About Nathanael Jones

Will you ever need to pass relative paths to your control? Does your control function as a container for markup? If so, you should subclass Control instead of using a .ascx file. read more

ASP.NET is primarily concerned with "virtual paths", the portion of the path following the hostname or port number. When working with ASP.NET, you must understand the following types of URIs thoroughly, and know how they are handled by ASP.NET and the browser. read more

Virtual path providers are awesome - you can serve a site from a .zip file, perform XSLT transformations to generate .aspx files as the compiler reads them, and do all sorts of unusual things. However, using them can make the StaticFileHandler buffer entire downloads in memory before sending the data to the client. read more

IIS allows websites to be hosted in virtual folders that do not correspond to the on-disk organization. read more

If you are getting a NullReferenceException from RewritePath at ~/, or if image references break when your URLs end in /, you need hotfix 911300. read more

The query string is handled differently from the rest of the virtual path. It is neither URL decoded or case-normalized before it reaches ASP.NET, although each name-value pair is URL decoded before being stored in the Request.QueryString collection. read more

ASP.NET introduces a new URI component to the equation: PathInfo. It's not very well known, possibly due to poor implementation and consequent lack of usefulness. However, it is important that you understand how it can affect you. read more

One of the most critical steps in designing a web site is choosing your URI structure for the site. Clean, friendly URIs make visitors more comfortable and help them keep track of where they are on the site. read more

I've signed up for a couple dozen wikis in the last two weeks. In my spare time I've been trying to find a hosted wiki that meets our needs. We need a private wiki with WYSWYG editing, 40+ user count, reasonably fast edit transitions, hierarchical organization of pages, and ad-free versions. read more

You've got to start sometime. After launching a certain number of websites, launching your own can seem really, really boring. Like watching grass grow. At least it doesn't take long with the CMS I created... read more