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.

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)

A common question I receive from clients, colleagues, and 4Guys readers is for recommendations on how best to store and display dates and times in a data-driven web application. One of the challenges in storing and displaying dates in a web application is that it is quite likely that the visitors arriving at your site are not in the same time zone as your web server; moreover, it’s very likely that your site attracts visitors from many different time zones from around the world. Consider an online messageboard site, like ASPMessageboard.com , where each of 1,000,000+ posts includes the date and time it was made. Imagine a user from New York leaves a post on April 7th at 4:30 PM and that the web server hosting the site is located in Dallas, Texas, which is one hour earlier than New York. When storing that post to the database do you record the post’s date and time relative to the visitor (4:30 PM), the relative to the web server (3:30 PM), or some other value? And when displaying this post how do you show that date and time to a reader in San Francisco, which is three hours earlier than New York? Do you show the time relative to the person who made the post (4:30 PM), relative to the web server (3:30 PM), or relative to the user (1:30 PM)? And if you decide to store or display the date based on the poster’s or visitor’s time zone then how do you know their time zone and its offset? How do you account for daylight savings, and so on? This article provides guidance on how to store and display dates and times for visitors across different time zones and includes a demo that gives a working example of some of these techniques. Read on to learn more! Read More >

Over the years I’ve worked on a number of projects where users could customize some aspect of the site. One such application surveyed a group of employees with and then made recommendations on how to best organize the employees into teams. Companies could buy a certain number of surveys and then direct their employees to the site to complete the survey. Before sending their employees to the site, a company could adjust the survey’s look and feel, uploading their own logo and choosing background and foreground colors, among other customizations. A common requirement for such customizable websites is the ability for the user to select one or more colors

Whenever a browser makes an HTTP request to a web server, it sends along several HTTP headers . These HTTP Headers are used to provide the web server with information to assist with handling the request. For instance, if the browser supports compression it will send along an Accept-Encoding HTTP Header, which lets the web server know what compression algorithms the browser can work with. Any cookies previously set by the web server are sent from the browser back to the server via the Cookies HTTP Header. The browser also sends the User-Agent HTTP Header, which the web server can parse to determine the browser (IE, Firefox, Safari, etc.), the version number, the operating system, and other information. Similarly, the web server includes a number of HTTP Headers when it sends back the contents of the requested resource. These headers are used by the browser to determine how to render the content and for how long to cache the content.

Many of the web applications I help build can be classified as in-production line of business applications that receive frequent and ongoing feature enhancements. Typically, these applications have dozens if not hundreds of users who rely on the site each and every day to accomplish tasks necessary to keep the company running smoothly. Every week or so the latest code is deployed to the production servers, bringing with it bug fixes and, very often, new features or changes to existing features. One challenge I’ve bumped into when working on such applications is how to best alert users of the new features and the changes to existing features?

Each series in a chart is composed of a set of data points, which are modeled via the DataPoint class. For most chart types, the two key attributes of a data point are its X and Y value. For example, in a line chart the X value indicates the position of the data point along the X axis, while the Y value represents the position of the data point along the Y axis. Ditto for a column chart, although it may help to think of the Y value as the height of the column.

Creating a Filtering User Interface With jQuery In a Web Forms Application: Part 1 looked at how to use jQuery in an ASP.NET Web Forms application to build a collapsible filtering user interface. When the page is loaded into the user’s browser the filtering interface is collapsed. Clicking the filtering interface’s title toggles the interface between its collapsed and expanded states. When expanded, a user can interact with the filtering controls – DropDownLists, TextBoxes, CheckBoxes, and so on – to narrow down the results displayed in the report beneath the filtering interface. While the filtering interface created in Part 1 certainly works, the collapsed/expanded state of the interface is not remembered. Consequently, on any postback or anytime a user leaves the page and comes back, the filtering interface returns to its collapsed state, regardless of whether the user had it expanded. The good news is that with a touch of AJAX we can have the collapsed/expanded state of the filtering user interface remembered for the duration of a user’s session. This article explores how to add such functionality. Read on to learn more! If you’ve not yet read Part 1 , please do so before tackling Part 2. Read More >

The Microsoft Chart controls make it easy to take data – such as sales numbers, website traffic statistics, and so on – and turn it into a chart, which can be saved to an image file or displayed from a web page. In Plotting Chart Data we examined a myriad of ways to turn data into a chart, including: plotting the chart data point by point; binding data to the Chart’s Points collection; programmatically binding data structured data to the chart; and declaratively binding data using one of ASP.NET’s data source controls, such as the SqlDataSource or ObjectDataSource. Oftentimes, web pages that display charts include user interface elements that let the user filter or sort the plotted data. For example, when viewing a chart of expenses, the user may want to only show expenses between two dates, or may want to sort the expenses by category. One way to provide such functionality is to sort or filter the data before binding it to the chart. Alternatively, you can bind the original data to the chart and then instruct the Chart control to sort the data, or to apply a filter. This article shows how to use these sorting and filtering capabilities. Read on to learn more! Read More >

The ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel provides a quick and easy way to implement a snappier, AJAX-based user interface in an ASP.NET WebForm. In a nutshell, Web controls within the UpdatePanel that would normally cause a full page postback trigger a partial page postback, instead. For example, a Button Web control, when clicked, submits the form, causing the browser to start a full page postback. However, if the Button control is within an UpdatePanel then the UpdatePanel short-circuits the full page postback and performs a partial page postback, using JavaScript to make an HTTP request to the server. The server realizes that the request is a partial page postback (and not a full page postback) and only returns the markup for the UpdatePanels on the page. When this response is returned to the browser, JavaScript code parses it and seamlessly updates the user interfaces in the UpdatePanels. (For a more in-depth look at the UpdatePanel control, refer back to the Using the UpdatePanel installment in this article series.) While we usually want controls within the UpdatePanel to perform a partial page postback, there are scenarios where we need a full page postback

When a visitor registers a new account on an ASP.NET website that uses the Membership system, they are prompted (by default) for their username, password, e-mail address, and other pertinent information. Along with functionality for registering new accounts, the ASP.NET Membership system provides page developers techniques for modifying information about users. For instance, with just a couple of lines of code you can change an existing user’s e-mail address, approve a user, or unlock them (if their account was locked out). However, there are certain bits of user information that cannot be modified through the Membership API, such as the username. For most sites this is a non-issue. Once a visitor has registered an account that username is fixed; if they want a different username, well, they’ll just have to register a new account. But consider a website that has customized the account creation process so that instead of prompting the user for both a username and e-mail address, the user is only asked to enter an e-mail address and that it is used as both their username and e-mail address on file. Anytime a user switched e-mail addresses – which can happen when changing jobs, changing ISPs, or moving to the new, hip, web-based e-mail provider of the day – they need to also change their username on your site

The ListView control is similar to the GridView control in many ways: both display a set of records, both support built-in sorting, paging, editing, and deleting functionality with minimal effort. The ListView differs from the GridView in two key ways: Rather than using fields, the ListView is rendered via templates, which offers the page developer much finer control over the emitted markup, and The ListView supports built-in inserting support The first installment in this series explored the ListView’s template-based rendering. This installment looks at how to use the ListView’s inserting functionality. In a nutshell, inserting data from the ListView requires two steps: defining the inserting interface via the InsertItemTemplate and specifying where the inserting interface should go via the InsertItemPosition property. Much like with editing data from within the ListView , the InsertItemTemplate can contain two-way databinding statements when using a data source control to get the inputs entered by the user from the ListView’s inserting interface into the parameters of the data source control. And like with the editing and deleting workflows, you can programmatically examine and modify the user’s submitted data before inserting the data, cancelling the operation altogether if needed. This article walks through the steps for creating a ListView that allows users to insert records.

Traditionally, website navigation has been focused on minimizing the number of clicks required to open a given page. However, this goal has nothing to do with the real purpose of navigation, which is to make finding information easy, consistent, and transparent to the user. Also, as websites get bigger, traditional navigation controls such as drop-down menus or tree views become impractical. Faster Internet connections and larger screen sizes now allow developers to experiment with new styles of navigation. This article shows how to implement incremental navigation , which is a style of navigation where users find information by clicking through a series of lightweight pages, with each click resulting in a small, but highly visible change to the navigation user interface. It differs from traditional drop-down menu navigation in that incremental navigation limits the amount of new choices available to just the next level in the sitemap hierarchy. I’ve created a customizable framework for implementing this sort of navigation scheme named Theseus, which you can download from the end of this article. Underneath the covers, Theseus uses ASP.NET’s SiteMap class and the configured sitemap provider to implement the incremental navigation. This article starts with an overview of incremental navigation and then goes on to examine how to use Theseus to implement such a navigation scheme in your website. Read on to learn more! Read More >

The ASP.NET Toolbox includes two Web controls for managing users’ passwords: the ChangePassword control and the PasswordRecovery control. The ChangePassword control allows a user signed into the site to change their password by entering their existing password and their new, desired password. The PasswordRecovery control is used to reset or recover a user’s password in the event that it has been forgotten. The PasswordRecovery control is used by anonymous users who need to be reminded of their password. Assuming that the Membership system is configured to require that users have a security question and answer (the default behavior), the user is presented with their security question and must correctly enter their security answer in order to have their password reset or recovered. While there are two controls for managing passwords, there are no Web controls in the Toolbox for managing a user’s security question and answer. In other words, there’s no built-in control that allows a signed in user to change her security question and answer. The good news is that while no control offers this functionality it’s not difficult to implement this feature ourselves. The MembershipUser class has a ChangePasswordQuestionAndAnswer method that modifies the security question and answer information using the configured Membership provider. This article shows how to build a page that permits a signed in user to change their security question and answer, and a demo application is available for download at the end of the article that showcases this functionality in action. Read on to learn more! Read More >

