10 ASP.NET Tips To Increase Productivity and Simplify Maintenance

Expert Reference Series of White Papers
10 ASP.NET Tips To
Increase Productivity
and Simplify
Maintenance
1-800-COURSES www.globalknowledge.com10 ASP.NET Tips To Increase
Productivity and Simplify Maintenance
Dan Wahlin, Microsoft MVP, ASP Insider, Silverlight Insider, MCT, MCAD
IntroductionASP.NET provides a robust framework for building Web applications that minimizes the amount of code that's required to be written. Although most developers rely on Visual Studio or Web Developer Express when build-ing applications, there's no substitute for knowing the framework when it comes to increasing productivity. The more you know about built-in functionality in the .NET framework and ASP.NET, the less code you have to write, which ultimately makes your applications more maintainable.
This white paper outlines several different tips to enhance developer productivity and reduce the amount of code that needs to be written in many cases. Tips range from simple concepts, such as setting default focus on a control to creating your own FindControl() method. Although the tips focus on ASP.NET Web Forms, there is also information about Microsoft's latest ASP.NET MVC framework as well. Let's get started.
Tip #1 - Strongly Typed Access to Cross-Page Postback
ControlsASP.NET 2.0 and higher supports the ability to post data from one page to another using cross-page postback functionality. This is useful when you don't want a page to postback to itself. For example, you may have a search user control defined in a master page, and when the end user searches, you want to take them to a search results page.
The built-in cross-page postback functionality in ASP.NET works great out of the box but doesn't provide strongly-typed access to controls in the previous page. Out of the box, you'll normally have to resort to FindCon-trol() method calls to locate the controls. There's another option that can be used, though, to access controls in a strongly-typed manner, which minimizes the amount of strings in your code and allows the compiler to catch errors more easily.
If you have a page called Default.aspx that exposes a public property that returns a Textbox defined in the page, the page that data is posted to (let's call it SearchResults.aspx) can access the property in a strongly-typed man-ner by adding the PreviousPageType directive into the top of the page:
<%@ PreviousPageType VirtualPath="Default.aspx" %>
Copyright ©2009 Global Knowledge Training LLC. All rights reserved. 2By adding this directive, the code in SearchResults.aspx can access the TextBox defined in Default.aspx in a strongly-typed manner. The following example assumes the property defined in Default.aspx is named Search-TextBox.
C# TextBox tb = PreviousPage.SearchTextBox;
Visual BasicDim tb as TextBox = PreviousPage.SearchTextBox
This code obviously only works if the previous page is Default.aspx. PreviousPageType also has a TypeName property as well where you can define a base type that one or more pages derive from to make this technique work with multiple pages.
Tip #2 - Use the Dynamic Data Feature in .NET 3.5 SP1If you've ever had to create database admin pages by hand, you know that it can be a time-consuming process. By using built-in controls such as SqlDataSource or ObjectDataSource, you can certainly simplify the process, but creating the pages and hooking the data to the controls still takes time. Visual Studio 2008 with SP1 installed adds a new project type into the mix called Dynamic Data that can be used to automatically create insert, up-date and delete pages to modify data in a database. Dynamic Data is very customizable but even out of the box, it gives you a great deal of functionality.
Here are the basic steps to get started using Dynamic Data.1. Install .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP12. Create a new project and select Dynamic Data Web Application from the templates3. Add a new LINQ to SQL Classes item into your project4. O pen up the Server Explorer, add your target database and drag the desired tables onto the LINQ to SQL designer surface5. Right-click on Global.asax and select View Code from the menu6. Locate the model.RegisterContext line in the code file and uncomment it7. L ocate the string "YourDataContextType" here and replace it with the name of your LINQ to SQL data context object. I... [download for more]