Develop Reference

URL Rewriting from Winforms or console application

I'm importing classic ASP pages into a new Sitefinity installation. Unfortunately, the existing site makes extensive use of URL rewriting via Helicon ISAPI Rewrite 3.
I'm generating the list of pages that need to be imported by crawling the navigation menus in the old site. These are, unfortunately, not dynamically generated from any sort of central repository, so the best way I've found to build the site hierarchy is to crawl the site.
When creating page nodes in the Sitefinity nav hierarchy to hold the content from the old pages, I need to be able to create the new pages at a location roughly equivelant to their location in the file system in the old site. However, the rewrite rules make this difficult to determine. For instance, I may get a link form parsing the old HTML like:
http://www.mysite.com/product_name
which is rewritten (not redirected) to
http://www.mysite.com/products/product_name/product_root.asp
I need a way to get the second url from the first. The first thing that comes to mind is to somehow use the .htaccess file to parse the URLs, get the result and use that for the rest of the import process.
Is there a way to do this from a Winforms app without having to involve a web server? I realize that I could modify one of the ASP includes, such as the page footer, to emit a comment containing the rewritten URL of each page, but I'd rather not make unnecessary changes to the existing code if it can be avoided.
Update
For example,
http://www.keil.com/arm/
rewrites to
http://www.keil.com/products/arm/mdk.asp

jQuery.load() with sitefinity

I'm going to develop a website which uses ajax to load pages. The cms behind it, is going to be Sitefinity. The problem is I don't know if it's possible to load the pages of sitefinity with jQuery.Load() or any other ajax technique.
Problems with sitefinity:
- I'm able to get the page object of sitefinity, but i need the rendered HTML.
- I'm going to make the pages in the CMS and each page will have a html, header, body tag etc. And I just need the main content of the page, so i'll have to strip the html aswell!
I've been searching alot, but haven't encountered a solution. If someone could give me tips where to search, or how to do it, I'll appreciate it alot!

A more efficient way to pull the pages in would be to connect to the Sitefinity WCF service with jQuery. You will receive JSON page data via AJAX that you can use to compose your page.
Your project's /Sitefinity/services/ folder is filled with .svc service files that you can query to get various items such as pages (/Sitefinity/services/pages/PagesService.svc/), images, blog posts, etc.
The documentation for using those services from jQuery is a little sparse at this point, but they are actively being improved.
See: Sitefinity Documentation Calling Sitefinity RESTful WCF services from Client Side
And this is a good example (non specific to Sitefinity) on how to call WCF services from jQuery.
One note: Sitefinity is very modular and serves pages and content items separately, you may need to query for a page first to find out what content items need to be queried.

Ask on the SiteFinity support forums. The devs are pretty good about answering questions on there.

Yes, it's possible to retrieve content from Sitefinity via .load(). You can use only a portion of the returned document by doing something like the example below.
$('#empty-container').load('sitefinity-page #main-content');

Grab details from web page

I need to write a C# code for grabbing contents of a web page. Steps looks like following
Browse to login page
I have user name and a password, provide it programatically and login
Then you are in detail page
You have to get some information there, like (prodcut Id, Des, etc.)
Then need to click(by code) on Detail View
Then you can get the price for that product from there.
Now it is done, so we can write detail line into text file like this...
ABC Printer::225519::285.00
Please help me on this, (Even VB.Net Code is ok, I can convert it to C#)

The WatiN library is probably what you want, then. Basically, it controls a web browser (native support for IE and Firefox, I believe, though they may have added more since I last used it) and provides an easy syntax for programmatically interacting with page elements within that browser. All you'll need are the names and/or IDs of those elements, or some unique way to identify them on the page.

You should be able to achieve this using the WebRequest class to retrieve pages, and the HTML Agility Pack to extract elements from HTML source.

yea I downloaded that library. Nice one.
Thanks for sharing it with me. But I have a issue with that library. The site I want to get data is having a "captcha" on the login page.
I can enter that value if this can show image and wait for my input.
Can we achive that from this library, if you can like to have a sample.