ASP.NET MVC is a Microsoft-supported framework for creating ASP.NET applications using a M odel- V iew- C ontroller pattern. In a nutshell, ASP.NET MVC allows developers much finer control over the markup rendered by their web pages, a greater and clearer separation of concerns , better testability, and cleaner, more SEO -friendly URLs. This article is not about ASP.NET MVC, but rather focuses on ASP.NET Routing, which is the technology by ASP.NET MVC to allow for intuitive and “hackable” URLs . There is typically a one-to-one correspondence between the files on the website and the URLs through which visitors interface with the site. For instance, if you worked for an eCommerce company and were tasked with creating a web page that displayed a list of products for a particular category you’d likely create a new page – say, ShowProductsByCategory.aspx – and add markup and code so that it displays the products for the category specified via the querystring. Once deployed to a production environment, visitors would reach this page via the URL www. yoursite .com/ShowProductsByCategory.aspx?CategoryID= categoryID and would see the products for the category categoryID .

ASP.NET’s Membership system and its associated Web controls enable developers to create websites that support user accounts in a fraction of the time that it once did. In a nutshell, the Membership system and the specified provider handle the low-level details of creating a user account, validating a user’s credentials, deleting an account, locking out an account, getting information about the currently logged on user, and so on. The associated Web controls, which are grouped under the Login section in the Visual Studio Toolbox, make creating typical user account-related user interfaces like login pages and registration pages as easy as drag and drop. This article looks at one user account-related control in particular, CreateUserWizard. The CreateUserWizard control generates a user interface that enables a visitor to create a new account on the site. Specifically, the Countersignature renders a series of textboxes. What textboxes appear depend on the Membership provider settings, but when using the SqlMembershipProvider (which stores user account information in a Microsoft SQL Server database) the default settings generate six textboxes: one for the username, one for the password, one for confirming the password, one for the e-mail address, and one for both the security question and security answer. The security question and answer are an additional form of security and represents a secret that only the registering user knows. For example, many sites include a page where a user who has forgotten his password can have it reset and e-mailed to him. You can reset a password via the MembershipUser class ’s ResetPassword method or by using the ASP.NET’s PasswordRecovery control . Typically the user resetting their password is shown their security question and must correctly enter their security answer in order to proceed with the password reset. It has been my experience that the default interface for the security question and answer in the CreateUserWizard control is suboptimal, especially for non-computer savvy users. It is not readily apparent what purpose the security question and answer textboxes fulfill. Also, by using a textbox you trust the user to enter a strong security question.

It’s common UI courtesy to show the Wait cursor when performing a long operation that requires the user to wait.  Here is how the Wait cursor appears in Windows Vista: But developers often go about this the wrong way by setting the Cursor.Current property as follows: Cursor.Current = Cursors.Default; The problem with this approach

A number of personal websites and blogs have a “What I’m Reading” section, where the site owner lists books he’s currently reading. Typically these widgets include a cover image of the book, the title and author, and a link the web visitor can click to buy the book or learn more about it. I recently needed to create a similar sort of widget for a website I was working on. This website did not require anything overly fancy, it just needed a simple administrative interface where the website administrator could enter book information and a User Control that he could drop on a web page that would display his current reading queue. The solution I created uses an XML file to store information about the books displayed in the “What I’m Reading” User Control. The User Control uses a ListView and an XmlDataSource to display the books in the XML file in a series of <div> elements.

When showing a form that contains a TextBox, it’s common courtesy to focus the TextBox so that the user can begin typing immediately. To focus a TextBox when a Windows Form first loads, simply set the TabIndex for the TextBox to zero (or the lowest TabIndex for any Control on the Form). When a Form is displayed,

Virtually every ASP.NET developer has, at one point or another, created a page with a Button control that, when clicked, redirects the user to some other page, perhaps sending along a value entered by the user through the querystring. The typical pattern for implementing such behavior is to add a Button to the page and create a Click event handler that executes a Response.Redirect( url ) . If the redirect incorporates some input from the user, then this pattern is expanded to include the addition of a TextBox or some other control to the page and a Response.Redirect( url ) statement that includes this control’s value. While this approach certainly works, it’s not without a couple of flaws. Firstly, this approach involves a needless round-trip to the server: clicking the Button causes the browser to re-request the page and the response from the server is simply, “Please go to url .” Ideally, when the Button was clicked the browser would immediately request the final destination URL rather than have to do a postback to find out the final destination URL. Second, this approach can lead to a confusing user experience in scenarios where there are multiple TextBoxes on the page and multiple Buttons because there may not be the expected correspondence between hitting Enter in a TextBox and having the associated Button control “clicked.” Consider a website with a master page that has a TextBox and Button for searching the site.

