Category Archives: Programming

ASP.NET Master and Content Page Event Order

Below is a breakdown of the ASP.NET master page event order in relation to the event order of the content page that is using the master page.

Content Page

Master Page

1PreInit
2Controls Init
3Controls Init
4Init
5Init
6Load
7Load
8Controls Load
9Controls Load
10PreRender
11PreRender
12Controls PreRender
13Controls PreRender
14Controls Unload
15Controls Unload
16Unload
17Unload

Information taken from https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dct97kc3.aspx

Development resources

Below is a list of resources that can be used for developing video games.

Colours

Color Scheme Designer 3 – A interactive web page for generating a colour scheme.

COLOURlovers – A website that can be used to get inspiration for colour palettes, patterns or even just individual colours.

Rainbow colours – A web page listing the HTML and RGB codes for the colours of the rainbow.

CSS

CSS3 Generator – A web page for generating CSS3 specific code for various CSS commands such as border radius, box shadow, text shadow, etc.

Fonts

dafont.com – A website containing both free and commercial fonts.

Font Awesome – A font specially designed for web use which contains 369+ web-related actions, such as a settings icon.

Graphics – 2D

GIMP – An open source alternative to Photoshop which includes a wide range of plugins.

GIMP extensions – A compliation of GIMP extensions, plugins, scripts, brushes, etc.

Graphics – 3D

Blender – An open source 3D modelling software.

Blender 2.5 cheat sheet – A PDF of useful keyboard shortcuts to be used when using Blender.

Music

MusicRadar – A music website containing a vast array of samples that can be used in your music.

Shockwave Sound – A website containing royalty-free music and sound effects.

Incompetech – More royalty-free music.

JewelBeat – Even more royalty-free music.

Catooh – An online media marketplace for images, video, songs, sounds and effects.

Performance

CLR Profiler – Microsoft’s own .NET profiler, can be hard to use but one of the few free .NET profilers around.

Intel Graphics Performance Analyzer – Can be used to monitor performance of 3D programs, helping to identify any performance issues.

Sound Effects

Bfxr – A web based program for generating basic sound effects.

Wilhelm scream – The famous Wilhelm scream which can be heard in a wide variety of places, see Wikipedia for more information.

Freesound.org – A database of Creative Commons Licenced sounds.

Soundsnap – A database of professional paid sound effects.

VoiceBunny – Provider of professional voice actors.

Catooh – An online media marketplace for images, video, songs, sounds and effects.

Technical Notes

A sampling of shadow techniques

Understanding half-pixel and half-texel offsets

How to validate an email address in .NET

There are various ways to validate an email address from .NET, the choice of which one to use is based on how restrictive you wish to be to your end user. This articles details the following methods of email validation:

  • Email format validation
  • Domain name validation
  • Mail server validation

The simplest is the email format validation as it merely checks the format of the supplied email address and not if any of it is valid, the slightly more complicated is the domain name validation is where the domain name after the @ sign is extracted and the domain is checked to see if it exists. The most complicated is the SMTP lookup where the actual mail servers are contacted and communicated with in order to see if the email address is valid. A worthy note is that as each version becomes more complicated you are also increasing runtime and also the chance of a false negative, ie. that a valid email address will flagged as invalid.

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.NET charting with ZedGraph

When trying to create graphs from within a .NET program there are many routes, most of which are commercial products.
Recently I found myself needing a free .NET graph package which also had to meet the following requirements:

  • Free
  • Works in ASP.NET
  • Able to plot multiple graph types, including bar, line and pie
  • Useful help system to aid with integration

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How to display loading text whilst processing

Occasionally when writing ASP.NET pages you may find that the Page_Load subroutine will take a long time to complete and therefore the final page will not be viewable by the end user until the processing has completed. It is possible to send some HTML to render before the Page_Load subroutine has finished using the Response.Write and Response.Flush commands.

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