Mail Server Down

For some reason, the romsteady.net mail server has gone away. I'm working on figuring out what happened. If you need to contact me in the interim, send it to romsteady [at] gmail.

Heading Back To Utah...For Work

I'm going to be back in Utah this coming Friday evening through Wednesday noon for work.

If any of the old SLGTest guys are reading this, feel up for dinner Friday night?

Unfortunately Accurate

(via Dilbert.com)

By the way, a new skin will be coming to the site shortly to move nav back to the left to keep things like this from getting chopped off by the nav.

Enforcing MaxLength On TextBox Controls

If you use ASP.NET, you've probably encountered situations where you need to restrict the overall length of input and you've tried using the MaxLength property on the TextBox controls.

For the most part, that works. Most browsers properly restrict the length on the client side. However, some browsers do not properly restrict the entry length, some browsers have loopholes that allow overlong entry (copy/paste, etc.), and you can't forget malicious users.

So you can properly restrict the sizes using ASP.NET's validators, do the following.

Drag over a CustomValidator and point it to the TextBox you want to enforce length limits on.

Point the CustomValidator's ServerValidate function to this function...

    protected void TextLength_ServerValidate(object source, ServerValidateEventArgs args)
    {
        CustomValidator v = (CustomValidator)source;
        if (v != null)
        {
            TextBox t = (TextBox)this.FindControl(v.ControlToValidate);
            if (t != null && t.MaxLength > 0)
            {
                args.IsValid = args.Value.Length <= t.MaxLength;
                return;
            }
        }
        args.IsValid = true; // If custom validator wasn't set up correctly, assume valid
    }

Kait and Joel

This is my granddaughter Kait and Joel Hodgman from Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Cinematic Titanic.



I can't believe how much she has grown up. Tonight was her first live riff and she had a blast.