Source Control for .NET Developers, The open source approach
Independent developers who don’t work in a team may think that source control is not necessary for them because nobody else works on their projects but this is a big mistake!
Before I lost some source codes which was on my previous dead laptop I didn’t feel I need source control for my projects but after that incident I started to research about possible source control approaches for .NET developers and Visual Studio and in this post I want to share results with you.
There are two main source control systems: Concurrent Versions System (CVS) and Subversion (SVN). I was looking for a system that covers the following specifications:
- Free technology.
- Free Ad-on for Visual Studio.
- Free server to host source codes.
My choice was SVN which is initiated by CollabNet Inc. because it’s free and open source and also has an official ad-on for Visual Studio which is offered by CollabNet. AnkhSVN is a very good free tool to implement all source control activities right inside Visual Studio. You can download it for Visual Studio 2008 here.
By now, you have the technology and tools to control your source and take care of them but there is one another requirement. You need a server that supports SVN to host your source codes and absolutely you look for a free one ;-) Assembla is a good choice because it offers a free package as well as paid commercial packages. One you register, you can define various workspaces with unlimited team size in your free 250 MB storage space.
You’ve almost done, now you can start Visual Studio, open a solution or project, right click on it and add it to SVN. It’s so simple and easy.
In Assembla you can receive source control comparison (Diff), source history and many more features.
In brief, you have to take these 2 steps:
ASP.NET MVC Tutorial in PDF format
We are getting closer to official release of Microsoft ASP.NET MVC. There are couple of tutorials and videos to get started with this new approach to enterprise web applications development. I found an eight part series of tutorial (in both C# and VB) on ASP.NET Website; good news is that all of these tutorial parts are available in PDF format too. I downloaded all of them and compress them in a single .rar file.
You can download it at http://www.sharplife.net/Files/ASPNETMVCTutorialPDFVersion.rar (approx. 1.7 MB).
Enjoy ;-)
How to use ASP.NET Membership in a Console Application
It’s so easy to use powerful ASP.NET Membership, Role and Profile provider in a Windows or Console application. Only one key point remains here; you should add an app.config file to your Console or Windows application and include these nodes in that:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?> <configuration> <connectionStrings> <add name="SQLConnString" connectionString="SERVER=(local);DATABASE=SampleApp;UID=sa;PWD=123"/> </connectionStrings> <system.web> <membership defaultProvider="SampleAppMembershipProvider"> <providers> <add name="SampleAppMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="SQLConnString" applicationName="SampleAppMembership" enablePasswordReset="true" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" passwordFormat="Hashed" maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="100" minRequiredPasswordLength="5" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="true" passwordAttemptWindow="5" passwordStrengthRegularExpression="" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" /> </providers> </membership> <profile defaultProvider="SampleAppProfileProvider"> <providers> <add name="SampleAppProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider" connectionStringName="SQLConnString"/> </providers> <properties> <add name="FirstName" type="System.String" /> <add name="LastName" type="System.String" /> <add name="Email" type="System.String" /> <add name="Website" type="System.String" /> <add name="Address" type="System.String" /> <add name="Note" type="System.String" /> <add name="Phone" type="System.String" /> <add name="Fax" type="System.String" /> <add name="Feature" type="System.Int32" /> </properties> </profile> <roleManager enabled="true" cacheRolesInCookie="true" defaultProvider="SampleAppSqlRoleProvider" cookieName=".ASPXSampleAppROLES" cookiePath="/" cookieTimeout="30" cookieRequireSSL="false" cookieSlidingExpiration="true" createPersistentCookie="false" cookieProtection="All"> <providers> <clear/> <add name="SampleAppSqlRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" connectionStringName="SQLConnString" applicationName="SampleAppRoles"/> </providers> </roleManager> </system.web> </configuration>
Download .netTiers Documentation
A few days ago, I found some free time to study some articles and documentation about .netTiers. I tested it on some of my previous projects and result was great. Professional software architecture in generated code, smart code generation based on database tables and columns, ease of use, etc. are amazing features of this open source template for CodeSmith.
.netTiers official website has a documenation you can read online but how I searched, I couldn't find any offline version of this documentation to download. So I saved all documentation sections as HTML files and also created PDF version of each page. You can download this documentation in a compress file here (3.7 MB).
reCAPTCHA: Free CAPTCHA Solution For Your Website
Recently (and specially after Web 2.0 revolution) many websites started to use more complicated CAPTCHA solutions on their websites in order to prevent spam and bot attacks. There are many free solutions and tools for users and developers to implement CAPTCHA technology in their applications. There are also many ASP.NET controls and components for this approach but many of them are so simple to hijack or don't offer features that these days we see on professional websites (some features like reload function, voice, etc.).
A few days ago I found a link to reCAPTCHA on Yahoo!. reCAPTCHA is a free (but professional) tool for basic users and also developers. To use this service you should first signup, receive an API Key for your website (you can receive as many as you need) and use one of easy-to-install plugnins provided. And good news for ASP.NET developers is that you can download and use a server side control and enjoy reCAPTCHA with two lines of code! The API Key guarantees your website and prevents attackers collect answers from visitors and use them. There are three different themes to choose.
If you want to use reCAPTCHA on a Web 2.0 website you can use AJAX API just by adding this line of code to you html or webform file:
I strongly suggest you download and test this tool in your web applications.
Quick Links: reCAPTCHA.net | Live Demo | Why reCAPTCHA | Signup | reCAPTCHA.NET Control | Email Protection With reCAPTCHA
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