How to use Toastr.js in ASP.NET

First let me ask you a question, what is Toastr.js and what is the use of it?

Toastr is a simple JavaScript library which can be used along with jQuery to show a simple and appealing notification in your web application. Good thing about Toasr is, since it is a JavaScript library it won’t create any performance issue and the coding looks very simple.

Lets start with a very simple .net application with one label, textbox and a button. Then on click of the button we will show the Toastr alert.

First we need to add the Toastr library like below in your .aspx page.

<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
   <Link href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/toastr.js/2.0.1/css/toastr.css" rel="stylesheet" />
   <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/toastr.js/2.0.1/js/toastr.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Here you might have noticed that I am referring the path directly from the online URL. In your case you may download the toast.js and toastr.css and also the jQuery and refer it internally.

Now we will write the code to show the alert.

protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
       {
           Page.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(this.GetType(),"toastr_message", "toastr.error('Please Enter Name', 'Error')", true);
       }

On click of the button Toastr message will be shown like below. You can have a condition based on your requirement to show the alert.

Here I didn’t show that because everyone got their on requirement.

You have many option to show different color, different title and different icon depends on the message.

Another sample below is for success,

Similarly you have toastr.info and toastr.warning to show the alert.

Another useful option you may require is the position where you want to show the alert.

Below are some of the options available in toastr,

toastr.options = {
  "closeButton": false,
  "debug": true,
  "newestOnTop": true,
  "progressBar": false,
  "positionClass": "toast-top-right",
  "preventDuplicates": false,
  "showDuration": "300",
  "hideDuration": "1000",
  "timeOut": "5000",
  "extendedTimeOut": "1000",
  "showEasing": "swing",
  "hideEasing": "linear",
  "showMethod": "fadeIn",
  "hideMethod": "fadeOut"
}

I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Please try this in your project and let me know your client feedback. I am sure they will definitely like this.

Build failed without any error in Visual Studio 2013 update 4

This is one of the very strange error you may find sometimes. Especially when you build a new system or when you install visual studio 2013 first time.

There are many reasons for this error. If you search in Google you may find many solutions here I am going to give you a different solution which worked for me after a thorough investigation.

What happened in my case was, when I open Visual Studio 2013 it shows as running in Administrator mode, but actually it is not. I didn’t right click and run as administrator while opening Visual Studio.

Now if you build your application which require administrator rights your build may fail. Again not always and not all projects.

So to resolve this issue what you have to do is open Visual Studio in Administrator mode. Just right click on the Visual Studio 2013 from the start menu and click on Run as Administrator. Now you try to build the project which failed without any error. It must work.

I hope it helps, as I mentioned at the top this is not the only solution to this problem, but this is definitely one of the solution which worked for me. So thought of sharing with you all.

App Suspended feature in .NET Framework 4.5.1

Today we will go through one of the new feature added in .NET framework 4.5.1. This feature is currently available only in Windows Server 2012 R2. Microsoft may add this in other operating systems later but currently this is restricted to Windows Server 2012 R2.

App Suspend is a new configuration in IIS in Windows Server 2012 R2. We will see what is the advantage we are going to get if use this configuration and also will see where we have to change this configuration.

First thing first! What is the advantage of using app suspend?

If you enable this great feature your application start up will be much faster and in single webserver server you can host multiple application without impacting the performance.

Now, lets see how enable this feature.

In order to enable first we will open IIS from your Windows Server 2012 R2. Open IIS—> Select Application Pools—> Right Click on Application Pools and then select the “Advance Settings…”.

In advanced Settings window you will not see this feature anywhere! isn’t it? Yes you cannot see this feature directly. This feature is part of the “Idle Time-out” settings.

 

You would have noticed a special configuration here that is nothing but the “Idle Time-Out Action” this is currently available only Windows Server 2012 R2. This is the configuration we have to change. By default it will be selected as “Terminate”.

 

Just click on this dropdown to see that the new option “Suspend”. and select the same and click on OK to return.

That’s all you have to do, you are done!!!

If you like to test this feature then change the default time to 2 min or something and access the application. Also change the setting back to terminate and see your application start up time difference.
I hope you understood the advantage of this App Suspend feature and you will try this in your application.

Visual Studio In-built Support for Windows Azure

As you are aware Visual Studio has evolved a lot and every new release Microsoft adds many features. Since Windows azure is the hot cake in the market, of course Microsoft added many inbuilt features in Visual Studio 2013. Today we are going to explore few important features which will help you to debug your application.

