Develop Reference

Clone intranet site, but replace content pane with own content

I'm working at a small company within a rather large company, where I don't really have control over our intranet. I have built a little site/page, and I want it to style exactly like the intranet pages.
I know I can download the stylesheets and start hacking away, but I need the links and the menu's to be up to date.
I'm working with asp.net mvc 2 here, but I've no idea how to go further from here. Thoughts?

You will need to copy the CSS etc.
About the menu - you will need to do the fallowing
use WebRequest for getting the new data, Use Html Agility Pack for parsing the page, And use XPath for getting the relevant data - I will recommend using caching for this

Append domain to images

I am developing a .net web application in c#/.net. For images on my site I am using relative paths. However to assist with performance of my site I am looking to introduce cookieless domains for images.
In most situations I can just add the domain to the images.
But in certain scenarios I cant and need to do it at run time. So I am looking at introducing some code to resolve the urls. I have a couple options of doing this.
Method in base page to loop through all the controls, add append the domain to all controls that inherit for System.Web.Ui.Image and append domain if not present.
Or do similar in a http module. (Is this possible)
Will doing the above slow down my site rendering? I dont want this to be counter productive!
Either of the above approaches should work ok for .net controls.
But any ideas how I might append the domain to html img tag and/or any images within my stylesheets? I probably can just set the domains of the img tag in code, but not sure of the stylesheets.

You can consider using Response.Filter too.

How to reduce size of html rendered from ASP.net?

I'm developing a newsletter in asp.net that will be send to a large quantity of users, so each kilobyte that I can reduce will help a lot in the use of bandwidth consumption, what I do until know is write the aspx excluding some spaces between tags, and before render, i've renamed some controls ids to "-" to save more space.
So now, the file has 50kb. I need a file with 25 Kb.
Can anyone teach me any other way do save more space ?
ps.: I Use 3 divs with some data, and 2 repeaters, one inside other, to generate a table with some data for me.
EDIT: I've disabled viewstate, and remove unnecessary divs, I'll try to verify if gzip is enabled in IIS.
thanks in advance

Make sure HTTP compression is enabled. It will help to reduce the amount of HTML, but enabling HTTP compression will give more than the marginal improvements you're likely to see.
There are different ways to enable compression, depending on your version of IIS. For instance, in IIS 6.0, you can manually edit metabase.xml or run:
cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/filters/compression/parameters/HcDoDynamicCompression true
You can check HTTP headers to verify that compression is enabled using something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829/ Live HTTP Headers for Firefox. Check your headers for "Content-Encoding: gzip".

Don't use an aspx page if you want full control. Make a Generic Handler, and then you can have full control over every byte generated.
Instead of using Repeaters, just loop through a dataset and output tables or spans or something. Although, I have to say, repeaters are very easy to control the exact output of, too.
Look at your generated html and see if you can identify any obvious culprits.

You can disable the viewstate and optimize image files if you are using any.

I recommend going over this article if your using ASP.Net Web Forms - explains how to correctly utilize ViewState:
http://weblogs.asp.net/infinitiesloop/archive/2006/08/03/Truly-Understanding-Viewstate.aspx

You might want to look into IIS Compression(it uses gzip IIRC). That should knock the file size down.
Also minify the javascript/css(I've done that and seen up to 40% reduction on js/css file sizes), here's a link to a book/website that talks about other things you can do: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html, the book's title is "High Performance Web Sites", the ISBN: 978-0-596-52930-7

It may not work out to much savings, but you can also reduce markup by seriously considering whether to use DIVs for styling purposes when styling the contents directly would achieve the same result.
For instance,
<div class="sidebar">
<ul>
<li>Lorem</li>
</ul>
</div>
In most cases you can get the same result from styling the UL directly:
<ul class="sidebar">
<li>Lorem</li>
</ul>
But in your case, the repeaters are probably the main source of the bloat. Make sure you're using a custom template for them with clean HTML, and not relying on the out of the box rendering, which can be quite messy.
Like someone else posted, turn off viewstate for any controls you don't need it on - that's a TON of junk alone.

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).