Building a Data-Driven Navigation Menu

Navigation menus are the forefront of just about any website, whether the site is a dynamic database driven application or simply a personal homepage. They lead and direct your user around the pages of your site and provide the basis for your usability experience. A site that is difficult to navigate is a site that will not be popular with your users.

When working with ASP.NET you have a lot of extra flexibility when working with a navigation menu. In most development languages, your menu needs to be copied/pasted onto all of your pages, or at the very least you had to use include statements to place the menu at the top of every page. This process is very redundant and cumbersome.

ASP.NET offers the ability to create user controls, which are custom chunks of HTML and code-behind server logic which can be dragged/dropped onto any .aspx Web form in your application, making the development of a component such as a navigation menu quite easy, and very reusable.

In addition to a custom user control, you can add in your own server logic to extend the menu control even further and allow it to be data-driven from a database of your choice. This way your menu is rendered on-the-fly dynamically from records read from a database table which can be modified in real time.

In this tutorial we will build a sample application to demonstrate this powerful technique. We will build a custom user control to house our navigation menu which can be dropped onto any page in our application. And we will implement functionality to make our user control database driven from an Access .mdb database, rendering menu items and submenu items dynamically.

ASP.NET Image Gallery, Uploader & Thumbnailer Part 2

Welcome to part 2 of our demonstration image gallery creator, image uploader and thumbnailer application built in ASP.NET. As we’ve seen so far, we’ve been able to provide thumbnailing and image sharpening methods using built in objects that are part of the .NET framework.

To summarize, in part 1 we created an ASP.NET application called ImgThumbail and setup a folder structure for uploading images to the web server. We then added an ImageUtil class which can receive HttpPostedFile objects and create thumbnails for the images returning the binary content which can be written to the file system. We also implemented a method which uses a math algorithm to sharpen the image.

In part 2, we’ll continue building upon our application by developing the user interface and putting our ImageUtil class into action. We’ll build a web page which allows a user to upload an image to the web server, and then display those images dynamically in an HTML table constructed on-the-fly through code.

Once again Visual Studio.NET is required for this part of the tutorial, and both VB.NET and C# code samples will be provided.

ASP.NET Image Gallery, Uploader & Thumbnailer Part 1

Working with images is a requirement of many applications, from business software to simple personal web pages. There are hundreds of different implementations of this feature, some good, others not so good. When using images in ASP.NET applications you have the added benefit of making things a little easier on yourself by using a more object oriented approach so that you can create components that you can reuse in other applications.

Depending on the requirements of your images module it may be necessary to look towards third party components. There is literally hundreds of ASP.NET third party controls which deal with imaging, image uploading and image manipulation. Before you implement a costly third party component it’s important to understand what you can and cannot do with the existing .NET framework.

The purpose of this article is to show 3 basic imaging techniques you can implement in your applications which all make use of the existing .NET framework classes. These three techniques are: uploading, thumbnailing, and dynamic display (gallery).

For this article we’ll build a simple demonstration ASP.NET application where you can upload an image into a specific folder on the web server, have that image automatically thumbnailed on the fly, and then have the image thumbnails rendered into an HTML dynamically. These are the basic building blocks of most applications utilizing images.

DataBinding for Beginners in ASP.NET

DataBinding for Beginners in ASP.NET

When building any application, whether it’s ASP.NET web apps or WinForms desktop apps you will eventually come across the need to DataBind. DataBinding is the basic process of presenting dynamic data sources within a user interface component.

DataBinding isn’t limited to just interface components, but it is probably the most common occurrence you’ll encounter. Without DataBinding your web pages would only be able to display static data, or dynamic data populated programmatically.

DataBinding can take on numerous formats, from very simple to complex. The .NET framework also provides you with many possible DataBinding properties throughout the web control library to give you a lot of control and flexibility. Take for example a Label control, you can bind its foreground and background color properties. Although not a common requirement it shows binding can be more advanced than simple text values.

In this tutorial we’ll look at several basic examples of DataBinding on different controls available in ASP.NET. We’ll explore basic page property binding for a Label control, custom class property binding for a TextBox control, collection class binding for a DropDown control, and DataTable binding for a DataGrid control.