My Favorite Technical (.Net & Other) reading list - 2

In this post, i am mentioning the list of my favorite technical articles, blogs, websites and videos,

Articles:

 

Truly understanding viewstate : This article explains everything you want to know about viewstate in ASP.NET.

A low-level Look at the ASP.NET Architecture : This is little outdated article, but still can learn a lot about internal workings of ASP.NET architecture.

ASP.NET Application Life Cycle Overview for IIS 7.0: Very good MSDN article about whole application life cycle.

ASP.NET Page Life Cycle Overview: This one is the best to understand page life cycle flow & events. again this is also from MSDN.

Developer Tool list for windows: In this Hanselman provides a very long list of useful tools, which make developers life easier.

Blogs & Websites:

 

Jon skeet websites: (C# MVP)

http://yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/

http://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/

http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet

Scott Hanselman (Principal Program Manager - Microsoft)

http://www.hanselman.com/

Eric Lippert (Previous Principal developer at Microsoft who has worked on C# compiler)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/   (This blog is not updated any more, Eric has moved out of Microsoft)

http://ericlippert.com/

http://stackoverflow.com/users/88656/eric-lippert

Abhijit Jana (.NET consultant at Microsoft)

http://abhijitjana.net/

http://dailydotnettips.com/

Pinal Dave

http://blog.sqlauthority.com/

http://www.dotnetcurry.com/magazine/  free .NET bi-monthly magazine, which consists of articles on latest technologies in the .NET world, written by Microsoft MVP's and industry veterans.

Below websites needed no introduction

http://www.w3schools.com/

http://www.codeproject.com/

http://stackoverflow.com/

Videos

 

Tutorial videos On .NET technologies

https://www.youtube.com/user/kudvenkat (Venkat is very good in explaining the complex topics, in a manner in which user can understand very easily, This channel contains videos on ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, WCF, Entity Framework, C#, ADO.NET and SQL Server.)

NHibernate screencast series

http://www.summerofnhibernate.com/ (Best videos you will ever find for NHibernate.)

My Favorite Technical (.Net & Other) reading list - 1

It has been 4.4 years, since i have started my career as a Software Engineer (.NET developer), There are lot of articles, blogs & few books i read to improve my technical skills.

Here i am giving the list of my favorite books, which helped me so much in shaping my technical knowledge. This list of books are like a very good Mentor to me. Mostly related to .NET.

Books:

CLR via C#

 This book clearly explains the internal workings of CLR in .NET. We can learn the inner details of the concepts like memory management, threading, delegates, typing, assemblies, etc.

         Official book website: http://goo.gl/Fs822P

         Purchase online : http://goo.gl/JIW32g

C# In Depth

This book explains the C# based on each version, how the language has evolved in years & how it made developers life more easier. This book is written by Jon Skeet. (very famous in StackOverflow.com website.) He burst some of our myths about C#.

Official book website: http://goo.gl/FrH177

Purchase online : http://goo.gl/m6Pb8o

Fast ASP.NET Websites

This book explains much about improving the performance in the front end. I contains concepts like, caching, compression, bundling, minification, ET tags and some of the concepts specifically related to ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC.

Official book website: http://goo.gl/71OtXs

Purchase online : http://goo.gl/eIp99m

Learning WCF

This book is little outdated. But still, none of the other books explains WCF concepts like this book.

Official book website: http://goo.gl/j3swcl

Purchase online : http://goo.gl/ff1bZW

DOM Scripting

This book is mostly about the Document Object Model and Javascript. 

Official book website: http://goo.gl/CzJmvj

Purchase online : http://goo.gl/KeLWSO

The Art of Unit Testing

This book is about unit testing & test driven developement in .NET.

Official book website: http://goo.gl/P89fCm

Purchase online : http://goo.gl/VHyZxt

HTML & CSS

This is for absolute beginners, who wants to learn about HTML and CSS.

Official book website: http://goo.gl/PYBcJR

Purchase online : http://goo.gl/ta7iyK

HTTP Succinctly

Briefly explains the HTTP protocol. It explains, what we need to know most about HTTP.

Official book website: http://goo.gl/4vO4O4

NHibernate in Action

It explains the on the very under used ORM tool, NHibernate.

Official book website: http://goo.gl/HRioBI

Purchase online : http://goo.gl/0FrDrf

Dependency injection in .NET

It clearly Dependency injection concepts with examples in .NET platform.

Official book website: http://goo.gl/c9kWrW

Purchase online : http://goo.gl/wtPjAg

Code the hidden language of computer hardware and software   
This book is one of its kind. Explains how the code has been evaluated from Bailey, Morse code to current generation.

Official book website: http://goo.gl/SHnLsX

Purchase online : http://goo.gl/yhtH48

Producing Open Source Software

This book contains all you want to know about, open source software. How the license works, how they get funds, how do they maintain the code etc.. Soft copy is freely available on the book website.

Official book website: http://goo.gl/sI4FS7
Purchase online: http://goo.gl/pKpocx

JQuery Validations

Code Snippet for validating the textbox, dropdownlist, and radiobuttonlist in ASP.NET page using Jquery.

To check Textbox value:

txtName is the textbox id:

if ($.trim($("#txtName").val()).length == 0) {
//Enter a name
}

To check Whether entered value is number or not:

$.isNumeric(value) method can be used to check for number

var age = $.trim($("#txtAge").val());
if ($.isNumeric(age)) {
//Entered number is Numeric
}

To check whether any radio button is checked:

rdbGender is the Radiobuttonlist id:

if ($("#rdbGender input:checked").length == 0) {
//Gender is not selected
}

To check whether any dropdownlist value is checked:

ddlQualification is the Dropdownlist id:

if ($("#ddlQualification option:selected").val() == 0) {
//Qualification is not selected
}

Total Source Code

Output Screen

ASP.NET Page life cycle

This is some of the notes i have collected when digging more details on the page life cycle. The below points are fetched up from all over the net.