 

Lets go through one by one, lets connect to Windows Azure website form Visual Studio.

Now you can directly connect to your Azure website from Visual Studio. IN order to connect to the windows azure, first you need to sign in to your Azure account. If you are already connected then you can directly open the server explorer form View Menu.

Once you open Server Explorer, you can find an option named “Azure”. You may expand the Azure to find the available options under that. This links nothing but what you see once you login to your Azure account.

 

You can compare the feature list below. Except Visual Studio online everything can be found there. Visual Studio online is a different configuration so that is available under Team explorer in Visual Studio.

 
Now what we are going to explore is the features available under Websites.

 

Lets expand the Websites, you will notice that all the websites which is already hosted in your Azure account will listed there.

We will concentrate on one website now and will see what we can do directly from Visual Studio.

 

Lets right click on one website and select View Settings. You will be amazed to see the options which is opened in your right panel. Lets explore one by one now.

First one you would see is the Stop Website and Restart Website. If the website is in the stopped state you will find an option Start Website in place of Stop Website. As you are aware you stop the application inn windows Azure as well same like the way you do it in IIS.

I believe nothing more to explain this feature as it has got its literal meaning.

Next options which shows under Website Settings are mainly for debugging.

First option is definitely the Framework version. You will have two options either V4.5 or V3.5

You may choose the framework version depends on the one you want to run your application.

Next four settings are related to remote debugging.
1. Web Server Logging
2. Detailed Error Messages
3. Failed Request Tracing
4. Application Logging (File System)
5. Remote Debugging

You may enable all or the require logging options in case you are facing any issues with the application. It is very easy to know what exactly is the issue your application is facing by going through this log files. As soon as you change this logging options it will reflect in Windows Azure as well. Which means instead of logging-in to your windows Azure  account you may manage all these options from Visual Studio itself.

I will be stopping today, there are much more to explain about the log files which you are going to get by enabling this logging mechanism.

I will be writing a separate articles for each logs.
Thanks a lot of reading my article.

Request for the permission of type 'System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed.

Recently when I was debugging my application I got the error “Request for the permission of type 'System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed.”

Below is the exact error I have received.

Description: The application attempted to perform an operation not allowed by the security policy. To grant this application the required permission please contact your system administrator or change the application's trust level in the configuration file.

Exception Details: System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type 'System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed.

I was very mush sure that I have proper permission in my system and also I am running Visual Studio in Administrator mode. So there is no way I should get security exception.

First thing I checked was the TRUST level in web.config but found that it was set to FullTrust. They suddenly I realized that I am running the code from remote share, I mean from the network drive.Therefore, the remote share that holds the Web applications content requires FullTrust.

There are two ways to solve this error,

1. Copy the complete code in your local drive and run, since you are an administrator to your system there won’t be any issues.

2. Provide FullTrust to your network drive. To provide FullTrust to your network drive you have to follow certain steps. This steps are already documented in Microsoft KB article. I would like you to go through this steps in case if you are interested to provide FullTrust to your network drive.

I hope you are able to resolve this issue now and you are able to debug your application without any problem.

Thanks for reading my article. Please rate the article by clicking on the buttons below.

Rank VS Dense_Rank in MS SQL

Today we will some interesting SQL feature. You would have seen in SQL RANK and DENSE_Rank function. Did you ever think why we have these two functions and what exactly is the difference between RANK and DENSE_RANK in MS SQL.

My task for the day is to teach you the difference between RANK and DENSE_Rank in MS SQL.

First I will give a small description about the difference and then we will go through the sample.

RANK—> Rank function will help you to find the RANK within your ordered partition. If you have same rank for the two rows then the next rank will be skipped. Which means if you have 3 items with the same rank as 3 then the next rank will be 6. 4th and 5th rank will be skipped.

DENSE_RANK—> Dense_Rank function will help you to rank the the item within your partition same like RANK function but it will not skip any ranking, it will be consecutive. Which means if you have the same scenario we taken above that is 3 items with the same rank as 3 then the next rank will be 4 in case of dense_rank.

Now lets see the demo.

First we will create the table

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[tblStatistics](

    [ID] [numeric](18, 0) NULL,

    [Name] [varchar](50) NULL,

    [Salary] [numeric](18, 0) NULL,

    [City] [nchar](20) NULL

) ON [PRIMARY]

Lets query the table and see the output,

Above one is the simple select query. Now we will query using RANK and DENSE_RANK together to see the difference.

