Like many world-changing technologies before it, SharePoint has caught IS organizations off-guard. Early adopters within the business established SharePoint environments on their own. These users assumed they could manage these environments independently without IS's knowledge or perha...

Roughly two years ago, when I was writing an article on 'New Features for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2005' that was published in the August 2005 issues of this magazine, our program management team was already busy shaping the next release of the product, which is soon to be re...

The Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides the foundation for building applications and high-fidelity experiences in Windows Vista, blending together application UI, documents, and media content. WPF contains two data sources for XML and objects. To enhance productivi...

In Visual Studio 2003 and earlier, the build process for Visual Basic and C# projects was hard-coded, and built into Visual Studio itself. The only build scripting tool that Microsoft offered was nmake, and a companion tool called build.exe that provided some support for concurrent bui...

C# 3.0 represents a radical new approach to .NET development. The new language features were added primarily to support Language Integrated Query (LINQ), allowing you to query data using the same constructs regardless of where the data is currently stored. However, you'll find that the...

To take advantage of the OpenSocial implementation in Orkut sandbox, you have to create a Google Gadget with the OpenSocial feature, post the gadget on the Internet, and then add the URL of the gadget as an application. As I looked into the Google gadget API to build this, I found some...

Enterprises frequently have to deal with part of their infrastructure that doesn't have the privilege of uninterrupted connectivity. Such system environments designed using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) need a way to manage uncertain connectivity. SOA as an architectural paradigm...

.NET lets us easily serialize an object into XML and deserialize XML into its corresponding object. This functionality has been available since .NET 1.0. The introduction of new data type called XML in SQL Server 2005 gives us even more advantages that come in handy with Stored Procedu...

You might be tempted to say that once you enter the .NET world, you'll never look back. Nothing seems too easy for you at this moment, what with the brand-new .NET 3.0 that's just out, high tech and still unexplored in its entirety.

At this point, we should think about the permissions our component needs. We're creating our own code group and permission set, so we start from scratch: this means that we'll have no permissions at all to start with. So, in addition to the permission to call unmanaged code (which we n...

Most of the applications we software developers build need to interact somehow with data from a database. The .NET Framework defined by Microsoft provides a rich set of objects to manage database interaction; these classes are collectively referred to as ADO.NET and the latest versions...

As both a .NET programmer and ColdFusion developer, I always wondered how I could leverage the world of .NET in ColdFusion. Both platforms come with powerful features and using them together might be a wonderful friendship, if one could only make them cooperate. There are two worlds ou...

We're living in an information age. Our daily life involves absorbing useful information and filtering out garbage. Information (data) plays an important role in our daily life. People, especially businesses, need to organize large amounts of disparate information. The information need...

When building WCF services you'll eventually need to integrate common logic that may be applied across a number of services, contracts, endpoints, or operations. Examples include logging, security, error handling, and message or parameter manipulation. Since this kind of logic cuts acr...

Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets are a great way to add value by addressing targeted and focused user scenarios. Think souped-up system tray - always-on applications typically used for monitoring something that often drives, based on notification, to a broader range of related scenarios. ...

To solve problems DHTML, JavaScript and XML can't handle, you sometimes need so-called 'rich' client components for your Web applications. Traditionally, this is the realm of Java (applets) or ActiveX controls.

The significance of blogging is not the word 'blog' whether used as a verb or a noun, but its role as a harbinger of the game-changing Web-as-platform revolution. In particular, the migration of blogging from the individual toward the enterprise...

Predicate is a new feature introduced in .NET 2.0 in conjunction with Generic collections. Generics are also new in .NET 2.0; Generic collections are by nature strong-typed. What that means is that if we declare a generic list of Address objects, we can only insert an Address type of o...

At the end of each year, when SYS-CON informally polls its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors, our question is always the same: where's the industry going next year?

We are on the cusp of the next giant step in software applications. It's a new frontier that is there for the bold of mind to embrace. This new caliber of applications will be hugely beneficial to mankind, the quality of our lives, and the safety and security of our nation. These appli...

The capabilities and advantages of using the Microsoft .NET Framework are undeniable. It provides the ability to rapidly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, security-enhanced solutions with Web Services, enabling businesses to integrate their systems more rapidly and agilely and ...

