I received an e-mail from DiscountASP which hosting services I was using that they had launched a free beta testing programme of their .NET 4.0 hosting. The beta testing is open to everyone, it’s not limited to the DiscountASP customers.

As their website says you will have the following:

http://labs.discountasp.net/netfx4/index.aspx

Finally, it has become possible to easily add AJAX file uploading capabilities to ASP.NET applications. The newly released version of the AJAX Control Toolkit ships with two new controls, one of them is called AsyncFileUpload control which was designed specially for the above mentioned purpose. It’s really great that a new version of AJAX Control Toolkit has arrived, because the project seemed to be dead, especially since ASP.NET MVC had taken its place on the stage and many developers switched to it and to jQuery which can also be used with ASP.NET WebForms.

Anyway, it is the time to introduce the control for asynchronous file uploading. More...

Recently I have been working on a project where I needed to make use of some geographical data and I decided to use Google Maps for that. So, in this particular tutorial I will explain how one can start working with the Google Maps API in ASP.NET.

Basically, the following topic will be covered:

• How to find a place on the map by address
• How to let a user choose a place on the map and retrieve its coordinates and save them in a database. 

The EntityDataSource control is a very powerful one. It allows you to rapidly create database driven application. You don’t have to manually write code for extracting, modification and deleting records from the database. Moreover since this code is backed by Entity Framework, you are not tied up with a particular database schema and can easily change it or even choose other database application.

However when working with EntityDataSource sometimes I feel like I using plain old SqlDataSource and simply have too much unnecessary code in my .aspx files. More...

In ASP.NET the client IDs of controls are often really unpredictable. When you need to add some JavaScript code that works with rendered controls you have to know their IDs. But usually an ID looks like something like this: “ctl00_contentBody_txtStreet”. There are several methods for overcoming that diffic ulty explained here. However they require writing additional code or even creating your own controls inherited from the original ones.

But there is one simply but yet dirty way of addressing HTML elements rendered by ASP.NET. More...

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Although there is a built-in control for advertisement rotation in ASP.NET, it is capable of showing image ads only. However, in the real life you often have to deal with the ads that require some JavaScript code, for instance, you want to put there AdSense code or want to use Flash banners instead of images. Thus, if you want to rotate complex ads, you have to develop your own control.

In this particular tutorial I'll show you how to create a very simple, but rather functional user control that will randomly show an ad from an XML file More...

Having read a great variety of forum and blog posts, I met a lot of misconceptions about ASP.NET that definitely made people to turn away from ASP.NET. I won't argue whether ASP.NET is better than PHP (or Ruby on Rails) or not, instead I'll try to bust those myths. More...

I want to proceed with telling how to deal with uploaded images with ASP.NET. I have already showed how to resize images. However, that resizing method isn't perfect. It doesn't produce images of high quality. Even though it just shrinks images, the quality of resized images don't match the quality of original images, the produced quality usually appears to be worse. Sure, there is a neat solution. We just need to use the HighQualityB icubic Interpolation mode. Sounds difficult? In fact, it's not difficult to implement, just need to add a few lines of code,  but the result is great. More...

In the previous tutorial I showed how to handle image uploads, how to validate some things and finally how to resize images retaining their proportions. This time I'll show you how to prevent uploading of files which size exceeds the defined limit. Well, this is not difficult to implement,  however there are some pitfalls I'll tell you about later. More...

I apologize, there were few mistakes in the article on ASP.NET Image Uploading. There was a logic error in the resizing method. Furthermore, I decided to use the <asp:FileUpload /> control instead of the HTML input, FileUpload automatically adds a proper encryption type to the form.

The article is still available by its previous URL, but now it's correct, as well as the project files.