PeterKellner.net

Come hear about how to see ExtJS integrated with ASP.NET for awesome Membership and Profile Management!  I will speaking at the Microsoft Office at a meeting of Bay.Net Users Group.

http://www.baynetug.org/DesktopModules/DetailXEvents.aspx?ItemID=378&mid=49

ASP.NET: Membership with Profile and High Performance ExtJS JavaScript Interface

When: 

Wednesday, 5/20/2009 at 6:30 PM

Where: 

Microsoft Office, 835 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco

Event Description

In this session, we will demonstrate building a super rich JavaScript interface to the standard ASP.NET Membership and Profile services. That is, built into ASP.NET are wonderful providers that allow you to validate and store user credentials typically to a database. It also lets you store other information such as pictures, first and last names, as well as anything else you may want to store. In this session we will build a highly performing, 100% JavaScript UI to maintain hundreds of thousands of users. As part of this solution, techniques for using REST based services to access this information will be presented. Once you see this, it will be hard to ever use web forms again.

(Using Membership ObjectDataSource From MSDN Article)

I’m doing a project where I have lots of DropDownList’s on a page and want a simple way to set the initial values based on some known value.  The DropDownLists are retrieved using ObjectDataSource but I don’t want the first value displayed.  I wrestled some with how to do this using page_load or page_prerender but didn’t come up with good solutions.  I did finally
decide that programming the databound event of the dropdownlist was probably the best way to go.

The solution is pasted below.  The MembershipUtilities.MembershipODS c# code can be downloaded from MSDN or on my web site at the following location. 

If you ever have wanted to be able to programmatically change (reset) a users  password while at the same time continuing to be able to use the question and answer feature, this post is for you.  The problem is that if you use code like this:

 string username = "user";
 string password = "pass@word";
 MembershipUser mu = Membership.GetUser(username);
 mu.ChangePassword(mu.ResetPassword(), password);

You will find that if you have in your web.config requiresQuestionAnswer="true", you will get an error when you try and reset the password.  The elegant solution to this is to create an additional membeship tag in your web.config and reference it when you change passwords.  That is, add another provider like this:

Introduction

A question that frequently comes up in the asp.net forums is how to have a gridview show the the last record added highlighted. This articles gives a technique for doing this. It only works with SqlServer but could could be modified for other databases.

What It Looks Like Running

After pressing the insert button on the screen shot below, the bottom line was actually added and it is automatically highlighted. This is in a nutshell, what the code listed below and this article discusses.

ASP.NET 2.0 Membership

A very common question that comes up while using ASP.NET 2.0 Membership is that when moving a web application from the local developer environment with Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005) to IIS is that login no longer works. Almost everytime this happens, it comes down to the application name in the Membership Profile of Web.Config is set to / instead of the actual application name. That is, if you you were to look at your web.config, this is what you would see.

Microsoft just published my fourth article. This one is titled: "Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management with IIS, Part 4: Adding Personalization with Profiles to the ObjectDataSource".

You can find it on MSDN here, or on my blog here.

Here is the introduction.

Microsoft just published my third article. This one is titled: "Member/Role Management with IIS, Part 3: AJAX Enhancements with Microsoft’s Atlas".

You can find it on MSDN here, or on my blog here.

Here is the introduction.

Introduction

This article extends one of the web pages developed in Part II of this series using Microsoft’s implementation of AJAX called Atlas. It utilized two techniques for reducing web server traffic to the browser to enhance the users web experience. The first technique uses the UpdatePanel tags to limit the refreshed area of the web page to limited areas and the second has to do with implementing some javascript using Atlas techniques so that the web page is updated on every key stroke in a textbox. A user list is displayed based on what is actively typed into this textbox. After reading this article the developer will be able to implement AJAX (Microsoft’s implementation Atlas) in their own application.

( ObjectDataSource1.Insert(); )

ObjectDataSource’s are great for building your own middle tier between your aspx web page and your database (or any other datastore for that matter). By binding the datasource to a databound server control like detailsview, you auto-magically get the insert behavior you are looking for. If however, you just just want to insert to the ObjectDataSource you have included on your aspx page without using a databound control, you don’t have a lot of fancy footwork to do. All you have to do is reference the insert parameter by name (or index offset) and assign it directly.

Also published on Microsoft’s MSDN Network at Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management with IIS, Part 4: Adding Personalization with Profiles to the ObjectDataSource

Applies to:

• Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
• Microsoft Internet Information Services

Applies to:

Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Microsoft Internet Information Services

 Run Live Demonstration Of AJAX Technology

Click Here for Source Code Associated With This Article 

Contents

Introduction
What is AJAX and Atlas
Background
The AJAX Enhanced Version
Technologies Used in AJAX Enhanced Version
Steps Involved in Building (or upgrading) to AJAX using Atlas
Using UpdatePanel ASP.NET Tag
What is Really Happening
Enhancing the TextBox for User Search
Conclusions 

Mikhail Lukyanau has been kind enough to provide a redesigned version of the membership.aspx page. The source file for this can be downloaded at (Download New File). Below is a screen shot of this new look.

Figure 1 – Updated Design for Membership.aspx By Mikhail Lukyanau

I was recently asked how to use the Membership Data Object to return the unique ProviderKey generated by the Membership object. This may be necessary if want to associate the membership data with an existing table. That is, add a foreign key "ProviderUserKey" to another table so you can track an existing user to your current database without getting involved in extending the base provider. You can of course extend the existing provider to include other fields, but in general, you probably are better off maintaining your own tables rather than extending the provider model. Peter Dawson does an excellent job of explaining and showing how to extend the Membership Provider in his article Creating a Custom ASP.NET Provider. (published on theserverside.net)