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Congrats to Marcus, an active member of the Irish developers community, for the launch of his new venture Pix.ie, done with .Net

ASP.NET 1.x allowed configurations in web.config file to be read from .NET application. But there were no options to manipulate Web.Config contents in programatically. To achieve this we had to consider Web.Config file as a normal file or an xml file. .NET 2.0 fills this gap and also provides many other useful operations to be carried out on Web.Config file; like editing and encrypting sections of Web.Config file. This articles illustrates these functionalities via a sample ASP.NET application. 

It is a common scenario for ASP.NET Web developers to want to have different sets of configuration data depending on whether the project is being developed locally within Visual Studio in Debug mode, being tested in QA in Release mode, or is in Release mode in production. Also, settings may differ from machine to machine if the Application is deployed into a web farm scenario.

Transactions are commonly used to update data as a batch. If any one operation from the batch is failed the entire batch of operations must be cancelled. Thus either all operations in the batch succeed or all of them are cancelled. ADO.NET 1.x provided SqlTransaction class that in conjunction with SqlConnection class provided to commit or rollback transactions. In .NET 2.0 an additional technique can be used and that is what is the topic of this article.

In any user centric application, we always strive to make application more interactive and user friendly. When ever user performs any heavy or lengthy operation (Uploading/downloading a large file or Installation) he or she expects to know the progress of operation at regular intervals. The user should be made aware of status whether it may be success or failure at each step. We cannot keep user waiting. The user should be informed of percentage of task completed.

A lot of web sites provide search capabilities, where you can simple type several words, press "Search" button, and you'll receive a list of pages which contains these words. It's simple. But how can you implement these features in your own web application? Yes, you have to use indexing service which will index your files or web pages. After that you can use full text search features.