The Ultimate Asp.net 2.0 Security, Role, Membership and Profile Provider List V1.0

Just a cheap blog entry to make sure that you know this page in case you work with .net 2.0 Roles, Membership, Profiles and Security. If you can't find what you need to know here, don't look any further.. ;-)

http://arnonel.com/blogs/arnonel/archive/2006/03/28/12.aspx

Are you a leader ?

Are Web Developers/Web Project Managers that have been working on/for/with the web for years (since 1995 here, which is ELEVEN years already !! Woah, I'm getting real old real quick..), the future leaders in terms of Internet strategies and so on ? Exactly that thought crossed my mind last weekend, and i have not been sure whether working on the Internet is rather something seen as "trivial" compared to a proper Software Engineer, doing Java or something similar. Software Developers still seem to have less reputation than Java developers. But on the other hand, they have to know many (rapidly advancing) technologies. Granted, most of these technologies only now start to mature (in terms of OO, compatibility), but all these technology-layers a Web Project incorporates have all still a certain complexity.

Anyway, make your mind up for yourself and
see if you'll be a leader :-)

Has Microsoft lost confidence in .net ?

Having been at PDC 2005 and seen the praising of .net myself, I felt clearly confident that Microsoft and .net would be a marriage that lasts for years, with the inventor supporting the technologie virtually forever.

But Richard Grimes collected indicators that it wouldn't be so. Searching Windows XP and it's various successors for traces of OS-shipped applications, tools and (who knows) core services of the Operating System that rely on the .net Framework. He couldn't find much that encouraged him in thinking that Microsoft would indeed trust in it's new (cool !) technology.

Having said that, it also need to be stressed that the core developers that work on the Windows-core having been developing unmanaged (thus non .net) code for a long time. The risk of scraping everything they did (like Windows explorer) and start anew would be tremendous. But even then, Microsoft can be expected to be more honest to at least it's developer base, like PDC 2005 etc.

Read and decide for yourself: http://www.grimes.demon.co.uk/dotnet/vistaAndDotnet.htm

Visual Studio likes to work disconnected, but how to reconnect ?

I like to work on my notebook and work when- and wherever i can, like when in the train or plane etc. That did mean to work without any internet access and thus working on a checked-in C# project. Now fortunatly, both Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 nice let you know that it can simulate a check out and let you work disconnected. Very useful and just a confirmation click away. I might have been the only one expection it to nicely ask me to work connected again as soon as VS would start and find a connection to the VSS server again.

It didn't, and it took my at first quite a bit of time and hassle to reconnect AND be sure that no updates on my (faked checked-out) files at first.
While I could see that Visual Studio 2003 was a first of its kind, VS 2005 certainly isn't (I do definitely believe that MS did a good and extensive job with both versions, though). So I was again naive and looked forward to making reconnecting the project much easier, but I was in for a suprise - it did exactly what it's predecessor (?) did - nothing !

So whether you're in the fortunate situation to already work with VS 2005 or still stick to VS 2003, you still have to open "File" menu, go to Source Control and indicate to "Change Source Control" (which is not quite what I really want to do, but well..). You'll find your projects being disconnected, and have to check the box for each (and usually all listed) projects, which then causes VS to (most of the times, but you might even there run into trouble) connect again and let you know about next steps. For me, doing a GetLatest while not letting it overwrite writable files did the trick.

Resources in ASP.net 2.0 and Design time support

Today I noticed that the CreateUserWizard control I am working on throws an exception once switching to Design View of Visual Studio 2005, by saying "Error Creating Control - Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

The reason is that i declaratively reference my Global Resources for labelling ToolTip and CreateUserButton Text, which seem to be null during design time (which seems perfectly understandable).
But what can I do against that ? Finding out hopefully..

Update: 2 days later after investigating, I didn't find any clear documentation on that, but just moved the late-bound stuff like setting control properties to resource-texts form ASPX to the code-behind. Since the designer doesn't have to render these calls like this anymore, it's all fine. And although it would be nice to access resource texts including designer support and without using code, i can perfectly live with that. And I still suspect that there is a CustomAttribute or something like that to include Designer-support. Anyone ? ;-)

ASP.net User Controls - CreateUserWizard customization

Currently i am trying to get my head round .net 2.0 / ASP.net 2.0, which is indeed an interesting journey. Overall, also I have to express my admiration to what Microsoft has accomplished with .net 1.1, continuing pretty much the right path (imho) with .net 2.0 (I used to be a huge fan of Java, and had no sympathies for MS pre-.net)

While trying to customize the CreateUserWizard control in Terms of appearance and steps, some confusion came up. Not in general a fan of tiny things that generate themselves to some big magic balloon noone can look into/debug and grasp why things are rendered and why not.

To make things short, whenever i added a CompleteWizardStep

<wizardsteps>
<asp:createuserwizardstep>
</asp:createuserwizardstep>

<asp:completewizardstep>
</asp:completewizardstep>

<contenttemplate></contenttemplate>

</wizardsteps>




ASP.net 2.0 would still render my complete step and then additionally the default complete step. Anyway i was wondering how asp.net should know i intend to REPLACE the default complete step and not add my own.
After browsing through loads of (repeating) documentation and samples, i got suspicious that your step to overwrite the default one, it has to be called exactly like the default step, in my case "CompleteWizardStep1" which i found a bit strange and/or weird. But it's the first version of the control after all ;-)

Just in case somebody has a similar issue.

Happy coding
Denis