Being a software developer for over 20 years I have seen plenty of things and a whole lot tricks when it comes to software development. One example is when someone says a software program is too slow. A tricky way to fix this problem and make everyone happier is to take the little “wait” icon and make it move faster. The user gets the perception the program is working faster.

SEO is no exception to this type of trickery. Being the owner of a website, I am constantly bombarded by spam from companies claiming they can boost my ranking, make my company more visible and promote ME, all for a minimal monthly fee or one time payment.

Here are some ways to help distinguish the ethical SEO practitioners from the unethical ones.

• A true SEO practitioner will not guarantee you a #1 ranking in anything.
• A true SEO practitioner wont spam your name all over blogs and forums, and in general wont SPAM at all.
• If someone says they they can put you on hundreds of search engines and websites, and on top of it wants to charge you a monthly minimal fee a red flag should go up for you.
• A true SEO practitioner wants to see your website, know about your business and look at the HTML code on your page.
• A true SEO practitioner after looking at your code should be able to increase your visibility without changing your intended look of the site.
• A real SEO company will not make up news for your company or backlink fake stories from sites you own to boost your visibility. Bragging about how awesome you are on a site you own that links back to another site you own does more harm than good.
• Ask for references, use the wayback machine and utilize google caching to validate these references claims. Some SEO companies references are actually the same companies.
• Do they have another business and SEO is their side job or is SEO all they do? If the company isnt built around website development and SEO, you best just turn away.
• A true SEO company wont guarantee you X number of hits per day.
• A true SEO company wont use a link farm or use spamdexing.

The above is only a SMALL sample of how to distinguish the ethical from the unethical in the world of SEO.

I hope this article serves you well in your quest to promote your site and avoid the scams out there. Below are a couple of good articles that can expand on this much better than I can:

• http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2005/07/01/the-biggest-seo-scam-of-all
• http://webdesign.about.com/b/2008/11/17/seo-promises-are-often-too-good-to-be-true.htm
• http://www.webmaster-talk.com/seo-talk-forum/150384-seo-fraud.html

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When storing user-supplied text data into a database, it is essential that the length of the user’s input does not exceed the size of the corresponding database table field. To ensure that a user’s input is within the legal bounds, you can: set the TextBox control’s MaxLength property (although this does not work for multi-line textboxes); use a validation control, such as my TextBoxLengthValidator control or a RegularExpressionValidator; use server-side code to check the Length property of the string before storing it in the database; or some combination of the above. The problem with these solutions is that they are not very interactive. The user doesn’t know how close she is to hitting the maximum number of characters. In October 2007 I created a custom ASP.NET server control that uses JavaScript to interactively display the number of characters and/or words a user has typed into a textbox, and wrote about it in an article titled Creating a TextBox Word / Character Counter Control . In the TextBoxCounter control’s initial implementation is simply reported how many words or characters the user had entered. Because this control is most useful in scenarios where there is a limit to the number of characters or words allowed, a natural enhancement would be to allow the page developer to specify a maximum number of characters or words allowed. With this information, the control could be updated to show how many characters or words remain.

ASP.NET offers a variety of tools and mechanisms for working with database data, including a number of data source controls, such as the SqlDataSource, ObjectDataSource, and LinqDataSource, among others. The SqlDataSource is one of the most basic data source controls as it operates directly against a configured database. Using the SqlDataSource control, an ASP.NET developer can retrieve, insert, update, or delete data by simply setting a few properties. Little to no code is needed. While the SqlDataSource makes it a walk in the park to implement the most common data access scenarios, a little extra effort is needed for more intricate scenarios.

This article is the fourth and final installment of a series that examines how to build a data-driven web applications that offers dynamic user interfaces. Over the past three articles we created a sample web application that allows for numerous law firms to log in to the site and manage their clientele. Client data is dispursed across fixed and dynamic data models. The fixed data model contains a set of client attributes common to all law firms – FirstName , LastName , Email , and so forth – while the dynamic data model allows each law firm to define their own custom client attributes. For example, a personal injury firm could include attributes like Date Injured, and Was Permanently Disabled, while a law firm specializing in bankruptcy would have attributes like Debt Servicing Cost and Monthly Income Amount.