, simplify state management, and free the developer from worrying about HTTP, requests and responses, and similar matters. While these facets of the Web Forms model allow for rapid application development and make ASP.NET more accessible to developers with a web application background, their behavior can impact your website’s behavior and performance. View state is perhaps the most important – yet most misunderstood – feature of the Web Forms model. In a nutshell, view state is a technique that automatically persists programmatic changes to the Web controls on a page.

As discussed in earlier installments of this article series – most notably in An Introduction to LINQ and The Standard Query Operators – one of LINQ’s primary components is its set of standard query operators . A query operator is a method that operates on a sequence of data and performs some task based on that data, are implemented as extension methods on types that implement the IEnumerable<T> interface . Some of the standard query operators that we’ve explored throughout the articles in this series include: Count , Average , First , Skip , Take , Where , and OrderBy , among others. While these standard query operators provide a great detail of functionality, there may be situations where they fall short. The good news is that it’s quite easy to create your own query operators. Underneath the covers query operators are just methods that extend types that implement IEnumerable<T> and iterate over the sequence performing some task, such as computing the total number of items in the sequence, computing the average, filtering the results, or ordering them. This article examines how to extend LINQ’s functionality by creating your own extension methods. Read on to learn more! Read More >

Tired of RSS feeds?  Now you can follow C# 411 on Twitter! Cool Twitter logo from here Related posts:New .NET LogoAdd Drop Shadow to Borderless FormC# Focus TextBox on Form Load Related posts: New .NET Logo Add Drop Shadow to Borderless Form C# Focus TextBox on Form Load

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

Last week’s article, Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API (Part 1) , was the first in a multi-part article series exploring how to add store locator-type functionality to your ASP.NET website using the free Google Maps API . Part 1 started with an examination of the database used to power the store locator, which contains a single table named Stores with columns capturing the store number, its address and its latitude and longitude coordinates. Next, we looked at using Google Maps API’s geocoding service to translate a user-entered address, such as San Diego, CA or 92101 into its latitude and longitude coordinates. Knowing the coordinates of the address entered by the user, we then looked at writing a SQL query to return those stores within (roughly) 15 miles of the user-entered address.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been working on a couple of projects that have used the free Google Maps API to add interactive maps and geocoding capabilities to ASP.NET websites. In a nutshell, the Google Maps API allow you to display maps on your website, to add markers onto the map, and to compute the latitude and longitude of an address, among many other tasks. With some Google Maps API experience under my belt, I decided it would be fun to implement a store locator feature and share it here on 4Guys. A store locator lets a visitor enter an address or postal code and then shows the nearby stores. Typically, store locators display the nearby stores on both a map and in a grid, along with the distance between the entered address and each store within the area. To see a store locator in action, check out the Wells Fargo store locator . This article is the first in a multi-part series that walks through how to add a store locator feature to your ASP.NET application. In this inaugural article, we’ll build the database table to hold the store information. Next, we’ll explore how to use the Google Maps API’s geocoding feature to allow for flexible address entry and how to translate an address into latitude and longitude pairs. Armed with the latitude and longitude coordinates, we’ll see how to retrieve nearby locations as well as how to compute the distance between the address entered by the visitor and the each nearby store. (A future installment will examine how to display a map showing the nearby stores.) Read on to learn more! Read More >

Earlier this year I wrote an article about Twitterizer , an open-source .NET library that can be used to integrate your application with Twitter . Using Twitterizer you can allow your visitors to post tweets, view their timeline, and much more, all without leaving your website. The original article, Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website , showed how to post tweets and view a timeline to a particular Twitter account using Twitterizer 1.0. To post a tweet to a specific account, Twitterizer 1.0 uses basic authentication . Basic authentication is a very simple authentication scheme. For an application to post a tweet to JohnDoe’s Twitter account, it would submit JohnDoe’s username and password (along with the tweet text) to Twitter’s servers. Basic authentication, while easy to implement, is not an ideal authentication scheme as it requires that the integrating application know the username(s) and password(s) of the accounts that it is connected to. Consequently, a user must share her password in order to connect her Twitter account with the application. Such password sharing is not only insecure, but it can also cause difficulties down the line if the user changes her password or decides that she no longer wants to connect her account to certain applications (but wants to remain connected to others)

