Recently I had a need to examine IIS log files - lots of them - to do some usage analysis. Analog has been my tool of choice, and although it takes a bit of learning, when coupled with the right config settings will display helpful tables, charts and graphs for summary-type information (click for a larger picture): But when it came time to answer some more directed questions about web site usage, I thought the best way would be to import the IIS log files covering 2 years worth of data into SQL Server, and utilise my existing knowledge of T-SQL. There were...

Foolishly, unforgivably, when I first read Jimmy Nilsson's excellent book .NET Enterprise Design with Visual Basic .NET and SQL Server 2000 (Amazon) back in August 2003, I did not review it (short review: it was excellent, and I used some of his methods straight away - well worth the read). Now Jimmy has released a new book called Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns : With Examples in C# and .NET (Amazon) that also looks great. Even though I use Visual Basic.NET much more than I use C#, I'm still going to try and get this one. Tags: domain-driven design, jimmy nilsson, patterns,...

There are many auto-complete/auto-suggest web controls around, and when I needed AJAX functionality to get the data from the server dynamically, in preferably an ASP.NET control, I started using the excellent "Implementing an Ajax.NET-based Lookup Server Control" on CodeProject. This is a nice control that works in with AJAX.NET and has many configurable properties. Unlike some of the other similar controls I've found, it also supports keyboard selection of the returned matches (using the up and down arrow keys). And, since it uses AJAX.NET, it can take advantage of Session variables (should you need them). All this is packaged into a...

I've been developing an ASP.NET 2.0 site for a couple of months now (which got released and used by 100+ people, with no major bugs...high five!) Every so often, I see a strange error message coming through the logs that reads "Validation of viewstate MAC failed". I'm using a GridView control, bound to an ObjectDataSource, with EnableViewState turned off and DataKeyNames. After dropping into "web developer" mode - where I search the web for the answers to my development problems :-) - I found two helpful sites, at Jotekes Blog and the ASP.NET Forums, which addressed the problem. It seems that in...