Mitch's Blog

As I mentioned on my homepage I have upgraded this site to DotNetNuke 4.4.1. Overall this was a very smooth process as the actual upgrade went off without ANY problems!  For those of you not aware, when you are upgrading a DNN site you can place an app_offline.htm file in the root of your DNN Location and it will take your application offline.  This is a VERY important feature for those of us with slow upload speeds to our web hosts!!

This is the second part of my Regular Expression overview. In the first article I discussed the basics of creating Regular Expressions and provided a link to test expression patterns using the .NET Framework RegEx classes.  In this article I will discuss the various actions that can be taken to match values in a string using regular expressions.  I will also discuss how you can implement a SQL CLR UDF to allow regular expression validation from your database to provide a strong level of input validation at the database level.

I have created this two part article series to provide a quick and practical introduction to using regular expressions. Regular expressions can be used for many things; however, they are typically used for input validation or to perform advanced searches on text in supporting applications. This first article will explain how to create a regular expression pattern; the expression defines what is considered a match. The second article will provide details on how to implement regular expressions in .NET applications.

Many developers have wanted to create an application that runs fully out of the system tray, maybe an application to help you automatically sort files, or something to monitor the clipboard. Many people have implemented these applications and many textbooks provide instruction on how to create an application such as this, however, none of the books I have found show you the most effective way to create the application.

ASP.NET 2.0 allows for a very robust user authorization/authentication system with little to no code. One of the added features of the ASP.NET Membership and Profile systems is the ability to have custom user profiles. The ASP.NET Profile system allows you to add additional user profile fields very quickly. I will discuss in this post the methods needed to add simple profile fields (Standard system types), however, remember that you can use complex objects for profile fields as well.

C# custom events and delegates can be confusing for developers new to the concept. This article does a deep dive into these concepts and how you can leverage them in your applications.

.NET 2.0 introduces an easy configuration ability for SMTP settings using the web.config file. This is a deep dive into the new features available in the .NET Framework 2.0 for email delivery.

So like many personal development projects, I have a few ASP.NET applications I am working on that have no money backing them and I need to create reports. So for the past week or two, I have been looking for a good free .NET charting component that I can use to create bar and pie charts for my ASP.NET application.

Included in this entry is sample C#.NET code (1.1 and 2.0 compliant) that can encrypt and decrypt data files. The input elements are byte arrays and it uses a simple key-value that you can substitute for a more advanced value if needed.