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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.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular file format for documents. PDF files are a popular document format for two primary reasons: first, because the PDF standard is an open standard, there are many vendors that provide PDF readers across virtually all operating systems, and many proprietary programs, such as Microsoft Word, include a "Save as PDF" option. Consequently, PDFs server as a sort of common currency of exchange. A person writing a document using Microsoft Word for Windows can save the document as a PDF, which can then be read by others whether or not they are using Windows and whether or not they have Microsoft Word installed. Second, PDF files are self-contained. Each PDF file includes its complete text, fonts, images, input fields, and other content. This means that even complicated documents with many images, an intricate layout, and with user interface elements like textboxes and checkboxes can be encapsulated in a single PDF file.

Due to their ubiquity and layout capabilities, it's not uncommon for a websites to use PDF technology. For example, when purchasing goods at an online store you may be offered the ability to download an invoice as a PDF file. PDFs also support form fields, which are user interface elements like textboxes, checkboxes, comboboxes, and the like. These form fields can be entered by a user viewing the PDF or, with a bit of code, they can be entered programmatically.

This article is the first in a multi-part series that examines how to programmatically work with PDF files from an ASP.NET application using iTextSharp, a .NET open source library for PDF generation. This installment shows how to use iTextSharp to open an existing PDF document with form fields, fill those form fields with user-supplied values, and then save the combined output to a new PDF file.

OOP is still alive, and we can learn Razor (us) to behave this way...

A sample ASP.NET application development using MVC.

The article provides and describes some useful code snippets for Windows Mobile/CE developers.

The article provides and describes some useful code snippets for Windows Mobile/CE developers.

Chances are, at some point you've tried creating a new user account on a website and were told that the username you selected was already taken. This is especially common on very large websites with millions of members, but can happen on smaller websites with common usernames, such as people's names or popular words or phrases in the lexicon of the online community that frequents the website. If the user registration process is short and sweet, most users won't balk when they are told their desired username has already been taken - they'll just try a new one. But if the user registration process is long, involving several questions and scrolling, it can be frustrating to complete the registration process only to be told you need to return to the top of the page to try a different username.

Many websites use Ajax techniques to check whether a visitor's desired username is available as soon as they enter it (rather than waiting for them to submit the form). This article shows how to implement such a feature in an ASP.NET website using Membership and jQuery. This article includes a demo available for download that implements this behavior in an ASP.NET WebForms application that uses the CreateUserWizard control to register new users. However, the concepts in this article can be applied to ad-hoc user registration pages and ASP.NET MVC.

Read on to learn more!

How to use the nHydrate ADO.NET generator and keep your database in sync

How to use FileDb as a local database in your .NET, Silverlight and Windows Phone applications

When a browser displays the HTML sent from a web server it parses the received markup into a Document Object Model, or DOM, which models the markup as a hierarchical structure. Each element in the markup - the <form> element, <div> elements, <p> elements, <input> elements, and so on - are represented as a node in the DOM and can be programmatically accessed from client-side script. What's more, the nodes that make up the DOM have functions that can be called to perform certain behaviors; what functions are available depend on what type of element the node represents.

One function common to most all node types is focus, which gives keyboard focus to the corresponding element. The focus function is commonly used in data entry forms, search pages, and login screens to put the user's keyboard cursor in a particular textbox when the web page loads so that the user can start typing in his search query or username without having to first click the textbox with his mouse. Another useful function is select, which is available for <input> and <textarea> elements and selects the contents of the textbox.

This article shows how to call an HTML element's focus and select functions. We'll look at calling these functions directly from client-side script as well as how to call these functions from server-side code.