And then I came across obout controls, which are actually very good though they need to be a bit better in terms of programming integration, eg. their slide controls can get better if they provide some property like DataSource and a simple binding could do the job instead of running a foreach loop on the datasource and doing the dirty work.

They have a long range of products including tree view, calendar, HTML editor, fly outs, slide show alongwith a very rich set of tutorials. They provide about one month free trial and some of their products are completely free. Highly recommended.

eg. if user logged in to the website using www.domain.com, now via a link, he moves to subdomain.domain.com then he should not be required to re login.

Solution :

In order to achieve this, you need to take two actions,

1. Make the following changes in web.config :

Within System.web element, add the following,

<authentication mode=”Forms”>
<forms path=”/” name=”.cookieName” cookieless=”UseCookies” domain=”.domainname.com“/>

</authentication>

If your site’s domain address is “www.sitename.com” then domain will be set as “.sitename.com”

2. Add the following code piece to the code which runs on logout,

HttpCookie cookie = Request.Cookies[FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName];

if (cookie != null)

{

cookie.Domain = FormsAuthentication.CookieDomain;

cookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-360);

Response.Cookies.Add(cookie);

}

FormsAuthentication.SignOut();

If you use a single domain then it’s not required that you explicitly expire the authentication cookie, a simple ForsmAuthentication.SignOut() should work fine, but once the cookie domain is set then you will need to expire the cookie explicitly, otherwise your user will remain logged in.

Once you have done both the actions, your job is done and your user’s login should work for the main domain and all the sub domains.

Next Problem >> Though this solution will keep the user logged in but every time when he will move to a new sub domain, his session will renew, any information which you placed into the session at the time of logging in will be lost too. The informatino can be refilled but more than that it’s a performance issue.

Let’s discuss this in Part 2.

If you have ever tried to use ASP.Net’s File upload control along with Ajax then you would know that PostBackFile property will be null, no matter what you do , how much you pull your hairs out, its not gonna work.

Four years back, I had to write a control which could upload files just like GMail, (thats without posting the page) – yeah these were the exact words of my manager. I wrote it, it worked but it was always such a pain to integrate it into a new project and too much of work was involved. And at that time, any search for such a control gave dry results.

But recently, I came across this control namely “File Upload Ajax,”  its simple and it works. You can access it here,

http://en.fileuploadajax.subgurim.net/

But its not perfect, they need to make it a bit more generic. The only problem that it created was it was somehow doing something to Request collection and it was coming as ‘null.’

I love it. Its so simple, yet so useful.

Mercifully, Microsoft has this cleaning utility which works like a charm and is unbelievably fast. You can delete everything blindly. you can check it here

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290301

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/ 

“Google Apps Team Edition is designed to enable easy collaboration and communication with other people at your school or business. Your account is automatically linked with all other accounts from your organization “

For more details, check this link

The merger of Google Calendar, Documents, Spreadsheet, Presentation seems a perfect match for maintaing a project. You just have to add a few widgets and everything is ready to use.

Storage space is 10 GB and with 50 $ per user per year , you can increase the space. And the best thing is that you are not required to use a gmail account – so your organizational email addresses can be use easily. Don’t you just love Google.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/12/asp-net-mvc-framework-road-map-update.aspx

Its surely some thing which I am looking forward to, as its mean a more maintainable code. I simply love this, another thing on my list of ‘check-it-out’

So, Microsoft has come up with this ‘Open Packaging Conventions,’  it stores application data and required resources in one file container using XML and Zip technology. Its an open standard and ECMA(association dedicated to the standardization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Consumer Electronics (CE)) has approved it.

It would allow platform independent, efficient information exchange. And the best thing is that it points the files within it in such a way that if you want to change the file location, you can do it easily and make the change at just one place, even if you have used it at more than one place. This is what wikipedia says,

“An OPC-aware application will use relationships metadata rather than directory names and file names to locate individual files.”

Microsoft Office 2007 is using it, so it is here to stay. The .Net 3.5 provides namespaces to create OPC packages. Information exchange is one of the most critical topics in the IT world, so I do think that its something important to look into.  On the next weekend, I would be making a sample application and would update you about my experience.