Once again I want to talk about URLs and who doesn’t know that I’m a big fan of friendly, clean and pretty URLs in my applications! When you write an application (for example a blog engine) you have multiple choices to create unique URL for a single post; you can include an integer ID (myblog.com/458) or a GUID instead of integer or the best way, a friendly URL like myblog.com/hey-i-am-a-clean-url. This value should be unique and should not be changed if your blog post title is changed; so we should have a separate column in our database table to store this friendly URL. I wrote a simple JavaScript code that receives your blog post title, clean it from non alphanumeric characters and replaces them with a dash, change all characters to lower case and make it ready to be sent to your business logic handler:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">

    function parseUrl(url) {

        var cleanUrl = (url + " ").replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]+/g, "-");

        return cleanUrl.slice(0, cleanUrl.length -1).toLowerCase();

</script>

and this two lines of code to fill URL field automatically as user types the post title (using jQuery:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">

    $(document).ready(function() {

        $("#postTitle").keyup(function() { $("#postUrl").val(parseUrl($("#postTitle").val())) }

        );

    });

</script>

This is very useful if you’re building applications using ASP.NET MVC and have control over URLs using routing engine. This is also helpful for WebForms developers who use routing in WebForms or rewrite extension less URLs using IIS7, ISAPI_REWRITE and etc.

Let your URLs be more friendly against search engines ;)

Recently Microsoft released a beta edition of Anti-XSS library V3.0. Here’s a list of some new features which were added in this release:

• An expanded white list that supports more languages
• Performance improvements
• Performance data sheets (in the online help)
• Support for Shift_JIS encoding for mobile browsers
• A sample application
• Security Runtime Engine (SRE) HTTP module

Also as you can read on Microsoft Connected Information Security Group blog they have also released a CTP version of CAT.NET (Microsoft Code Analysis Tool .NET) which is a managed code static analysis tool for finding security vulnerabilities such as Cross Site Scripting - SQL Injection - Process Command Injection - File Canonicalization - Exception Information, etc.

Downloads:

• Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library V3.0 Beta (Kick It!)
• Anti-XSS V3.0 Beta Source Code
• Microsoft Code Analysis Tool .NET (CAT.NET) v1 CTP - 32 bit (Kick It!)
• Microsoft Code Analysis Tool .NET (CAT.NET) v1 CTP - 64 bit

A few years ago, when I had begun learning ASP.NET and Web Development, I found a nice and lovely guy who was very professional at that age. We were both university students (in different universities) then and was studying Mathematics; me, Pure Mathematics and he, Applied Mathematics. Almost every night, we were chatting using poor dialup connections and he was opening new doors of knowledge to me. He was a professional and pioneer developer and coder at age of 20-21.

I’m talking about my dear friend, Soheil Rashidi. But you may ask why I’m talking about this nostalgia?! Soheil had a website dedicated to Persian language developers to provide articles and useful resources for them. We call it iDevCenter (or iDC). About 2-3 years ago Soheil suddenly stopped iDC because of what he calls an ‘Unresponsive Model’. Now I can officially and proudly announce re-launch of one of my most favorite Persian websites in field of coding and development. Yeah iDevCenter.com is back!

New iDevCenter is completely different from what is was 2 years ago. iDevCenter v3.0 is a powerful Link Directory + a nice Wiki. All old iDevCenter members can login to their accounts using the same username and password (except one poor person that only I and Soheil know ). All information are categorized using tags and you can easily find relevant information.

If you’re Iranian or know Persian language I invite you to take a deep look at how Soheil rocks on iDevCenter.com!

And special message for my dear Soheil: A world of congratulations and sweet dreams for you :-*

Thanks to ASP.NET MVC and C# Extension Methods, many developers in the community have been creating very useful HtmlHelper extensions and some of them are sharing their works. Today I find this nice one for Gravatar (via Simone’s tweet) and after reading that post this thought came to my mind to gather such Helpers somewhere so that others can access them easily and quickly. This post will be the first step to gather and share such Helpers (If I feel it can be more useful than what I’m thinking now, I may launch a dedicated website for this purpose!).

At this early stage I put some links without any categorization, but after my list grows up I try to update my list and categorize them.

