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Working with big applications requires extending the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Membership API to handle more detailed member records.In this article, I'll present one of the available techniques used to extend the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Membership API to solve some of the limitations of that API.

ASP.NET provides a couple of page-level state persistence mechanisms in ViewState and the new ControlState. While both mechanisms work, they both have some limitations in that they are not deterministic for the application developer-ViewState can be turned off and can be very bulky, and ControlState can only be set from within a control implementation. In this article I'll show another, more flexible state mechanism using a PreservePropertyControl that allows automatic persistence and restoration of field values automatically without requiring ViewState.

Lookup and navigation screens initially seem like no-brainers, when compared to other parts of an application-yet by the time a developer has met all the user requirements and requests, he/she has expended much more time than expected. This issue of The Baker's Dozen will build a lookup Web page using ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and C# 2.0. The lookup and results page will contain optional lookup criteria and custom paging of the result set. The solution will utilize new language features in SQL 2005 for providing ranking numbers to correlate with custom paging, and new capabilities in .NET generics to pump the results of a stored procedure into a custom collection. Just like Mr. Mayagi taught Daniel the martial arts by doing exercises, the example in this article will demonstrate some common design patterns, such as factory creation patterns, using .NET generics. The article also subtly presents a general methodology for building database Web pages.

This article attacks a problem for which I have heard many solutions: How can I offer file downloads on the Internet and protect them from unauthorized downloading? There are many answers to this problem, but some are not without their own problems. In this article, I’ll review some of the techniques commonly used by software vendors, and then show you my solution for this.

In this article we start with a look at the T-SQL commands for performing asymmetric encryption and decryption. Next, we discuss using digital signatures as a means for ensuring the integrity of the encrypted data. This article concludes with an ASP.NET 2.0 website example that ties together the lessons learned throughout this article series. Specifically, the database used by this ASP.NET application stores customer information with the customer's credit card information encrypted. An ASP.NET page provides a means to view the sensitive information in plaintext as well as a means to add new customers to the database with the credit card information properly encrypted.

This tutorial examines how to use TemplateField to achieve a greater degree of customization with GridView. This tutorial looks also at another way to customize the formatting based on underlying data: by calling formatting methods from within a template.

The appearance of the GridView, DetailsView, and FormView controls can be customized through myriad style-related properties. Properties like CssClass, Font, BorderWidth, BorderStyle, BorderColor, Width, and Height, among others, dictate the general appearance of the rendered control. Properties including HeaderStyle, RowStyle, AlternatingRowStyle, and others allow these same style settings to be applied to particular sections. Likewise, these style settings can be applied at the field level.

In many scenarios, though, the formatting requirements depend upon the value of the displayed data. For example, to draw attention to out of stock products, a report listing product information might set the background color to yellow for those products whose UnitsInStock and UnitsOnOrder fields are both equal to 0. To highlight the more expensive products, we may want to display the prices of those products costing more than $75 in a bold font.

Adjusting the format of the GridView, DetailsView, or FormView based upon the data bound to it can be accomplished in multiple ways. In this tutorial, we'll look at how to accomplish data bound formatting through the use of the DataBound and RowDataBound event handlers. In the next tutorial we'll explore an alternative approach...

ASP.NET 2.0's new cross-page postback capability gives developers three choices to choose between when transferring server processing from one page to another—and they're all useful in different scenarios.

As the attacks in which hackers use become more and more sophisticated, and the programs in which they attack become increasingly complex, encryption is becoming the last line of defense in database management system (DBMS) security.

In this article we will look at how, specifically, to encrypt the data in a SQL Server 2005 database using symmetric encryption techniques. We'll start with examining the facilities for managing keys in SQL Server and then explore symmetric encryption in SQL Server 2005.

As the attacks in which hackers use become more and more sophisticated, and the programs in which they attack become increasingly complex, encryption is becoming the last line of defense in database management system (DBMS) security. Since Microsoft announced their Trustworthy Computing security initiatives four years ago, the industry has been waiting to see how these initiatives would be implemented in upcoming products. With the introduction of Microsoft's newest DBMS, SQL Server 2005, it does indeed seem as though they have provided what they have promised.

What follows is a two-part article series that provides an in-depth examination of encrypting data in SQL Server 2005. In this article we will exploring key challenges facing database systems and the motivations for providing robust encryption mechanisms directly within the database system. We will also look at encryption fundamentals and SQL Server 2005's encryption capabilities.