Some of my colleagues are often reluctant to use ASP.NET 2.0 profile provider to store profile data for their web applications. The main reason for this is the fact that the default SqlProfileProvider that ships with ASP.NET 2.0 “blobicizes” Profile data using string, XML or binary serialization prior to storing information in SQL Server. This obviously puts a rather large overhead when you need to query your profile data. What most developers aren’t aware though is that you can build your own custom profile provider to store Profile data “in the clear” in the database so that the data...

I’ve been involved for quite some time now with a new Microsoft project codenamed “WebMatrix” but couldn’t say anything about it since all the info was under NDA. Today though, the public availability of the Microsoft WebMatrix Beta was announced, so I guess I’m no longer bound by the NDA agreement and can let you in on a few things. So first let me clarify a few things, and to do that I’m going to use an excellent explanation from David Ebbo’s blog. WebMatrix: a stack and a tool Let’s start with WebMatrix.  The term is actually...

I briefly got the chance to talk about MetaCMS, the content management system and e-shop platform I’ve designed and built, a while back. Since then a lot of sites have been built using it. Some of which (the biggest ones) include: www.nooz.gr (former www.flash.gr) ...

I’m starting a new line of blog posts in which I’m going to give out a few tips and tricks I’ve picked up during the past years. I’m going to start with one of the most common mistakes I often face when reading code. To demonstrate that, I’m going to use LinqToSQL as my data access method (although the problem can be found in any kind of Data access technology) and use the the same model I used in my earlier Caching series. As you can see the model is very simple and contains just three entities, a Peson, its Phones and...

Before picking up where I left off yesterday, I have to first make a small disclaimer. I received a couple of comments stating that the caching solution I presented wasn’t that sophisticated or complete or that the cache keys that I’ve used were not the right and the answer is of course “yes”. The solution I presented was far from perfect but it served well as a simplified demonstration of the problems one might face when caching Linq to SQL entities. Ok now that we’re done with the typicalities let’s see what was wrong with the solution shown earlier. To demonstrate...

A caching solution is always necessary if you want to build scalable applications which will handle lots of users and heavy data access without requiring more hardware resources. I’ve already talked about caching when using Entity Framework, but is there a way to use caching in Linq to SQL and what are the problems one might face. To explore caching in Linq to SQL I’ve built a small web site that had a single page. This page used Linq To SQL to access the AdventureWorks sample Database which you can download from Codeplex. The very simple Linq To SQL model that...

So it’s time for me to reveal what I’ve been up to for the past 6 months. As some of you may already know, I moved to a new start up company about six months ago, called Metadata (I know the site isn’t quite ready yet, but we focused on the product instead of the site), where I was assigned the task of designing and building a solution for Content Management. The company business strategy required a product that would satisfy the needs of every possible client ranging from small companies that need simple websites to large news portal organizations...

There are many occasions (at least so I’ve discovered) were you need to re-use user controls that you’ve created. A solution in those cases would be to convert your user control to a custom control, compile it into an assembly which is then going to be shared to all projects needed. The problem is, that you can’t easily convert a user control to a custom control cause you have to write all that render html methods to render exactly as the user control looks like. An alternative that I find pretty handy in cases like that, is moving the user...

Most of the people I meet have this idea that they have to either buy or find an open source third party component, or (even worse) use flash, when it comes to drawing graphs for a web application or site. So I’m guessing that most people don’t know that the Data Visualization Group within the SQL Server Reporting Services Team has created stand-alone ASP.NET and Windows Forms Chart Controls for the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, similar to what has been already available as built-in chart functionality in SQL Server Reporting Services 2008. There are...

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak in front of a large audience about Microsoft's Live Services, available to developers, in a Microsoft hosted event called "The Next Web Now". Although I had to write this presentation twice, as I lost my first one with my stolen laptop, and had to prepare the second one in just a few hours, I was glad to do it as I always enjoy speaking and communicating with other developers. In general I believe it went well, even with all the computer related problems Panos' laptop had ;-). The event's sessions were video recorded so they're...