The ASP.NET Routing framework allows developers to decouple the URL of a resource from the physical file on the web server. Specifically, the developer defines routing rules , which map URL patterns to a class or ASP.NET page that generates the content. For instance, you could create a URL pattern of the form Categories/ CategoryName and map it to the ASP.NET page ShowCategoryDetails.aspx ; the ShowCategoryDetails.aspx page would display details about the category CategoryName . With such a mapping, users could view category about the Beverages category by visiting www.yoursite.com/Categories/Beverages . In short, ASP.NET Routing allows for readable, SEO-friendly URLs. ASP.NET Routing was first introduced in ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 and was enhanced further in ASP.NET 4.0. ASP.NET Routing is a key component of ASP.NET MVC , but can also be used with Web Forms. Two previous articles here on 4Guys showed how to get started using ASP.NET Routing: Using ASP.NET Routing Without ASP.NET MVC and URL Routing in ASP.NET 4.0 . This article aims to explore ASP.NET Routing in greater depth. We’ll explore how ASP.NET Routing works underneath the covers to decode a URL pattern and hand it off the the appropriate class or ASP.NET page.

To get the path of the current user’s temporary folder, call the GetTempPath method in the System.IO namespace: string tempPath = System.IO.Path.GetTempPath(); On Windows Vista and 7, this method will return the following path: C:UsersUserNameAppDataLocalTemp Related posts:C# Copy Folder RecursivelyCheck Valid File Path in C#Microsoft Sets Windows 7 Pricing and Upgrades Related posts: C# Copy Folder Recursively Check Valid File Path in C# Microsoft Sets Windows 7 Pricing and Upgrades

Earlier this month Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010, the .NET Framework 4.0 (which includes ASP.NET 4.0), and new versions of their core programming languages: C# 4.0 and Visual Basic 10. In designing the latest versions of C# and VB, Microsoft has worked to bring the two languages into closer parity. Certain features available in C# were missing in VB, and vice-a-versa. Last week I wrote about Visual Basic 2010’s language enhancements , which include implicit line continuation, auto-implemented properties, and collection initializers – three useful features that were available in previous versions of C#. Similarly, C# 4.0 introduces new features to the C# programming language that were available in earlier versions of Visual Basic, namely optional arguments and named arguments . Optional arguments allow developers to specify default values for one or more arguments to a method. When calling such a method, these optional arguments may be omitted, in which case their default value is used. In a nutshell, optional arguments allow for a more terse syntax for method overloading. Named arguments, on the other hand, improve readability by allowing developers to indicate the name of an argument (along with its value) when calling a method. This article examines how to use optional arguments and named arguments in C# 4.0. Read on to learn more! Read More >

When you download XML text from the Web, you may find “garbage characters” in the start of your XML string.  For example, I encountered this result when I downloaded an XML string using WebClient.DownloadString method: <Root><Item>Hello, World</Item></Root> What you are likely seeing is a Byte Order Mark (BOM), which is a Unicode character that indicates the endian-ness Related posts: C# Convert Byte Array to String Read File into Byte Array

It’s easy to convert a byte array to a string.  For an ASCII string, use the Encoding.ASCII.GetString static method: byte[] buffer = new byte[10]; // todo: populate the buffer with string data string s = Encoding.ASCII.GetString( buffer ); Related posts:Convert String to Byte ArrayC# Convert String to Stream, and Stream to StringRead File into Byte Array Related posts: Convert String to Byte Array C# Convert String to Stream, and Stream to String Read File into Byte Array

It’s easy to convert a byte array to a string.  For an ASCII string, use the Encoding.ASCII.GetString static method: byte[] buffer = new byte[10]; // todo: populate the buffer with string data string s = Encoding.ASCII.GetString( buffer ); Related posts:Convert String to Byte ArrayC# Convert String to Stream, and Stream to StringRead File into Byte Array Related posts: Convert String to Byte Array C# Convert String to Stream, and Stream to String Read File into Byte Array

It’s easy to convert a string to a byte array.  For an ASCII string, use the Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes static method: string s = "Test String"; byte[] byteArray = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes( s ); Related posts:C# Convert String to Stream, and Stream to StringRead File into Byte ArrayConvert Binary to Base64 String Related posts: C# Convert String to Stream, and Stream to String Read File into Byte Array Convert Binary to Base64 String

It’s easy to read a file into a byte array.  Just use the File.ReadAllBytes static method.  This opens a binary file in read-only mode, reads the contents of the file into a byte array, and then closes the file. string filePath = @"C:test.doc"; byte[] byteArray = File.ReadAllBytes( filePath ); Related posts:C# Read Text File Line-by-LineConvert String Related posts: C# Read Text File Line-by-Line Convert String to Byte Array C# Read Text File into String