While working on a recent Flickr/Google Maps mashup i needed to make it as simple for users to share their Flickr photos as possible. What is easier than simply asking them to enter the Flickr photo page URL? Using this I'll show you a simple way to use RegEx to retrieve the photo ID part of the URL using c# as well as a JavaScript RegEx version for your ASP.Net RegEx validators. Lets get to it!

ASP.Net Script Services and Web Services are an incredibly powerful tool for providing rich dynamic sites using AJAX. As good as they are, there are times when you want to access them in alternate ways. Combine JQuery, JSON and ASP.Net Web Services and you have a combination that rivals the A Team – lets take a look.

If there is one blogging related tool that I've come across lately that i think has been a game changer it would have to be Windows Live Writer. However some people are using either a custom written blog engine (like me) or are using a blog engine that doesn’t support Live Writer. If that is the case i will show you a simple way to integrate Windows Live Writer support into you blog with WebServices and the MetaWebLog API.

There are times when the invention that we all call E-mail just doesn’t cut it for sending information securely. It is because of this that in every case where information really needs to be sent securely E-mail is not usually the medium chosen to send it. As most developers know though there are times when you have to bite the unsecure E-mail bullet. I’ll show you a way to solve this conundrum and at the same time probably keep your current e-mail client.

If you have ever had to setup or manage an Umbraco installation you will know both the pleasure and the occasional pain that it can bring. Umbraco is part of the growing list of “oober cool” up and coming Dot Net CMS that are getting attention in the “get it up quick” world of marketing driven sites in the market place (Ford Australia for example). I recently had to upgrade a clients installation from 3.0.5 to 4.0.2.1 and the story that follows will hopefully help someone in a similar position so that they can revel in the same relief that I do currently.

There are many times when there can be a requirement to disconnect users from your Microsoft SQL database. Sometimes you can have bad code keeping connections alive that shouldn’t be, other times your simply want to restore a backup or do something that requires no users to be using the database. Reasons aside, I’ll show you some simple SQL to make it happen.

This is a quick one today. I was recently working with a web application that runs a spider to index content on a bunch of intranet sites. The client was a large company with a very security conscious IT team, that had locked down all intranet access from the web server server in question. Luckily Dot Net supports proxies in a loving fashion, and I'll show you how.

Today i was battling in the trenches while trying to fix a deployment issue on a foreign webhost with a support team that had a lead time of 3 days on a support ticket when i came across a very annoying issue. While trying to import a large MSSQL script (140mb) i was having a repeated dual to the death with the error “701 Insufficient Memory” and his evil twin (kind of like the white dreadlock guys in the Matrix) - “System.OutOfMemoryException” in SQL management studio. But never fear, there is a solution, and its really simple.

If you haven’ heard yet there is a new browser in town. Like a mutant cyborg from the future built with used parts from the past the “IE-Chrome” browser has leapt to life. So there has been much talk back and forth over the past day in regards to what this will do for the old browser IE 6 that is the bane of most peoples existences in the development world.

I use Google Analytics a lot day to day to help my clients better understand their visitors. As Google Analytics is a remotely hosted statistics solution that uses JavaScript it doesn’t track files downloaded like a regular log file analyser would. So today we’re going to talk about how we can track those file downloads so that you can gain better metrics on documents hosted by your site.