.NET Answers

A couple of days ago I showed a method for finding a module on another page. Néstor Sánchez pointed out that on a large site, this could cause a significant performance issue. He suggested, instead, registering the location of the module with the database when it is created on the page it is on.

I was looking for a way that would allow the module to move around, and had initially thought that a module-centric method would require the end user to do something. Ah well, that’s one of the problems of working alone. (And one of the advantages of blogging about what you’ve done.)

So, let me show you the way I did solve the performance problem. It isn’t quite as efficient as what Néstor recommends, but it is usable in other situations and it is a performance solution you need to know about. (more…)

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Last week we talked a bit about Inter Module Communication, the ability of one module to notify another module on the page that something needs to happen without requiring a post back.  The other need you may have is something I refer to as Cross Page Communication.  This is not a DotNetNuke term, I just made it up today.

Here’s the problem.  In some cases, you may have a module that you’ve placed on a page that should only ever be on one page.  In my case, this was the checkout module.  I needed some way of retrieving the page that that module was on so that I could create a hyperlink to that page from my modules that displayed my products and my “mini cart” module that displayed a summary of items in the shopping cart.

Here’s how I did it:

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Once you have your database created, you’ll want to get some tables set up into it.  To do this, you’ll need the CREATE TABLE statement that can be issued from the connection object once you’ve established the connection.

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A couple of weeks ago, I was working on a project that required me to unzip a file.  There is only one text file in the zip, so using a full-blown library like SharpZipLib (OpenSource) or some commercial product just didn’t seem right.  From my experience with Java, I knew zip routines were available as part of the Java libraries in .NET (JSharp).  It seemed like my best bet would be to use what was already available rather than having yet another DLL on my system.

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I started a project recently that requires me to process an XML file from Google. Being the lazy sort, I’d really rather just use the data as though it were part of a database and forget that it was ever XML. So I’m using a method in the DataSet class that I’m finding is rather obscure. ReadXml().

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