Rank and Rank_Dense query syntax is slightly different from our regular query as you have to mention the partition in query.

 

SELECT [Name]

      ,[Salary]

      ,[City]

      ,RANK() over (partition by City order by Salary) Rank_Demo

      ,dense_rank() over (partition by City order by Salary) Dense_Rank_Demo

      FROM [tblStatistics]

Lets execute above query and see the result.

You would have noticed that the skipping happened in the RANK for Rank column and consecutive rank for the Rank_Dense column in the above screen print.

That’s all..now you learned the difference between RANK and DENSE_RANK in SQL.

Thanks for reading my article!

Compatibility level 90 is deprecated in MS SQL 2014

As we are going to use MS SQL 2014 in near future, compatibility level setting is one of the important thing we should know. Especially when you are migrating SQL from older version we should set this compatibility level properly otherwise your database migration will be a flop.

In MS SQL 2014 Microsoft declared that compatibility level 90 is deprecated.

What it means for the DBA or a developer?

To know the answer for the above question first you should know what is compatibility level. I will give you a short table below to understand how it is related to each version MS SQL.

Compatibility Level	MS SQL Server Version	Applies to
80	SQL Server 2000	SQL Server 2008 through SQL Server 2008 R2
90	SQL Server 2005	SQL Server 2008 through SQL Server 2012
100	SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2	SQL Server 2008 through SQL Server 2014
110	SQL Server 2012	SQL Server 2012 through SQL Server 2014
120	SQL Server 2014	SQL Server 2014 through SQL Server 2014

 

Now you might be clear what is this compatibility level all about and why Level 90 is deprecated in SQL 2014.

When Microsoft says compatibility level 90 is deprecated which means when you are migrating from SQL server 2005 or older version to SQL server 2014 you have to change the compatibility level from 90 to 100, that is the minimum compatibility level SQL 2014 supports.

Once you install SQL server 2014 then the default compatibility level will be set it as 120. Where as when you migrate your database from older version database retains its existing compatibility level if it is at least 100, which means it retains its compatibility level if the database you are migrating is SQL 2008 or above.

So here comes the catch. What will happen if you are migrating SQL server 2005 or older version. In such cases we have to change the compatibility level to 100 manually.
Microsoft recommends below steps to change the compatibility level,

 

1. Login to the database and set the database to single-user access mode by using ALTER DATABASE SET SINGLE_USER.
   
2. Change the compatibility level of the database.
   

   ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks2012
   SET COMPATIBILITY_LEVEL = 100;
   GO

3. Put the database in multiuser access mode by using ALTER DATABASE SET MULTI_USER.

Other option is login to the database. Select the DB you wanted to change the compatibility level and then right click to open the properties.

Click on properties and then select Options. Scroll down to change the Database to Single User mode and then click OK.

Now click on the Compatibility level dropdown and select the preferred compatibility level. Once you change the compatibility level then scroll down again and change the database to multi user mode.
You are done now!!!

I would like to offer you further reading in this regard too, here is the MSDN link related to the same topic.

I hope you enjoyed reading this and learnt something interesting.

Disadvantage of enabling Session State in all ASP.NET pages

Did you even think of disabling the ASP.NET session to improve the performance of your web page? Or Do you think enabling session in all the web page has any performance impact to your ASP.NET web application. All your such questions will be answered here today.
As you are aware session data is stored in the server if you use inProc mode. So if you have huge data in session all your server resource will be utilized. So the first thing is make sure whatever you are writing into the session is really required to be stored in session and clear the session as soon as you use the data from the session.

TransactionScope in ASP.NET

This is one of the good feature which will help you when you have to do multiple database operations and you wanted to make sure that all the transaction has to be either committed or roll backed as a single unit of work.
TransactionScope is exactly same as the one we use in database level. But sometimes we may not use transaction at database level if the data/table we are operating is completely different and there is no connections.
Couple of important points you have to remember while using TransactionScope is, TransactionScope class cannot be inherited, also this is part of the System.Transactions which means if you wanted to use the class TransactionScope then first you have to refer to the assembly System.Transactions.

Filtered Index in MS SQL

What is filtered index? What is the benefit of using filtered index? Does filtered index really improves the performance? All these queries will be answered in this article.
Lets start with what is filtered index? A kind of interview question.
Filtered index is an optimized non clustered index. Filtered index is more suitable for the queries which select the data from a well defined subset. Important thing you have to remember about the filtered index is it uses the filter predicate to index only a portion of rows in a table. This is what I have mentioned above that “filtered index is suitable for the queries which select the data from a well defined subset”.
Does the filtered index improve the performance?

