Encrypted QueryStrings in .NET

Encrypted QueryStrings in .NET

When ASP.NET first arrived to the development community a few years back it was clear that one of the primary goals of the technology was to simply front-end development patterns. Many of the troublesome kinks that made classic ASP development very cumbersome had been addressed and pre-built into ASP.NET, allowing the developer to focus on functionality rather than finding solutions to the limits of the technology.

One of these new patterns is now widely known as the post-back concept, whereby forms no longer post themselves to other pages, but rather post to themselves, containing all the form information through the new ASP.NET control objects. You no longer had to “receive” form posts and process the data.

There are certain situations however, where posting or sending information to the same page that originated the data is just not an option. So there is still a need to use either querystrings, or post form data to another page. A good example is a page with overloaded functionality, and the querystring can tell the page which “context” it should run in, thus rendering dynamic content based on the querystring.

Another example could be a page which renders a certain object from your database, such as a document, or an image. The querystring can tell the page which document to fetch and render the result on the page.

Whatever the situation may be, there are times when the querystring information should remain private, or at least inconspicuous. As you’re well aware querystring data by default is clearly visible and decipherable by the naked eye. Taking the document example, a user could simply append: documentid=number to the page and render any document they wish, possibly breaching security or permissions in your application.

In this tutorial we will explore a basic encryption/decryption pattern which will allow your querystring data to remain encoded, and unreadable. Though not recommended for mission critical enterprise applications this basic pattern will alleviate the most common problems associated with unencrypted data.

Multi-Level Forms Authentication with Dreamweaver and ASP.NET: Roles Logins

Authenticating users is a common task—one with which all web application developers should be familiar. In Classic ASP, Dreamweaver developers have long had the convenience of the built-in Macromedia Server Behaviours for implementing forms based authentication and authorization schemes. Needed security features such as Login User or Login User with Levels (Roles in Windows parlance) and Create New User are a simple point and click away.  When the Dreamweaver team implemented support for ASP.NET these familiar—and easy to use, server behaviours somehow never made it into the package. While many have wondered why this important functionality seems to have been left out, I wondered what it would take to implement it. And that leads to numerous and interesting questions.

But first before you get too involved, let’s see if you’re ready. This tutorial makes some assumptions about your skill level--that is, this tutorial is intended for intermediate users. If you’ve never configured a new site in Dreamweaver, never configured a database connection string, or never used the Dreamweaver database connectivity tools, this tutorial is probably not for you as you’ll need to be familiar with these concepts and techniques. If you have done these things but have very little or no experience hand coding, writing SQL statements, using the Dreamweaver advanced Dataset Dialog, don’t worry we’re doing this together and I’ll to do my part to bring you along.  

Free! - Insert a Record across 2 Pages (PHP Version)

Inserting a record over two pages > Insert a Record accross 2 Pages (PHP Version)

Size: 9.50 mb

Download Source Code / PDF Help File:

Date Created: 2006-03-02

In this tutorial we'll show you how to let an end-user sumbit information for the same record accorss 2 pages.   This is great to know if you have a case want to split a form in half.  

Here's the demo: (end result) http://shoestore.dmxtutorials.com/admin/shoe1.php

Data Driven Email Templates

It can easily be argued that sending email notifications is a part of almost any Web application. Whether you’re developing small 2-tier apps to full n-tier enterprise apps you are more than likely going to wind up with the requirement to interact with customers/clients/users via email notifications.

There is literally and endless supply of email components available on the net today. Most of them are free to download and distribute, while other more advanced components can be purchased for a reasonable price. For me personally, I would rather implement my own functionality majority of the time rather than reading through support documentation and code samples trying to figure out how to make 3^rd party components function with my existing application.

Tip: If you do not have Microsoft Access installed on your machine you can download the .mdb file for this tutorial and setup your database connection in Dreamweaver to point to this file.

Free! - Create a dynamic slide show with ASP.NET and Active Slideshow Pro

I was asked to write this tutorial after posting some code on how to get active slide show to work with asp.net. Actually it is easier then you would expect. In the following tutorial I’ll explain on a step by step basis the approach. I haven’t seen a cooler slide show, except for the slide show on an apple Macintosh, which looks exactly the same as Active Slide Show Pro (and also uses the same Ken Burns effects). But the benefit of Active Slide Show Pro is that you can use it on your website and let the whole world enjoy your slideshows. Feel free to ask any questions if you cannot get things to work.

An example can be found on http://www.mijnvakantievrienden.nl In this example I show 20 random images out of the database, combined with text at the top and per slide a link to another page.

Learn more about Active Slideshow Pro>>

Creating an Editable DataGrid in Dreamweaver

The ASP.NET DataGrid component is a very powerful interface control that supports a myriad of features and functionality. It is however, often misused and misunderstood. Due to the depth of functionality built into the DataGrid component developers are often “reinventing the wheel” in certain situations simply because they are unaware the DataGrid already provides the required functionality, or they discover the functionality simply too complex to work with.

Here are some features provided by the DataGrid component out-of-the-box:

• Automatic generation of an HTML table when bound to a DataSource
• May be bound to several DataSource objects, such as DataSet, DataTable, DataView, ArrayList
• Provides built in column sorting
• Provides built in data paging and Next/Back navigation
• Allows row selection with highlighting
• Supports full row by row customization of data presentation through the ItemDataBound event
• Provides built in Edit/Update/Cancel functionality

When we say built-in what we really mean is that the basic plumbing for using this functionality is already built into the component, however the definitions of these features must be programmed because they are dependent on your specific needs for your application.

In this tutorial we will examine the built in functionality for Edit/Update/Cancel. We will implement a bound DataGrid component and see how we can edit the fields in the DataGrid right on the page, and update those fields to the database.

This functionality can be entirely designed through Dreamweaver’s wizards and dialogue boxes and requires absolutely no coding on behalf of the developer.