Anyone who develops applications for devices can vouch for the importance of having a powerful emulator that can help accelerate the overall development and debugging process. This articles talks about the new Microsoft Device Emulator and how you can exploit some of its capabilities a...

In the February issue of .NET Developers Journal, I described how implicit operations such as the boxing of value types can dramatically increase the amount of memory your .NET Compact Framework application uses. At the time, the tools available to help you get a picture of how your a...

Visual Studio project templates and item templates are reusable and customizable stubs that can simplify the development process. They provide pre-defined starting points for the project or the project items, thus removing the need to create new projects and items from scratch every ti...

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) provides tools and features that can be used in almost all areas of software development. As Microsoft VSTS has a broad spectrum of features and target areas, some of its core feature areas are still not well understood by many people working ...

You have probably seen applications that control their size and positions with greater fluidity than you can get with normal .NET Forms, such as maintaining an aspect ratio while resizing, or docking to the side of a screen. Thankfully there are ways of gaining access to the more power...

In the past, using open source databases meant running UNIX (or Linux) servers and open source development environments. Today however, the two most popular open source database packages - MySQL and PostgreSQL - have full featured Windows installations, and can be run on most Windows p...

Developer testing done early in the software's lifecycle is known to have a high positive impact on application quality, since this is the phase where finding and fixing bugs is cheapest, easiest, and fastest. Ideally, coding standard checking and unit testing would be done on every pi...

How often have you wanted to reuse some code you previously wrote but it didn't quite fit in your current project? Code reuse is an oft-touted benefit of modern object-oriented programming. With the advent of generic support in the C# language appearing in the .NET Framework 2.0 develo...

Over the last few years the Web has been going through another round of changes. Not only has the consumer Web sprung up with the Web 2.0 phenomenon, driven by new technologies such as AJAX and the philosophy of participation, but enterprise Web initiatives have also morphed. The infor...

Forms Authentication for ASP.NET is extremely powerful in that it lets you quickly add a layer of security to your Web site. While the simplicity of setup and implementation makes this form of authentication extremely attractive, usability can sometimes be downright ugly. The core func...

Enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the next evolution of business application development. There are four different approaches to RIA development - AJAX, Java, Flash, and .NET - and many different RIA solutions available today. This article answers the following questions...

Ever since the advent of the Internet, Web applications have lagged behind desktop applications in terms of interactivity and responsiveness. One of the biggest drawbacks in the conventional Web model has been the cycle of inactivity between the user request and the server response. Re...

Managing calendars across multiple Microsoft Exchange servers has always been a problem for those of us in consulting or other professional service fields. Having to aggregate appointments across calendars maintained at multiple client sites, plus your calendar back at the home office ...

Beijing-based SUNWAH LINUX has announced the release of Debian-based Linux Operating System RAYS LX 1.5 Beta. Based on the users' feedback on the previous RAYS LX version, Alpha, the stability and application performance of RAYS LX 1.5 Beta has been greatly improved.

Derek Ferguson has recently interviewed Rocky Lhotka, the creator of CSLA. In this interview, Derek discusses some of the things that originally led to the creation of CSLA, as well as where Rocky sees object-oriented development heading in the future. A lot of the inspiration came bec...

Last week I had a lunch meeting with the architects of a local company. The meeting began with a review of their current Web-based customer portal. This application had been deployed almost two years ago and had quickly become an important part of their business. Unfortunately, as they...

Visual Studio 2005 fully supports creating custom controls in .NET Compact Framework. In addition, custom control developers can create a great design-time experience for custom control users. Design-time support makes it easier for developers to use custom controls in Visual Studio 20...

Let's assume that we want to create a program that requires a pluggable architecture. The program should be able to dynamically load a plug-in assembly, create an instance of a class from that assembly, and then execute a method from the instantiated class. After the plug-in is used to...

The upcoming release of the .NET 2.0 framework brings many new enhancements to the CLR and the C# and VB.NET languages, and with the availability of Beta2, it seems like an appropriate time to dive into the .NET 2.0 framework and see what's cooking. Since .NET is a platform that suppor...