Setting up Apache with IIS and running PHP on both
Setting up Apache with IIS (and PHP on both)
Recently I’ve been working on a project in PHP since it required true URL rewriting which just is not available in the windows environment currently. This required the installation of Apache and it’s wonderful mod_rewrite module which does all the wonderful URL rewriting stuff. I ran into a bunch of issues which I’ll cover here to help anyone else trying to setup Apache with IIS.
Using SCOPE_IDENTITY() with ObjectDataSource
Microsoft’s introduction of the ObjectDatasource in ASP.NET 2.0 was a great addition. It saves developers alot of time once they are familar with the controls. The problem is that what seemed like simple tasks when coding everything by hand sometimes became more difficult to figure out. For example, how do I return the identity seed from an Insert command? Let’s say that your basic stored procedure looked like this
Encrypt data with MD5 in ASP.NET
Once you start storing sensitive data in your database, you’ll inevitably find that you want to encrypt some of the things you are storing, typically user passwords. The most secure sites will generally work with one way encryption meaning that there is no way for you to decrypt the data. The MD5 algotrithm is a popular way to encrypt data and ASP.NET has some encryption classes built in to allow you to work with MD5.
Create popup date picker in seperate window using ASP.NET calendar control
I’ve gotten alot of feedback on our popup ASP.NET calendar control I posted awhile back. In that post I did it with a “fake” popup using DIV’s. In this post, I will do it with a traditional popup window.
Using Parameters/Parameterized Queries in database interactions with C# and VB.NET
When writing ASP.NET applications, you need to be careful with your code to protect from misuse by would be hackers. One of the best ways to do this is to parametrize your queries. Not only will using parameters help against SQL injection attacks, but it’s best practice to do so and avoid large string concatenation. It also types the values being passed in which helps with proper coding.
Return a line break or carriage return in ASP.NET page
I came across the issue today of needing to output some text from a multiline textbox and having a few issues on preserving the line breaks/carriage returns from the textbox. If you view the source on the page, it would look correct, but yet the display on the HTML page would show no line breaks.
Dynamically Create Google Sitemap with ASP.NET
This article will cover dynamically generating your sitemap to submit to Google Sitemaps using ASP.NET and as usual the code will be available in C# and VB.NET. Whenever you develop a site with the intention of putting it on the internet, it’s necessary to do everything you can to index your site with the various search engines using all the tools at your disposal. Google allows you to submit a sitemap of your site to their search engine to help optimize your searching. You can see more details here