Adnan Rashid

Web Technologist…

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Tag Archives: tips & tricks

Google Chrome has many great features including an Incognito mode. You can open an incognito window by pressing ctrl+shift+N in your normal browser. You can see the Spy guy on the top left corner.

You can also open the Incognito mode directly, by modifying the Target property. Right click on the Chrome executable/Shortcut and append -incognito [...]

During your development, you may notice that your code file contains using directives which are not required by your code. The Visual Studio IDE provides the Organize Usings option to remove/sort these using directives. To access this option, right-click anywhere within your code editor and select one of the sub-menu options for Organize Usings option.

Remove [...]

Like most developer I love jQuery and appreciate the intellisense support in Visual Studio. I am very particular about the format for my code and often use the Document Format option of the IDE. What I noticed was that my braces were never placed on new lines, and I wanted to change this. So here’s [...]

I am a big fan of YouTube and how they revolutionized video sharing. One thing I didn’t like about the YouTube embedded player is that it does not have sufficient filtering depending on the content being played. I am referring to the Related Videos option that is available when you mouse over the video, or [...]

DBCC CHECKIDENT can reset the identity value of the table. The syntax is as follows :

DBCC CHECKIDENT (<table_name>, reseed, <seed_value>)

After executing this statement, the next inserted record will have seed_value + 1 as value. This rule is applicable only if the table previously contained records.
In case of a table with no records, since the current [...]

Here’s a small javascript helper to read Url Query String Parameters.

function GetUrlParams()
{
var vars = [], hash;
var hashes = window.location.href.slice(window.location.href.indexOf('?')
+ 1).split('&');

for(var i = 0; i < hashes.length; i++)
{
hash = hashes[i].split('=');
vars.push(hash[0]);
vars[hash[0]] = hash[1];
}
return vars;
}

The above function, will read the url, get the query string part i.e from (”?”) and split each paramter by the (”=”) character and [...]

Unlike the normal TextBox, the MaxLength property doesnt work for MultiLine TextBox. Heres a small trick to solve the problem:

<asp:TextBox ID="txtExample" runat="server" TextMode="MultiLine" />

<asp:RegularExpressionValidator ID="revExample" runat="server"
ControlToValidate="txtExample" ValidationExpression="[\s\S]{1,200}"
Display="Dynamic" ErrorMessage="Length cannot be greater than 200 characters" />

The above markup validates the revExample TextBox / textarea and limits the max characters to 200. By modifying the regular expressions, [...]

Visual Studio is filled with nifty tricks, which if leveraged properly in the right situation can make the developers life easy. Consider if you had a looping statement, and wanted to debug it, but only for a particular value. Rather than hitting the breakpoint every time, you can shorten the hits by using a Conditional [...]

Tip to debug a running instance of an application

Heres a quick tip. If you need to include a request for read receipt like Microsoft Outlook while sending mails through Asp.net, just add the Disposition-Notification-To Header to the MailMessage.
The MailMessage class does not have a corresponding attribute and thus it has to be set through the Header.

MailMessage mm = new MailMessage(fromAddress, toAddress);
mm.Subject = subject;
mm.Headers.Add("Disposition-Notification-To", [...]

In my current project I needed to access the Session state in a Generic Handler. To my dismay, i realized that the Session StateBag was null. The StateBag class is sealed and manages the Viewstate of the Asp.net server controls and pages.
Upon discussion with my colleague, Mr. Hamed, we found the solution to my problem. [...]

Recently, I felt the need for removing a project from the Visual Studio Start Page, so I Googled and would like to share the solution. Don’t forget to close visual studio before trying this out. This trick requires modification to registry, so if you are skeptical do make a backup of the registry before proceeding.
Start [...]

When you pass information from one page to another, you are passing information that anybody can sniff. For example consider a scenario, in which you pass the customer id as a query string:
http://www.yourapplication.com?customer_id=15
Now if somebody replaced 15 with say 10 or any other number, they can pull up other customer information. And thats a bad [...]

If you are using Membership Provider in your ASP.net application, you might come across a scenario in which you need to have both Security Question and Answer feature and would also like to programmatically reset the password for an account.
So if you run the code

string username = “user”;
string password = “password”;
MembershipUser mu = Membership.GetUser(username);
mu.ChangePassword(mu.ResetPassword(), password);

You [...]