If you have written a nice HtmlHelper for ASP.NET MVC and want to share it with others please send me a message or a reply to mahdi on twitter. I update this post as soon as I find new Helpers so you can check it frequently. This link is shorter to remember: http://tinyurl.com/mvchelper

- MVC HtmlHelper for Gravatar
- Paging HtmlHelper for ASP.NET MVC
- Marquee and GridView HtmlHelpers for ASP.NET MVC
- ReCAPTCHA HtmlHelper (and also a solution to use ReCAPTCHA in ASP.NET MVC)
- ASP.Net MVC Extension method to create a Security Aware Html.ActionLink
- CheckboxList Helper

We are getting closer to official release of Microsoft ASP.NET MVC. There are couple of tutorials and videos to get started with this new approach to enterprise web applications development. I found an eight part series of tutorial (in both C# and VB) on ASP.NET Website; good news is that all of these tutorial parts are available in PDF format too. I downloaded all of them and compress them in a single .rar file.

You can download it at http://www.sharplife.net/Files/ASPNETMVCTutorialPDFVersion.rar (approx. 1.7 MB).

Enjoy

It’s so easy to use powerful ASP.NET Membership, Role and Profile provider in a Windows or Console application. Only one key point remains here; you should add an app.config file to your Console or Windows application and include these nodes in that:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<configuration>
    <connectionStrings>
        <add name="SQLConnString" connectionString="SERVER=(local);DATABASE=SampleApp;UID=sa;PWD=123"/>
    </connectionStrings>
    <system.web>

        <membership defaultProvider="SampleAppMembershipProvider">
            <providers>
                <add name="SampleAppMembershipProvider"
                     connectionStringName="SQLConnString"
                      applicationName="SampleAppMembership"
                      enablePasswordReset="true"
                      enablePasswordRetrieval="false"
                      passwordFormat="Hashed"
                      maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="100"
                      minRequiredPasswordLength="5"
                      minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0"
                      requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false"
                      requiresUniqueEmail="true"
                      passwordAttemptWindow="5"
                      passwordStrengthRegularExpression=""
                      type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" />
            </providers>
        </membership>

        <profile defaultProvider="SampleAppProfileProvider">
            <providers>
                <add name="SampleAppProfileProvider"
                type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider"
                connectionStringName="SQLConnString"/>
            </providers>
            <properties>
                <add name="FirstName" type="System.String" />
                <add name="LastName" type="System.String" />
                <add name="Email" type="System.String" />
                <add name="Website" type="System.String" />
                <add name="Address" type="System.String" />
                <add name="Note" type="System.String" />
                <add name="Phone" type="System.String" />
                <add name="Fax" type="System.String" />
                <add name="Feature" type="System.Int32" />
            </properties>
        </profile>

        <roleManager enabled="true" cacheRolesInCookie="true" defaultProvider="SampleAppSqlRoleProvider" 
                 cookieName=".ASPXSampleAppROLES" cookiePath="/" cookieTimeout="30" cookieRequireSSL="false" 
                 cookieSlidingExpiration="true" createPersistentCookie="false" cookieProtection="All">
            <providers>
                <clear/>
                <add name="SampleAppSqlRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, 
                      System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" 
                      connectionStringName="SQLConnString" applicationName="SampleAppRoles"/>
            </providers>
        </roleManager>
    </system.web>
</configuration>

• Cleanup inactive anonymous users from ASP.NET Membership Tables
• Prevent Denial of Service (DOS) attacks in your web application
• 13 disasters for production website and their solutions

The key is to use something that may be new to you: control adapters. These are little chunks of logic that you add to your web site to effectively "teach" an ASP.NET control how to render better HTML."

You can download it for ASP.NET 2.0 here. Also you can find a complete guide and some live examples here.

• Code Highligher for ASP.NET 2.0 (Also compatible with .NET Framework v.1.x)
  This component is a source code syntax highlighting tool that can help you make your source codes more readable for your visitors. This component supports C#, CSS, HTML, INI files, Java, JScript, Perl, PHP, Python, SQL, VB.NET, VBScript, and XML and ... It's FREE!
  Home | Sample | Download
• Flash Control for ASP.NET 2.0
  This component will help you add Macromedia Flash files (with .swf extension) to your web pages using a server side control. You will have full VS 2005 Designer support. The generated code validates XHTML 1.0 strict. You can download and use this control in your projects for free but also source code is available for 199 USD.
  Home | Features | Download
  [UPDATE]: Looking for a similar control for ASP.NET 1.x? Try AIxtend AI Flash'In.

A very strong of marketing is the email marketing and it is growing because of the availability of free web hosting. These hosting services also offer free domain names. Another most famous tool of internet marketing is ppc or pay per click.