Disown your ASP.NET children

If you’re building a site that contains nested applications, you may find yourself confused at what appears to be IIS completely disregarding your virtual directories. The behavior is by design. Although the applications will get isolated, the web.config settings from parent applications propagate to children applications. An easy fix is to simply wrap your web.config with the following to disable propagation :

  <location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
    <system.web>

    ...

    </system.web>
  </location>

Most sections can be wrapped at the exception of <configSections>, <runtime> and of course, the <configuration> root node.

Check out the full article on aspdotnetfaq.com for more details.

Linus Torvalds supports Microsoft’s initiative

It didn’t take long for the entire world to learn about Microsoft’s submittable of 20,000 lines of code for the Linux driver base. As a surprise reaction to both sides of the camp, Linus Torvalds responded in favor of Microsoft’s move. I have a feeling that the most memorable portion of his response will become this little snippet :

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.

Turn your ASP.NET pages into valid XHTML Strict pages

Many developers seem to find it difficult to get their ASP.NET pages rendering in a valid XHTML Strict fashion. The solution is just a quick MSDN lookup away. Only two steps are required.

One, declare the proper XHTML Strict DOCTYPE :

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

Two, edit your Web.Config file and the following to the System.Web section :

<xhtmlConformance mode="Strict"/>

ASP.NET will now adjust the HTML it outputs from controls and get rid of the infamous name attribute on the form tag.