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In prior articles, I have shown how to create WPF-based client applications using the CODE Framework and the default themes it ships with. This is a great way to create applications quickly yet make them very reusable and maintainable. However, using the default themes is just the tip of the iceberg. CODE Framework’s theming system is completely open and the default options are just that: defaults. And it turns out to be surprisingly straightforward to create your own themes.

Standard Ink collection is incredibly easy using the Tablet PC SDK.For scenarios that require more control or non-default behavior, default Ink collection may not be the best choice. The Real Time Stylus API provides lower-level, higher performance access to stylus input, making this the API of choice for power-developers.Standard Ink collection is incredibly easy using the Tablet PC SDK.For scenarios that require more control or non-default behavior, default Ink collection may not be the best choice. The Real Time Stylus API provides lower-level, higher performance access to stylus input, making this the API of choice for power-developers.

Chances are, there are several different URLs that point to the same content on your website. For example, the URLs http://yoursite.com, http://yoursite.com/default.aspx, http://www.yoursite.com, or http://www.yoursite.com/default.aspx are all likely valid URLs that results in the same content, namely the homepage for yoursite.com. While having four different URLs reference the same content may not seem like a big deal, it can directly impact your website's search engine placement and, consequently, it's traffic. To a search engine, those four different URLs represent four different pages, even though the all produce the same content.

To understand how allowing duplicate URLs in your website can affect your search engine placement, first understand that search engines base a page's placement in the search results based, in part, on how many other websites link to the page. Now, imagine that there are 1,000 web pages from other websites that link to your homepage. You might conclude, then, that a search engine would rank the importance of your homepage based on those 1,000 links. But consider what would happen if 25% of those links linked to http://yoursite.com, 25% to http://yoursite.com/default.aspx, and so on. Rather than your homepage reflecting 1,000 inbound links, instead the search engine assumes there are only 250 links to http://yoursite.com, only 250 links to http://yoursite.com/default.aspx, and so on. In effect, redundant URLs can dilute your search engine ranking.

A key tenet of search engine optimization is URL normalization, or URL canonicalization. URL normalization is the process of eliminating duplicate URLs in your website. This article explores four different ways to implement URL normalization in your ASP.NET website.

A common pattern in web development is providing paged access to data. Rather than displaying the entire contents of a report or database table to an end user, developers often show only a subset of records per web page, with controls for moving from page to page. With ASP.NET 1.x, the DataGrid made paging incredibly simple - just set the AllowPaging property to True and add a few lines of code in the PageIndexChanged event handler and you were done! ASP.NET 2.0's GridView makes the process even simpler - just check the Enable Paging option from the GridView's smart tag - no code needed.

Of course nothing is free in life, and the tradeoff you make with the ease of checking a checkbox to enable paging (or, in the DataGrid's case, writing a couple lines of code) is performance. Out of the box, the DataGrid and GridView use default paging, which is a simple paging model that returns all of the records for each every page of data shown. When paging through small amounts of data (dozens to a hundred or so records), this inefficiency is likely outweighed by the ease of adding the feature. However, if you want to page through thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of records the default paging model is not viable.

The alternative to default paging is custom paging, in which you are tasked with writing code that intelligently grabs the correct subset of data. It requires a bit more work, but is essential when dealing with sufficiently-sized data...

In .NET applications, an illegal operation - an invalid cast, attempting to reference a null value, trying to connect to a database that's been taken offline, and so on - raises an exception. Exceptions can be caught and handled directly in code through the use of Try / Catch blocks. For ASP.NET applications, if the exception is not handled in code, it bubbles up to the ASP.NET runtime, which raises an HttpUnhandledException. By default, unhandled exceptions result in a page that displays the text, "Runtime Error" with instructions for developers on how to display exception details (see the screen shot to the right). This "Runtime Error" error page is what is seen by external visitors; if you visit your site through localhost and an unhandled exception occurs, the default error page includes the type and details of the exception thrown.

End users will no doubt find the "Runtime Error" page to be intimidating and confusing - do you think the average computer user knows what "Runtime" means? All the user knows is that something went horribly wrong. They might fear that their data or progress has been lost and that they are responsible for the error. Ironically, the person who does care that an unhandled exception has occurred - the developer - is left out of the loop unless the end user takes the time to email the developer the details of the error (what page it happened on, the steps the user had performed that caused the error, and so on)..

Virtualizing WrapPanel, similar to the default WPF WrapPanel but it should be used inside ListBoxes/ListViews that binds to large sets of data since it only generates elements that are visible to the user, improving performance.

Have you ever wanted to emit standards compliant and CSS based markup rather than the default table based markup provided in ASP.NET 2.0? Adaptive control behavior in ASP.NET 2.0 gives you the ability to customize the functionality of ASP.NET controls.

With the .NET Framework 4.0, you can now boost performance by replacing the default ASP.NET output cache with your own implementation. We show you how to do this with the MongoDB "NoSQL" database in a simple ASP.NET MVC app and then we swap out the custom provider to leverage features of Windows Azure AppFabric.

In some case, we need to customize the Scrolling functionality in Silverlight depending upon the requirement. The default look of ScrollViewer doesn’t give proper UI effect. In such case, you need to create the whole scroll behavior by modifying XAML and writing a bunch of C# code. In this article,

This article looks at Microsoft's free virtualization software, Virtual PC, and shows how to use it to create guest environments where you can cleanly install alternate development environments to assist with web development.