It is a relational database management system for building business applications with increased data protection. The SQL server acts like an 'engine' providing enhanced performance for data access and delivery of data from your server

This article is the second in a series of step-by-step tutorials by Nannette Thacker that show how to build an ASP.NET page to import an Excel spreadsheet into a database using Typed DataSets and TableAdapters. Last week's article, Building the Database, started with an overview of the system. We then created the ASP.NET website project, the database,...   Read Article.

In most data-driven Web applications, users add data to the database by entering it through a web page. While this works well for most scenarios, there are times when the user has already collected the data to enter elsewhere, and having them tediously re-enter it through a web page is not only inefficient but prone to typos. In this multi-part series...   Read Article.

Go to any travel or event booking website and you'll find the same user interface for collecting date information: the Calendar. Providing such an interface in an ASP.NET application is a breeze, thanks to the built-in Calendar Web control. There are two downsides to ASP.NET's Calendar control: first, it is not very useful when selecting dates...   Read Article.

The GridView, DetailsView, and FormView controls all support out of the box paging support that can be enabled at the tick of a checkbox. When configured to enable paging, these controls automatically render a paging interface comprised of LinkButtons, Buttons, or ImageButtons. The particular paging interface configuration - whether Next/Previous links...   Read Article.

While the GridView control offer built-in, bi-directional sorting support, there is no visual feedback as to what column the data is sorted by. To remedy this shortcoming, I showed how to create a custom server control that extended the GridView class and automatically added arrow up and down images to the appropriate column header, thereby clearly...   Read Article.

If you develop software long enough, you'll inevitably run into bugs in your platform or framework of choice. It's important on those occasions that you know how to apply the tools at your disposal to clarify the source of the bug; reproduce it in a deterministic fashion; and either fix the bug, avoid it altogether, or find the best possible workaround. This...   Read Article.

Before ASP.NET version 2.0 was released, I wrote a book and dozens of articles on the DataGrid control, which was the most functional data Web control in the ASP.NET 1.x toolbox. While the DataGrid still exists in ASP.NET 2.0, the GridView control serves as a much more functional and feature-rich choice. The GridView can be bound to data source controls...   Read Article.

When binding data to a GridView using a data source control, enabling sorting is as simple as ticking the "Enable Sorting" checkbox in the GridView's Smart Tag. Enabling sorting turns each GridView column's header into a LinkButton that, when clicked, causes a postback and re-binds the data to the GridView, sorting it by the clicked column. Likewise,...   Read Article.

When filling out a form on a web page you have probably experienced the fact that if you hit enter when typing in a single-line textbox the form is submitted. This is a feature that browsers provide to make it possible to submit a form without having to touch the mouse. For example, when visiting Google's homepage focus is immediately set to the search...   Read Article.

ASP.NET version 3.5 added two new data Web controls to the Toolbox: the ListView and DataPager. As discussed in the first installment of this article series, Displaying Data with the ListView, the ListView control offers the same built-in features found in the GridView, but much finer control over the rendered output. The ListView's output is defined...   Read Article.

In November 2007 Microsoft released ASP.NET 3.5. As noted in An Overview of ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, this released included two new ASP.NET data Web controls: the ListView and DataPager. In a nutshell, the ListView control provides a very flexible means for displaying a collection of data while still offerring rich data features like paging,...   Read Article.

ASP.NET provides a variety of validation Web controls that can be used to validate a user's form field inputs. Unfortunately, the validation Web controls do not work with the CheckBox or CheckBoxList Web controls. In a previous article, Creating Validator Controls for the CheckBox and CheckBoxList, I shared two custom controls I had created to address...   Read Article.

In November, Microsoft released the final version of ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. As discussed in An Overview of ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, version 3.5 is not a major reworking of the .NET Framework. Rather, it adds new classes and functionality on top of the existing core. If you've had a chance to check out Visual Studio 2008,...   Read Article.

In November 2007, Microsoft released the .NET Framework version 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, and new versions of the C# and Visual Basic languages (see An Overview of ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 for more details on the release). The new C# and Visual Basic versions include a myriad of exciting new features that make the languages more expressive...   Read Article.

In the last two installments of this article series - Updating Basics and Customizing the Editing Interface - we saw how to configure the SqlDataSource control to issue UPDATE statements to a database and how to then configure the GridView control to work in tandem with the SqlDataSource control to provide a web-based editing interface. By default,...   Read Article.

On November 19, 2007, Microsoft officially released the ASP.NET version 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. Like with the progression from ASP.NET 2.0 to 3.0, the features in ASP.NET 3.5 are additive, meaning that the core assemblies installed from the .NET Framework version 2.0 are still used by the 3.0 and 3.5 versions. The In short, ASP.NET 3.5 doesn't...   Read Article.

ASP.NET 2.0 added a number of built-in client-side enhancements that were missing from earlier versions. Many of these new features were detailed in an earlier article here on 4Guys, Client-Side Enhancements in ASP.NET 2.0. One of the least undocumented yet most helpful client-side enhancement, in my opinion, is MaintainScrollPositionOnPostback. As...   Read Article.

In a perfect world, once a web application has been deployed and is live on the Internet or intranet, it will never experience any downtime. However, this is not very realistic in the real world because most applications grow and change and get updated over time. For example, as users interface with the application they may unearth bugs, or they may...   Read Article.

When storing user-supplied text data into a database, it is essential that the length of the user's input does not exceed the size of the corresponding database table field. For example, imagine that you have defined a table with a field named Comments of type varchar(50). In a web page, the user is presented with a textbox into which to enter their...   Read Article.

A Multipart Series on ASP.NET AJAX Over the past several years web developers have started using JavaScript to make asynchronous postbacks to the web server that only transmit and receive the necessary data; these techniques are commonly referred to as AJAX. Microsoft has released a free AJAX framework for ASP.NET developers named Microsoft ASP.NET...   Read Article.