You should be able to achieve this by using two classes in C#, HttpWebRequest (to request the web pages) and perhaps XmlTextReader (to parse the HTML/XML response).
If you do not wish to use XmlTextReader, then I'd advise looking into Regular Expressions, as they are fantastically useful for extracting information from large bodies of text where-in patterns exist.
How to: Send Data Using the WebRequest Class

Home/Landing screen design for a website in asp.net

I have an web based application. The content for the Home page has been currently mentioned in the HTML code for the Home page using , and tags. To change the content anytime in future, it needs to be changed in the HTML code. :(
Is there a way that we can pick up the content from some external place and get it reflected through the website. This ways, any change if required can be made at the external location without referring to the application's code.
Please advise if there is any solution for it.
Thanks.

You can
Use a database
Include external files using Server Side Includes
Read external files and write their contents and an alternative method

Sounds like you're looking for a Content Management System (CMS), which will allow your content editors access to modify only specific blocks of a page that you specify.
There are a ton out there to do what you want, so you don't have to start from scratch. Just Google 'CMS'.
Although I haven't used it myself, DotNetNuke is a popular one these days and has a free version.

ASP.NET C# Properly Generating HTML for Page

I realize this is probably a fundamental thing I should know but I am self-teaching myself C# and asp.net so I am a little lost at this point.
I right now have 2 pages. One is an .aspx (with aspx.cs file included) that is blank and html is generated for it from a Page_Load function in the cs file. The HTML is very simple and it is just an image and some text.
The second file is a shtml file which has lots of things, serverside includes, editable and noneditable areas. I want to put my webapp into this file. My asp.net app uses Response.Write to just write out the html. This does not flow well with this page as all that does is write it at the top of the page which is because it is ran first and generates it at the top.
How can I make it to where I can generate HTML code inside the page, like within a specific DIV so it does not mess up the page. Where would a starting point be in learning how to do that.
I should note that I do not need any interaction from the user. All of this should generate right away.

I think you need to read up on some basic ASP.Net documentation and tutorials. Response.Write is not the correct approach - you need to understand how the ASP.Net page lifecycle works and how WebControls are used to render the html.
ASP.Net tries to abstract away having to create your html manually for the most part.

So if i have understood the questions correctly.
You already have an existing page/application (the shtml file) that you want to extend with some new ASP.NET components by including output from the ASP.NET page in the existing page?
This is as not something that is out of the box "supported" by ASP.NET and you "won't" be able to execute the aspx page using SSI. But you can do the opposite, an ASP.NET page does support SSI. So if you are not using any other scripts in the shtml file this might be a solution.
Otherwise the only common solutions would be either to use an AJAX framework and let it call the ASP.NET from within the existing pages or to use an iframe solution. In both cases the client will be resposible for making the calls to the ASP.NET pages and merging the results.
And then you have a issue with controlling the output from the ASP.NET page?
The Polymorphic Podcast has a good article on Controlling HTML in ASP.NET WebForms .

You can add a Literal control to the page inside the div:
<div>
<asp:Literal ID="litMarkup" runat=server />
</div>
then in your code-behind:
litMarkup.Text = "<strong>Your markup</strong>";

I don't know how well this would work for you, but could you try using an iframe to house the ASP.NET page? This should keep it in the specified region and not overwriting your shtml file. It may be something to think about.

If it is necessary that you generate your HTML output from C# code, and you would use this in more than one place, I think you may be thinking of something like what are called ASP.NET Custom Controls (not to be confused with "User Controls"-- though you probably could put together a solution with those as well, using a Literal control as another person suggested). The MSDN documentation would be a good starting point. In general, though, the writing-out-HTML-yourself-from-code model (like you would with, say, CGI applications), is not the usual ASP.NET model of development, as it largely defeats the point of using ASP.NET at all. You'd mostly want to do this sort of thing if you are writing your own web control, though this might be exactly what you are doing (hard to tell from the description).