It's more than 1 year that I'm using URL rewriting in my web application projects to make pages adresses more friendly. Before ASP.NET 2.0 release and its URL Mapping feature, web developers had to write their own Http Handlers to perform a complete URL rewriting solution. Scott Mitchell had written a good HttpHandler for URL rewriting in ASP.NET 1.x which published on MSDN as a technical article.

For its time, this tool was good enough because it let developers use regular expression to rewrite URLs. One major problem that developers may face while using this tool is "Not Available Folders" rewrite rules. Imagine you want to rewrite a path like this: ~/News/2005/ to ~/News/Default.aspx?Year=2005. It is a good idea to let visitors hack your URLs. But if you don't have a real 2005 folder and a default.aspx file inside it, IIS will return a 404 error page. In such cases we have two solutions: 1- Make a dummy folder for such URLs. 2- Map all incoming requests to ASP.NET engine. It's clear that first solution is not suitable because you should make a new folder on the fly for a record that is added in 2006! And also the second is not a good idea because we should handle all extensions manually. As Scott said on his blog (and on MSDN article), .Text (and Community Server I guess) use a solution similar to our second option but unfortunately I didn't check them so far.

It's my story these days!! If you faced this problem too and have solutions please discuss on it in the comments. (Specially, if you have worked on .Text or CS source codes you may know more about their solutions. So as Soheil says on iDevCenter "Share Your Knowledge" !!!)


UPDATE [3/2/2006]: There is another solution for those who have access to web server. IISMods.com offers an open-source free ISAPI filter for IIS that let you perform URL Rewriting at the web server level. But this solution is not suitable for shared server hosting packages. So I won't use it!

 

AjaxLessons.com is a workshop for Ajax and Web 2.0 concepts. You can find many useful articles, tips on discussion board and etc. Also if you have a running web site you have a chance to win 3 free books about Ajax [See here] ;)

 

Free SQL Server 2005 training from Microsoft eLearning (90-day subscription).

 

Brian Goldfarb has collected a list of must see "How Do I" video series for ASP.NET 2.0. (Total download size: 198 MB)

 

MSDN Magazine Special Issue: Visual Studio 2005 Guided Tour.

Download: PDF (21.1 MB) | CHM | Code

 

Omid K. Rad, the author of first standard Persian calendar for .NET 1.x, started his new Blog. I welcome him and express my happiness because I know him as one of VIPs of Iranian developers community.

To understand how he was effective for Iran .NET developers, it's enough to know that PersianCalendar class which is included in .NET 2.0 is developed and prepared by Omid and Soheil and they did their best for this project (iranl10ninfo) to make it ready and present it to Microsoft.

Thank you Omid and waiting for your valuable writings on your blog ;)

 

Yesterday, I was talking to Nima about some new web development tools he has found out these days. One of amazing open-source tools he introduced to me was Rico. Today morning I saw a link to Rico at del.icio.us too. So you can guess how popular it became! (Many links have been made, you see!).

As seen on Rico's web site, Rico in an open-source JavaScript library for creating rich internet applications. It provides full Ajax support, darg 'n drop management and a cinematic effects library.

To see how Rico can reduce your time, take a look at one of its demos here. You have a colored box built using a DIV tag and want to round its corners. Use complicated CSS? Use four images at the corners? Other solutions...? Rico answers: new Rico.Effect.Round( tagName, className, options). Yes, finished!

Many other effects are available too and you can use it in you own applications. Save your time!

Rico: Home | Demos | Features | Download

 

From today, I will post my cool links which I find during my daily web surf at del.icio.us/sharplife. [Subscribe to its feed if you like.]

 

After Hurricane Katrina, Michael Jackson told media he would release an all star song dedicated to hurricane victims. These days he is in Middle East and spends his hours with rich Arab princes and they became Michael's spokesman ;)

Yahoo! reported that above mentioned song titled "I Have This Dream" includes Snoop Dogg, R. Kelly, Ciara, Keyisha Cole, James Ingram, Jackson's brother Jermaine, Shanice, the Rev. Shirley Caesar and the O'Jays.

Wow! How many stars are gathering to bring this song out!

Read full story here.

 

 

Microsoft released PetShop 4.0. As you may know, PetShop is a web application designed to show the best practices for building enterprise, n-tier web solutions using Microsoft .NET technology. The previous version (PetShop 3.0) was a major different release because Microsoft team intoruced a model for PetShop that both SQL Server 2000 and Oracle databases were supported.

In this new version PetShop uses Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Oracle 10g Database.

It's a few months that I am using PetShop coding and project model in my own web applications and I think that this model gives all web developers a better feel to develop their projects.

As you can read here, PetShop 4.0 is a good practice for those who want to migrate from ASP.NET 1.x to 2.0 and want to keep their coding style as modern as possible.

If you used PetShop 3.0 before and want to migrate your .NET Framework I suggest you download it right now!

Microsoft PetShop 4.0: Information | Download

 

Soheil Rashidi has started his English blog. Soheil is one of my best friends which is so talented in programming specially using .NET Framework. I always benefit his ideas and techniques in my own ASP.NET projects.

iDevCenter.com is also developed and managed by Soheil. iDC is a Persian language web site for developers in which they can share their knowledge by sending articles about all programming technologies. Unfortunately it's  a few months that iDevCenter.com is not active and has not been updated. I should ask Soheil: WHY?!!

I wish a world of success for Soheil both in his new job at Mabna company and his new English weblog.

