Tiny drips of Asp.Net juice

long time no see,
I’ve been a busy little bee working on a fairly large web site for online gambling (horse races), with some SERIOUSLY cool software/frameworks. Going from the outside in it’s been jQuery, EPiServer 5, Asp.Net 3.5, WCF, SOA, NHibernate. And I have learned more from this project than any other. I’m going to publish reference code (for my own later googling pleasure) from this project for quite a while I reckon. I’m starting easy with some webcontrols we have used throughout the solution. using our own has made it possible to enable/utilize jQuery very easily.

to ensure the ID of controls are fixed, we have used this little trick:

public class ClientIdHiddenField: HiddenField{
   public override string ClientID{ get{ return ID; } }
}

This enables us to be certain that the jQuery selectors all work as expected

similarly we have overridden labels/buttons/etc to enable us to give the webcontrols a TextKey property (e.g. TextKey=”/app/game/gamewindow/buygame” ) declaratively, the TextKey is then used to lookup the correct text from the Translate function in EPiServer

public class TranslateButton: Button
{
[DefaultValue("")]
public string TextKey{ get; set; }

protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
{
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(TextKey) && string.IsNullOrEmpty(Text))
    {
       Text = LanguageUtil.TranslateOrBlank(TextKey);
    }
    base.OnPreRender(e);
  }
}

As these are all just Custom Controls (no code-front file) we can specify their namespace in web.config:

<pages validateRequest="false" enableEventValidation="false">
   <controls>
 ………..
      <add tagPrefix="cc" namespace="OurNamespace.CommonUC" assembly="OurAssemblies.Web" />
   <controls>
<pages>