WinForms Tab Order

Instead of going through every control on the form and painstakingly setting the TabOrder property to something correct, use View, Tab Order menu choice. This takes you back to the days of VS6 where you just click on the controls in the order you want their tab order.

Unfortunately, this feature doesn't seem to be available in WebForms.

Command Line and Environment

System.Environment has a lot of cool properties and methods to describe the environment in which your code is running.

• CommandLine
  
• CurrentDirectory
  
• GetEnvironmentVariable( "CHARCODE" )
  
• GetFolderPath( Environment.SpecialFolder.Favorites )
  
• MachineName
  
• OSVersion.Platform.ToString()
  
• OSVersion.Version.ToString()
  
• StackTrace
  
• SystemDirectory
  
• TickCount
  
• UserDomainName
  
• UserInteractive
  
• UserName
  
• Version
  
• WorkingSet
  

Windows Management Instrumentation is implemented in the System.Management namespace (manually add a reference to System.Management dll before using). Using WMI Query Language (WQL), here's the code to retrieve the current user on the local machine:

	string wql = "SELECT UserName FROM Win32_ComputerSystem";

	ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher( wql );

	foreach ( ManagementObject mo in searcher.Get() )

		Console.WriteLine( mo[ "UserName" ] );

ASP.NET Forms Authentication

MSDN Mag may 2002 - "ASP.NET Security"

TODO:
Details about changing expiration date of persistent auth cookie. (default is 50 yrs!)
Roles stuff still unclear

Pass Data From One ASPX Page to Another Page

Damn - didn't realize that this had changed so much from regular ol' ASP. Setting the "action" attribute on a form element that points to another page doesn't work in ASP.NET. All server-side form controls (with runat="server") automatically post back to themselves -- when rendering the page, the runtime overwrites any value you have in the action attribute so the page will be posted back to itself.

Note: you can not simply remove the runat=server attribute from the form, as many people suggest. The runtime will throw an exception if there are any other server controls inside that form -- for the postback stuff to work, the form must be setup to submit back to itself.

MS suggests using Server.Transfer, but this has it's own complexities as to how to get the data from the first form to the second. However, looking at the help for Server.Transfer, there is an overload that offers a 2nd param that describes whether to clear form variables or not -- this suggests that the variables are immediately available to the page being transferred to???

1. In the submitting code behind page...
   
2. Declare public "get" properties in the submitting page that will expose the data from the controls you want.
   
3. Call Server.Transfer( "pageToSubmitTo.aspx")
   
4. In the receiving code behind page...
   
5. Declare a public variable of the class for the submitting page, like this: public SubmittingPage submitter; (SubmittingPage is the class that is the code-behind for the submitting page)
   
6. In the form_load method, call submitter = (SubmittingPage)Context.Handler;
   
7. Now access the properties you exposed in the SubmittingPage class.
   

So basically, you pass control from the PostBack of Page1 to the Page_Load of Page2, and Page2 can access data in Page1. I guess when you call Server.Transfer, the context and data from Page1 is still alive and well....

Stuff I tried:

• Setting viewstate = false in submitting page doesn't seem to help with corrupt view state problem. In the link below, they elude to the fact that viewstate = false will allow you to send form variables through to next page. Doesn't work.
  
• Save Request.Form NameValueCollection to some public member in the submitting page. Then try to access that public member from the second page. Can't see it (even after casting the Context.Handler to the appropriate type). Could only see/use public properties on the submitting page (contrary to what article below says)
  

References:

MS KB - corrupt view state when call Server.Transfer

Web Project at Root Web Site

Step-by-step on how they setup a web project to run at localhost root web directory and stored in VSS.

Create a New Web App in Root Folder

Interop & Remoting Timings

Based on calling simple int Adder( int x, int y ) implemented in various places.

So far - it's looking like calling through COM Interop layer is ~130 times slower than staying in managed code !?!? Is this right? Well, 130x slower, but still doing 1.3 million ops/second -- so that's usually fast enough. Calling a COM object from an incompatible CLR threading apartment is even more disasterous - only 12 thousand ops/second.

Remoting results show that calling a method on a Serializable object is no different than a local one (after paying for startup costs). An interesting outcome when comparing the two built-in protocols --- TCP protocol is 3x faster than HTTP on remote machine, 6x faster on local machine!

PIII 550 MHz CPU
256 MB RAM
Windows 2000 Server
Visual Studio .NET v 7.0.9466
.NET Framework v 1.0.3705

Your mileage may vary....
Curious how/why operations performed in another AppDomain did not suffer any slowdown due to marshalling...still under investigation - I'm probably doing something wrong?! :-)

400,000,000 repetitions of simple Add function.