 

Recently a persian weblog has started its work. This weblog name is Farazesh (which means Sublimation in English). Hamid Farazesh wrote about Love in his first post, mentiond some poets of Rumi and said something about Valentine and this conecpt among ancient Iranian people.

If you know Persian language, inetersted in Rumi¹ and his poems, want to know more about love concepts in Masnawi or if you are a researcher looking for some writings about these subjects I suggest you read this weblog.

As I know Farazesh content won't be limited to this subject and you may read about law, Islamic thoughts, ...

I welcome this weblog and want you to link to it if find it useful.

---

1. Rumi or Molana Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi which is also known as Molawi and Molana is one of the greatests Iranian poems. His famous book Masnawi is an encyclopedia of love. His poems has been translated to many languages and many singers (like Madonna) has used his translated poems.

One of the best online test websites is the actual tests. This website can give you food for thought for many exams like 220-601 exam, and also for VCP-310 certification. If you are interested in knowing your talent before appearing in any test like 350-001 exam, you should at least once check this website. So, if you are finding your current exam of 642-901 tough, then go and solve online papers.

 

Recently, using Ajax has been dramatically increased among web developers. After Google started its free email service called GMail and used Ajax in it, this technology became more popular and many developers and companies tried to build tools and frameworks for various server side technologies to be able to use Ajax benefits more easily.

From my personal view, Ajax will give your visitors a better surf and they will not bother from multiple refreshes for a single task. I have tested and used Ajax.NET Pro in my recent projects. This framework was written in C# by Michael Schwarz. I think that this framework is powerful and easy to use and implement.
Michael has a personal blog in which he writes about his open source framework. He has also created a group at Google for Ajax.NET Pro.

Two different versions of Ajax.NET Pro are available for ASP.NET 1.x and 2.0.

If you want to know more about other Ajax tools for ASP.NET take a glance at this comparison.

I'm so glad to see that many Iranian developers are using Ajax in their web sites. Even if you use Ajax in a small part of you web site it is admirable. For example quick vote and tell a friend sections at ketabeavval.ir that has been programmed by my dear friend Mohammadreza Taheri.

I have shown some simple usages of Ajax in razmpa.com. If you are an ASP.NET developer and have used Ajax in your projects please send their URLs and I will put them in an update in this post.

 

Today I have 2 useful free components for ASP.NET 2.0 (and one of them for 1.x as well) to introduce:

• 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.

 

I recently wrote a post about i18n in ASP.NET. Today while I was searching for some better articles about this issue I found Microsoft Middle East MSDN site. This web site is built to help middle eastern developers which their native language is Arabic. Since Persian language, like Arabic, is a right-to-left (RTL) language I think many articles and resources on this web site can help Persian developers build more internationalized windows and web applications. Don't miss it!

UPDATE: Dr. International blog and Microsoft Global Dev. are also interesting :D

 

For visitors inside Iran: Take a look at IranCamp.com!

 

CNN specifies its first news to Iran nuclear program process and puts Ahmadinejad photo on its first page (at the time I'm writing this post).

As it seems, Iran would be faced with UN Security Council for its peaceful nuclear activities. We should sit and look at them!

I'm afraid that this process may lead to more sanctions over Islamic Republic of Iran and as you may know, Iran IT Soceity is the first victim of these sanctions. Also some companies have started their sanctions over Iranian users before, for example:

• Sun Microsystems: banned Iranian users from downloading Java Runtime Environment.
• Google: banned Iranian users from downloading Google Pack.
• ...

Yes! We are victims of this process.

UPDATE: IAEA to Report Iran to Security Council.

 

Microsoft released Beta 2 version of Internet Explorer 7: Home | Download | Tour | Blog.

 

Code Project is one of my favorite web sites on the internet. I think that the level of articles and the freshness of news which are published on this web site is so much better than other web sites.
Code Project holds an online poll every week and announce its results. The questions that are asked in these polls and the answers sometimes are so funny and sometimes so usefull and technical.

This week question was "Where do you get your IT news?" and the answers:

Option	Votes	%
Online news sites	528	73.8
RSS feeds	219	30.6
Email newsletters	250	35.0
Podcasts	24	3.4
Webcasts	45	6.3
Blogs	181	25.3
Internet radio	12	1.7
Discussion boards	164	22.9
Responses	715

Two things are interesting to me in this result. First: RSS feeds are still in the 3rd place after Web Sites and Newsletters, and second: Blogs are in the 4th place. If you compare this situation with our country (Iran) results, I think that Blogs can be at the 1st or 2nd place but yet there is no favor in RSS Reader softwares and web sites among Iranian non-professional users.

If we deeply look at these results we find out that most Code Project users are professional web users and developers that should be interested in RSS readers and Blogs; but in real world we see another result! What do you think...?

...

These days I'm busy with a web application project which should be shipped in two Persian and English languages. In this project I decided to build a real multi-lingual web site which can be easily extended to other languages in future. I had read many articles about internationalization in ASP.NET before but never used them. On of best articles I found about i18n in ASP.NET is a 3-part article series from Code Project. You can read them here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part3.

The core concept in i18n in ASP.NET (esp. in ver. 1.x) are resource files (with .ascx extension) and satellite assemblies.

In this series of articles Karl Sequin suggested not using satellite assemblies and build a resource manager from beginning. The reason he don't like resource files and satellite assemblies is that because resource files are compiled into satellite assembiles, if you want to change a small word in translated files you should stop your web server or web site and upload new .dll files. I believe that in large scale projects he is absolutely right but in my case resource files are better choice.

If you like to know more about i18n in ASP.NET 2.0 you should take a look at Part 3 which Provider Factory Pattern are discussed.