Good site usability often means removing links from one page back to itself. In this article we will look at how to create an ASP.NET User Control which will act as a common header to a site. It will automatically know which page we are looking at, and it will remove links to the same page from itself. For example, on this site, if we click on the About us section of the header, it will take you to the page, and it will make that link inactive. That way, we know that we are under that section, and we can’t click on it anymore.

The Datagrid server control offers much control and flexibility in presenting data. Two of the actions that are hard-wired into it are Paging and Sorting. On their own they work great, but not so well together. When you sort a column and then move to a previous or next page, the sorting preference is not maintained. In this article we will see how to maintain both by using the Viewstate object.

In this article, we will take a closer look at how ASP.NET pages post back to themselves, and how to customize this feature in our web applications.

The System.IO.FileAttributes class gives us access to file/directory attributes. In this article, we’ll see how to use this class to first read the current attributes and then change them.

The System.IO.DirectoryInfo class does not come with a method to copy a directory. In this article, we’ll see how to create a method to do that, and then use it in an ASP.NET page.

This article will go through the complete process of how to create a Web Service and then how to consume it in any ASPX page. We’ll do this entirely within the Visual Studio.NET. Our Web Service will convert Fahrenheit degrees to Celcius.

Unlike classic ASP which run in the same memory space as the IIS, the new ASP.NET runs as a process of its own. This gives us more flexibility, stability and power, especially when combined with the file. Using standard XML notation inside this file, we can attribute our process to do things that will make the Webmaster’s job a lot easier. We’ll take a close look at the ASP.NET process and the attributes available for us to play with.

In services like Hotmail, you have a list of contents in a table. If you allow the user to select rows and do something with them, you might want to make it more pleasing to the eye, by changing the color of the row when selected. You might also have a main control checkbox, that when clicked selects all the rows and also colors all the rows. In this article, we’ll see how to accomplish that in 2 parts: first how to create programatically the table and controls populating the checkboxes, and second we’ll create the Javascript functions that handle the client effect of changing colors.

In classic ASP it’s very easy to get the size of a folder since the FileSystemObject (FSO) class includes a Size function. In ASP.NET there is no such function provided, so we’ll see how to create one, extending the System.IO.DirectoryInfo Namespace.

We will create a custom 404 Response error page in ASP.NET, which will produce a friendly output to the user and send an email to the webmaster letting them know about the broken link so they can fix it.