Page Life Cycle in ASP.NET

Page_PreInit

• This is the first event raised in the ASP.NET page life cycle.
• IsPostBack property would have bee already set by this event, so we can determine whether this is the first request or not.
• Create or re-create dynamic controls.
• Set a master page dynamically.
• Set the Theme property dynamically.
• Read or set profile property values.
• We can not access any ViewState and PostBack data, because that data would not be loaded by this time.
• Master page can only be set in this event or before to this event. if we try to set it in any other event, exception will be thrown.

 There are two ways to add dynamic controls in the page,

• If there is no master page associated with the current page, then we can create dynamic controls in this event. 
• If there is a master page associated with the current page, then we need to add controls in the Init event

Page_Init

• This event is recursive, The Init event of individual controls occurs before the Init event of the page.
• Create or re-create dynamic controls.
• By using this event we can read or initialize control properties.
• We can set the Page.ViewStateUserKey value only in this event,if we try to set it in any other event, exception will be thrown.
• We can not access any ViewState and PostBack data, because that data would not be loaded by this time.

Page_InitComplete

• This is the last event in the initialization.
• Before this event TrackViewState() method would be called. So from here on wards, any changes to viewstate data will be persisted to next postbacks.
• We can not access any ViewState and PostBack data in this event, because that data would not be loaded by this time.
• We can use this event to change any data, that should be persisted in the next postback.

Page_PreLoad

• This is the first event will be called after loading the ViewState and the Postback data by two methods, LoadViewState and LoadPostData respectively.
• The purpose of the Page.PreLoad event is to provide a hook for control authors. The behavior of the load phase of the page lifecycle, is that  the Load event is raised on the page before it is raised on all its child controls. As a control author, you might want to perform some action after viewstate is loaded (so Init is too early), but before Page_Load is called (so Load is too late). How you do that is to add an event handler to Page.PreLoad.

Page_Load

• This event is recursive, The Load event of the page occurs before the Load event of the controls.
• We can use this event to set properties in controls and to establish database connections.

Control events

• Use these events to handle specific control events, such as a Button control's Click event or a TextBox control's TextChanged event.

Page_LoadComplete

• Use this event for tasks that require that all other controls on the page be loaded.
• There may be certain situations where we need to do some processing after control event, in that case Load event will be too early, so we can use the LoadComplete event for this king of processing.When you hook up several methods to the Load event you don't know the order they will get called. So you have the PreLoad, Load and LoadComplete events to have some more control as to in what order your code gets called. The use of this might not always be clear when working only with your page class. When working with controls however, with the need to have some code running at Load time, you might want to make it run right before or right after what would normally happen in the Load event. Then you can use the PreLoad and LoadComplete methods.

Page_PreRender

• This event is recursive, The PreRender event of the page occurs before the PreRender event of the controls.
• Raised after the Page object has created all controls that are required in order to render the page, including child controls of composite controls.
• Use the event to make final changes to the contents of the page or its controls before the rendering stage begins.

Page_PreRenderComplete

• Raised after each data bound control whose DataSourceID property is set calls its DataBind method.
• This is the last event raised before the page's view state is saved.

SaveStateComplete

• Raised after view state and control state have been saved for the page and for all controls. Any changes to the page or controls at this point affect rendering, but the changes will not be retrieved on the next postback.

Render

• This is not an event; instead, at this stage of processing, the Page object calls this method on each control. All ASP.NET Web server controls have a Render method that writes out the control's markup to send to the browser.

Unload

• This event is recursive, The Unload event of individual controls occurs before the Unload event of the page.
• In controls, use this event to do final cleanup for specific controls, such as closing control-specific database connections.For the page itself, use this event to do final cleanup work, such as closing open files and database connections, or finishing up logging or other request-specific tasks.
• During the unload stage, the page and its controls have been rendered, so you cannot make further changes to the response stream. If you attempt to call a method such as the Response.Write method, the page will throw an exception.

typeof

typeof is an operator, which cannot be overloaded.
Used to obtain the System.Type object for a type.
This operator uses reflection to access the metadata descriptions of the types.
There is only one System.Type object for any given type. This means that for a type T, typeof(T)==typeof(T) is always true. This type cannot be dynamic.

Synatx: typeof(type)
             typeof(unbound-type-name)
             typeof(void)

It returns the System.Type object for the specified type.

[Note: An Unbound-type-name is very similar to a type name except that an unbound-type-name contains generic-dimension-specifiers wherea type-name contains type-argument-lists.]

Examples:
typeof(int);  //System.Int32
typeof(List<int>);  //System.Collections,Generic.List'1[System.Int32]
typefo(Dictionary<,>);  //System.Collections,Generic.Dictionary'2[TKey,TValue]
typeof(void); //System.Void

   The result of typeof(void) is the System.Type object that represents the absence of a type. This special type object is useful in class libraries that allow reflection onto methods in the language, where those methods wish to have a way to represent the return type of any method, including void methods, with an instance of System.Type.

Test:
Employee objEmployee = new Employee();
System.Type t = typeof(objEmployee); //throws error, because typeof only works on types, not on variables.
System.Type t = typeof(Employee) ; //it is fine.