As always seems to happen this time of year, I find myself wondering where the year went. Our faithful readers will probably recall that my usual reaction to this feeling is to take a few minutes out of the hectic holday season to look back and highlight some of the best content we published this year. So without any further ado... here's ASP 101's year in review for 2008.

Did you know that you can register a custom server or user control in your web.config file and use it throughout your application without the need for the <%@ Register %> directive at the top of each page?

The default configuration of ASP.NET's machineKey element works great on a single server. The problems emerge when you deploy your application to a Web farm.

If you've ever cut and pasted text from Visual Studio into Microsoft Word just to check for spelling errors then this tip is for you.

When you add a new page to your Web site, do you often find yourself cutting and pasting from another page to get started? If you're spending more time importing controls and setting up content regions for your master page than actually working on the new page, you might want to look into creating an "Item template" in Visual Studio.

While this is really more of a Visual Studio tip than an ASP tip, it's a huge time saver that few people seem to know about.

It appears that ASP.NET actually includes a Response.RedirectLocation property which you can set instead of using the AppendHeader method we originally used in our tip about permanent redirects. The end result is the same, but based on the feedback we've received it seems that many of our readers prefer the RedirectLocation method.

As often happens, one of our visitors has taken one of our scripts and improved upon it. Our original was designed to mimic VB's vbProperCase format. The problem is that they both fail miserably on things like "Peter O'Tool" or "Camilla Parker-Bowles". This new version handles both of those correctly.

We've all used Response.Redirect at one time or another. It's the quick and easy way to get visitors pointed in the right direction if they somehow end up in the wrong place. But did you know that Response.Redirect sends an HTTP response status code of "302 Found" when you might really want to send "301 Moved Permanently"?

Microsoft has shipped the release version of Silverlight 2. The runtime is currently available for Windows and Mac browsers.

I've gotten a number of email from users anxious to use HttpOnly cookies in their legacy Web projects. Rest assured, you can get the same HttpOnly functionality regardless of your server side tool of choice... it's just takes a little more work.