A.D.D. In IT

I created an HTML Helper for rendering a dropdownlist aka select element from the name/value pairs in an enum and thought I would share.

After getting DataAnnotations working with ASP.NET MVC 1.0, I noticed a strange anomaly. Values that were previously bound as empty strings were now being bound as null values.

DataAnnotations is the Microsoft way of declaratively adding validation rules to a model. You simply add an attribute to a property and voila, it has validation! The concept of DataAnnotations should be familiar to anyone who has worked in Ruby on Rails and added validation rules inside the ActiveRecord model. I'm going to go over some of my findings and walk you through using DataAnnotations. Hopefully my pain, will be your gain.

After creating a registration wizard, the password field was not being saved. After tracing the problem, it was found that the TextBox for the password was losing its value when additional postbacks occur prior to processing.

In rebuilding the Ramsay Corporation website, we changed a large number of URLs for categories and products. To retain backwards compatibilities and provide the proper redirection for users and search spiders, I decided to create an HttpModule to check the Request URL for redirection.

RSS feeds are a great way to share data. We have a feed of product news that we wanted to embed in pages on our website. There are a variety of ways in which we could do this, but seeing how we like XSL and RSS is XML, it only seemed logical to use XSL to render feed links. This article focuses on loading the RSS feed on the server side and using XSL to transform the feed into HTML.

In case you're not familiar with Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), it is a server virtualization system that allows building systems in Amazon's massive IT infrastructure. I'm going to go over some of the features and techniques for building a virtual web server using Amazon's EC2 service.

An interesting problem that I've often encountered is how to best represent hierarchical data in a relational database and in classes. I'm going to share a technique for efficiently storing and accessing hierarchical data. In this example I'll be using MySQL and C#.

In one web application that uses the popular Recaptcha control to prevent spam we were receiving a decent number of exceptions related to invalid parameters. The error was "Value cannot be null. Parameter name: Challenge". I'm going to explain this error and how to go about fixing it.

I was looking for a nice simple implementation of nested select controls in ASP.NET MVC and... low and behold couldn't find anything to my satisfaction. So, I decided to write my own simple method for doing it using jQuery, JSON, and a little MVC magic.