Accidental Discoveries

Did you know Anesthesia, Iodine, Penicillin, the Telephone, Photography, Mauve Dye, Nylon, Vulcanized Rubber are all accidental discoveries? I enjoyed reading the funny stories behind them and this reminded me of how I ran into or discovered (if I may call it so as it is on a different note than the profound discoveries mentioned earlier) the cool "Generic Handler" feature introduced in ASP.NET 2.0. I have found the feature extremely useful.

They're equivalent to custom handlers in that they contain classes that fully implement IHttpHandler but they are a lot simpler to use. A Generic Handler has a .ASHX extension. It is like a .ASPX page but it doesn't render a complete HTML page. It can be used to dynamically return specific content.

So dear Reader, have you discovered any hidden gems like this that have benefitted you greatly?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HOW TO add a header or footer to a dynamically generated Word document

Image
There was a question recently on my CodeProject article "Dynamically generate a MS Word document using HTML & CSS" . The article describes how to generate a Word document programmatically without using any components, by exploiting the formatting features exposed through Office XML and CSS. The questioner wanted to know how to add a custom header and footer and show something like Page X of Y (total pages). Based on what I have tried so far, showing a header and footer using Office XML in MS Word is not as easy as it is in Excel . If you want to keep the code simple & don't need any great fireworks i.e. you will just settle for page numbers in the header or footer then it's a matter of adding a few lines to the original source code. The code can be viewed at this Github Gist Update (1-Sep-2010): To add a custom header & footer, check this new post To add a footer that shows Page number at the bottom right, here are the steps - 1) Add these classes...
Read more

Visual tags: Microsoft Tag vs QR Code

Image
As the Web got more popular in the last decade, it has been common to see advertisements carrying not much of details but just a terse URL prompting those interested to visit a website to get more info. As Mobile Internet gets more affordable & handsets with cameras get cheaper, a number of applications that leverage both those features have started to emerge. Microsoft Tag & QR Code are visual tags that use proprietary technology to encode data in a 2D "barcode". They pack a lot of information in a small space. These visual tags can be used in traditional marketing media like print advertising, billboards, packaging and merchandising. A user capturing a visual tag through her mobile phone camera can be directed to a website for detailed information (that can include online photos & video) by a barcode reader application (that needs to be installed before hand on the mobile). Picture courtesy: Wikipedia Google utilizes QR Code to promote the most sought ...
Read more

HOW TO dynamically generate a Word document with custom header & footer

Image
Way back in 2004, a project I was working on required a web page to be exported as a Word document (.DOC). Without relying on any components, I utilized the Office XML & HTML technique to implement this feature. I posted my sample on CodeProject to seek feedback. Over the years, I've received some generous comments & feature requests. Many wanted to know how to add a header & footer to the dynamically generated Word document. With the help of the Microsoft Office HTML and XML Reference , I devised a hack to add a lacklustre header and/or footer . Some folks wanted to customize the contents of the header & footer but when they tried with my hack that offered limited functionality, the header/footer text showed up in the document body to their annoyance. This July, an ingenious developer posted a hack that can overcome this problem, in the Comments section of my CodeProject article. His practical workaround was to pack the duplicating header/footer text inside a t...
Read more