Connect LocalDB using Visual Studio

Today let me answer few interview question and answer about local DB. We are going to cover, What is LocalDB? How to start LocalDB? How to stop LocalDB? How to connect LocalDB from visual Studio? How to create tables in LocalDB using Visual Studio.
Lets start with what is Local DB?
In earlier version Visual Studio installation SQL express edition gets installed automatically. People were really confused with this database and was having difficult time in connecting and managing this database. So from Visual Studio 2012 onwards Microsoft decided to have LocalDB engine in place of SQL Server express. This is a very light weight database with a minimum set of files required to create a database and it will directly tied up with the project it is attached to.
Lets see how to start LocalDB.

GROUPING SETS in MS SQL

I have been doing some reporting work today. In that report I have to show some trending. In fact I have to show average salary based on the city and department. I was thinking what will be the easiest option to display in that manner, only thing is I don’t want to write huge SQL query to show this data.  Nothing to worry now, you have an option in MS SQL that is nothing by grouping set.
Today we will see how we can use GROUPING SET in SQL query and when exactly we can use this query.
First we will create a table with the name tblStatistics.

Peek Definition VS Go To Definition in Visual Studio

In Visual Studio 2013 Microsoft added a very useful feature named peek definition. You will be amazed to see this feature because now you can change the code in another page without navigating away from the current screen you are in.
Suppose you are debugging in your code and you reached to a function where you find an error. Earlier you have to go to the .CS page where you function is defined and have to change the code. In those case we just right click over the function and use Go to Definition option to navigate to the exact function.

GROUP BY clause to get comma separated values in MS SQL

Today we will see how to get the comma separated values from SQL table. This may require during the project development to send the report or to send an email to multiple people.
 
We will create the table first.

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[StatusReport](

    [StudentID] [int] NULL,

    [Status] [nchar](10) NULL,

    [Email] [varchar](50) NULL

)

How to find Quarter Name and Month Name from the Datetime in MS SQL

Recently I was developing one Material Management System and got a requirement to get the details quarterly with the Month name in a report.
Since it is a simple query I thought I will share you he same as it may might be useful.
Lets create the table first.

create table Items

(

ItemName varchar(500),

uom char(200),

Quantity float(50),

Price numeric(5,2),

Bill_Date datetime

)

Regular expression to validate multiple Email IDs separated by comma

Today I am giving you a simple regular expression to validate multiple email IDs separated by comma. This is one of the very common expression we require during the application development.
Regular expression you may use for this purpose is,

^\s*((\s*[a-zA-Z0-9\._%-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9\.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4}\s*[,]{1}\s*){1,100}?)?([a-zA-Z0-9\._%-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9\.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4})\s*$

Below is the complete code for a sample asp.net page to validate multiple Email IDs

How to install ASP.NET MVC 5 in Visual Studio 2013 using NuGet Package Manager

Today I am sharing you a simple steps to install ASP.NET MVC 5 in your visual Studio 2013. I hope you are aware all templates and add on to visual Studio can be easily installed using NuGet package manager. If you are new to NuGet package manager then I would suggest you to read my earlier article “How to use NuGet Package Manager for Visual Studio 2013” 
Once you install the NuGet package manager then we will open the console to install the ASP.NET MVC 5 template.

How to get Month wise summary in MS SQL

One of the common query I used to see in Microsoft forum is “How to get month and year from a datetime column in SQL Server”, Since I saw this question today again I thought I will write small article about this.
Mostly we require this query when we generate reports. Month wise report or Month and Year wise report definitely require such kind of query.
We will directly jump on to the solution and the query.
First we will create a table with datetime field and two numeric columns to get the sum based on the month and year.

How to re-create designer.cs in Visual Studio 2013

Some time you may have to re-create .designer.cs file of your .aspx page. There can be many reason for re-generating this file. You must be surprised to know that there is no direct option to re-generate .designer.cs file. All you have to do is workaround, but it generates the file without any error and application doesn’t throw any error.
Let’s see the step by step process by deleting the designer .cs first.

Not able to access classes in the App_Code folder in Visual Studio 2013

You might be wondering why my classes inside the App_Code folder is not accessible when you are trying to add reference in the code behind page. This is one of the common issue and the solution is very simple. Here in this article I will be helping you to resolve this issue.
To resolve this issue what you have to do is right click on the class file and then select the properties.