Rollin with Bob Saget

If you haven’t listened to this yet, drop what you’re doing and hit this site.

NOTE : You are required to turn your volume to 10.

Rollin with Bob Sagat

Who’s the man now dog?

How to customize WebForm1.aspx in Visual Studio 2003

I finally found out where to customize the WebForm1.aspx template for Visual Studio 03.

C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio .NET 2003VC#VC#WizardsCSharpAddWebFormWizTemplates1033WebForm1.aspx

Now I don’t have to keep removing all those extra tags that Visual Studio likes to add. MS_POSITIONING?!?! Am I the only programmer who knows HTML and CSS?

Of course, you could just read this article and build your own custom form wizard.

Serialize an ASP.NET control into it’s html source code

Here’s a handy little routine that takes an ASP.NET control and spits out the html source for use in code. I’ve used this with ASCX files, but I think it should work with any type of asp:control ( ascx, server control, html control, etc ).

[csharp]
#region RenderToString
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using System.Web.UI;

public string RenderToString(Control ctrl)
{
StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();

HtmlTextWriter htmlWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter);

ctrl.RenderControl(htmlWriter);

StringBuilder stringBuilder = stringWriter.GetStringBuilder();

return stringBuilder.ToString();
}

#endregion
[/csharp]

This came in handy when I was working on a mass mailer app. Instead of hard coding my email message into my codebehind, I just made an ASCX control for each message, then loaded the correct message in my code, ran it through this routine, and sent it out.

By putting the message into an ASCX file, it makes formatting HTML much easier than putting it in C# code. If you’ve ever programmed any sort of emailer that sends an HTML message, you know what a pain this can be.

I would like to think there is an easier way to do an include file via code, populate the message with some variables, then send it out, but I haven’t found it yet. If you know of an easier way, I want to hear about it.