Will Strohl's Blog

Here is something that was happening to me today when trying to spawn a new thread to perform some task...

I very often end up speaking to people about how much proper string handling, concatenation, and evaluation can increase the performance of a web site or application. So I decided to write a guide about it...

For some odd reason, the XPathDocument class does not support loading the object using a string. However, this seems to be an integral requirement for some applications where the XML is generated and parsed on-the-fly. Here's how to do that...

There are times when you need to incorporate a client-side form on your web form, user control, or DNN module. As you probably already know, this will not work. By default, ASP.Net doesn't allow child forms anymore.

I recently had a project where the home page for a web site called for an image that loaded randomly each time the page is loaded. For example, the first time you viewed the home page, you might be looking at monkeys, the next time a llama, and so on.

Invariably, at some point you will have a control that needs to display a list of options as a checkbox list. In order for our application to be user-friendly, we will need to provide the ability for the end-user to Select All checkboxes with a single click, as well as uncheck all checkboxes. With a bit of client-side code, this is easily achieved.

Have you ever worked with an application that had many different connection strings and databases? It is sometimes necessary to grab some information from those connection strings. I have run into such a situation recently. Here is how to grab the database name from the connection string.

While I was writing a class to allow me to quickly grab preformatted JavaScript functions (i.e., confirm, alert, etc.), I came across the need to ensure that a string passed into those methods would not throw a JavaScript error upon rendering. This could possibly happen if the message contained singles quotes for contractions, quotes, etc.

From time to time we need to do something that the .Net framework doesn't immediately expose to us (without some finagling). In this instance, I wanted to override the attributes that the labels generated by the CheckBoxList webcontrol. However, I only wanted to modify this one instance of it.

I came across a requirement where I needed to create a DataTable of times for a project. This table didn't need to take up any space on the database since it would never change. The times would need to be listed in 30 minute increments for each hour of the day. This would then get binded mostly by dropdown lists.