Visual Studio Debug Web Server

I've been asked to create a web interface structure for a site still being planned. I guess my supervisor only expect me to make an outer shell to encase whatever he is developing. So I've been making webpages in VS2008. In the process I realized that when I open the pages with browsers from the debug mode, a lot of redirections end up with page 404. I searched online for some answers, but didn't find any. I guess other developers are smart enough to find out what the problem was.

Well, after delving into this problem for a while, I realize how stupid i was. The url displayed in the browser when I redirect from the default page to other pages I made was wrong. It somehow included the folder them that I place my file.

Normally, if I save my site in a folder called MySite. When I host this up, I expect that http://localhost would point to MySite. And indeed the default page would work. But clicking on links to other pages would result in http://localhost/MySite/xxx.html while http://localhost/xxx.html is correct url. Why?

After looking through some settings, I realized that VS2008 automatically set the virtual path of the site to "/MySite/", which make all the virtual paths to automatically include "MySite/" when it shouldn't, causing the annoying page 404. Note that this only happens when you run with visual studio's developer server. When you host the files on IIS, it does not get affected. So I think it's a setting only for the developer server program.

Fix: In the solution explorer, select your site (usually the very top item with the full path to the working folder). Then in the Properties panel, under Developer Web Server, change the virtual path from whatever to "/" (usually you just need to delete the folder name portion). Then you should find the developer server working properly.

Re-sizing images for website

With my super short image re-sizing procedure in my last post, I wrote a class the abstract an image file into an object. Within it, is a function to scale the image. Then I ran into a problem:
Say we have a image that's 800 x 600, and I want to resize it to fit a 600 x 200 rectangle. By using my procedures, the code:
new Bitmap(img, new Size( 600, 200));
create a image that's 600x200 from the original image. Well... the problem is that the image scale is off.
If we are indeed resizing pictures to fit a predefined windows size of 800x600, or perhaps 400x300, with my old procedures, the result would have some photos being stretched. Who would want to actually view their photos like that?
So a different method is needed that would check the original picture size against the desired size, and attempt to fit the picture in it without changing the aspect ratio. Which should be rather simple to implement.

Very simple image re-sizing in C#

Today I did some research on re-sizing images in c#. Most guides offer some lengthy code to scale the image using the Graphics object. While this allow us to set the qualities of the scaling, it has a lot of code (well.. for a lazy guy like me... 50 lines of code with long method names is very hard to read). Moreover, I really don't need the scaled-down image to be of good quality. I just want the process fast, and the result small. So I came up with this:

First you need to reference System.Drawing.dll if it's not reference by default. Then put these in the referencing section:

using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;

In my test program I did this:

Image img = Image.Fromfile("... source file address");

Size newSize = Size( img.Width/2, img.Height/2);

Image newImg = new Bitmap( img, newSize);

newImg.Save("... new file address", ImageFormat.Jpeg);

img.Dispose();

newImg.Dispose();

And as simple as that, would read in the source image file of any format, and save to the new file address in jpeg format and half the original size. Simple enough!!

Of course, if image quality is a concern, using the Graphics object should yield better results.