Articles filed in category '.NET Framework'

.Finalize() Column

May/June 06 Finalize Column

Using Oracle as your database in the .NET environment is relatively simple, except when returning JDBC ResultSets from Java stored procedures. The Microsoft and Oracle .NET data provider drivers allow for easy access to data from SQL queries and PL/SQL stored procedures. There is not, however, a simple interface to return ResultSet data from a Java stored procedure to a .NET client.

May June 2002 Product News

Web services are all about connecting businesses in a standard and secure manner.For a real-life Web service, security is intrinsic to every facet of operation and no party would ever agree to interact with a non-secure Web service. Unfortunately, Web services security is still in its infancy; standards such as WS-I are just emerging and there is no built-in support in the development tools for them. That being said, there are quite a few programming techniques you can u...se today in .NET 1.1 to secure your Web services, and do so in a way that will ease the transition to future standards and protocols.See More

As a developer, it is no surprise to encounter unexpected behavior when working with a new technology.Microsoft added the Entity Framework (EF) to ADO.NET with the .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 released in 2008 enabling developers to incorporate a data model directly in their application and interact with their data through the model rather than working directly against the database. For background on EF, see my previous article, “Introducing ADO.NET Entity Framework” in the N...ov/Dec 2007 issue of CODE Magazine.See More

Paul begins a new series of articles on how to create a WPF business application. This first one teaches how to use a message broker to eliminate strong coupling between classes, how to display status and information to the user while resources are loading, and how to load user controls onto a single window while aggregating controls and building a large screen.

In the third installment of his WPF series, Paul shows you how to get feedback using an Entity Framework entity class. He also shows you how to start expanding user activities, like adding, editing, or deleting screens.

In this article, Rick plays with the beta version of ASP.NET vNext. You’ll get to see what’s (probably) coming so you can start making plans.

Rick Strahl discusses Windows Vista for developers.

Blazor is a new Web framework that uses .NET Core’s architecture, essentially combining the simplicity of Razor with .NET Core concepts. Ed shows you how to get the most from this great tool.

Data-bound controls play a key role in the development of ASP.NET applications. Data-driven controls allow you to associate their whole interface, or individual properties, with one or more columns of a .NET-compliant data source. In this article, I'll delve into the depths of an extremely versatile data-bound control that is a fixed resence in any real-world ASP.NET application - the DataGrid control. I'll focus on the key programming aspects of the control, including d...ata binding, column mapping, paging, and sorting.See More

Consider this hypothetical: You need to track different ways it is permissible to contact a customer.Or perhaps there are multiple attributes you wish to attach to an entity. Further, perhaps you want to define new attributes that can vary from entity to entity. From a database perspective, this can present a thorny problem. Fortunately, indexers in C# provide an elegant solution to the problem. In this article, I will show you how to use indexers to expand an organizati...on’s data and at the same time, have minimal impact on an organization’s database structure. I will also show you how to incorporate this technique with NHibernate and how to verify your results with the MBUnit and TestDriven.net unit testing frameworks.See More

You can avoid all that pesky overhead when dealing with multiple platforms by using Microsoft’s library of APIs, Xamarin.Forms. Wei-Meng shows you how to efficiently map to the various platforms’ respective native UI elements at run time.

One new features in Visual Studio 2005 is the support for smart tags. A smart tag is a panel that displays next to a control and contains a list of commonly used properties.

By now, you have been exposed to a lot of information about Visual Studio .NET.Of all the new technologies associated with .NET, perhaps no other technology is more mysterious than ADO.NET. The purpose of this article, the first in a series, is to give you a brief overview of ADO.NET and how it is implemented in Visual Studio .NET. Future articles will expand on the material presented here. After reading this article, you will be able to understand how the various ADO.N...ET objects and generated code work to provide data for your applications.See More

When I was asked to write a few pages on what's coming in the next version of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET (code named Whidbey), the biggest issue I had was how to limit this article to a few pages.I opted to list a few categories and drill down into each. I'm not going to cover everything, just some key items in each area. Please note that not all of these changes are implemented in the PDC build that attendees are receiving, and that some of these features are still in... the planning stages. That said, here are the categories that I'd like to discuss:See More

When you make a method call on an object, typically you must block the client while the object executes the call, and control returns to the client only when the method completes execution and returns.However, there are quite a few cases where you want to call methods asynchronously?that is, you want control to return immediately to the client while the object executes the called method in the background, and then somehow let the client know when the method execution is ...completed. Such an execution mode is called asynchronous method invocation and the action is an asynchronous call. Asynchronous calls allow you to improve availability, increase throughput and performance, and make your applications more scalable.See More

By providing the history of asynchronous and await patterns, Bill examines the benefits of using these techniques in developing new apps and when it comes to the maintenance or revision of legacy code.

Encapsulate asynchronous functionality directly into your business objects.The .NET Framework facilitates calling object methods asynchronously through the use of delegates. You may already know how to do this using helper code, but there is a cleaner and much cooler way of packaging this kind of functionality right inside your business objects.

.NET provides new tools to make deployment of fat client .NET applications easier.This article describes the basics of .NET Auto-Deployment technology and the security mechanism that prevents users from inadvertently running code distributed by hackers and virus writers.

Configuration settings make it possible for users and administrators to configure an application before it is run for the first time and while it runs..NET provides a good rudimentary mechanism for storing and retrieving configuration settings in the application's .config file with the ConfigurationSettings class, but this mechanism is missing a number of essential features. This article describes how to improve on the base functionality using a class that provides stron...g typing, allows for writing of keys, and provides optional encryption of keys.See More

Rick follows up on his server-side Angular back end for ASP.NET Core with this interesting look at the matching front end.

With the functionality provided by the .NET runtime, building data access components with C# (pronounced "c-sharp") is not difficult.In this article, we discuss how to access data stored in a SQL Server database. We will then review the steps necessary to build a Dynamic Link Library and an Executable file in C# to query a table and display the results.

If you’re lucky enough to be involved in building a new enterprise system, you’ll want to check this out. Rachel takes a look at how the company where she works made some interesting—and forward-looking—decisions, and she shows us the benefits of microservices while she’s at it.

From the book Understanding .NET by David Chappell, published by Addison Wesley Microsoft's .NET is revolutionizing Windows-based software development. Since its initial release in 2002, .NET has changed significantly, becoming the foundation for a new generation of Windows applications. The .NET Framework and Visual Studio, the two core aspects of this initiative, provide a multilanguage environment in which developers can create Web services, graphical user interfac...es, and other kinds of applications. Taken as a whole, the .NET technologies have changed the way nearly every Windows application is built. Now fully updated for version 2.0 of the .NET Framework and Visual Basic 2005, Understanding .NET, Second Edition, is a concise guide to the landscape of Windows development. Margin notes, detailed diagrams, and lucid writing make this book easy to read and navigate, while analysis sections explore controversial issues and address common concerns. David Chappell's independent perspective and straightforward descriptions clarify both how the .NET technologies work and how they can be used. Coverage includes: An overview of .NET and its goals The Common Language Runtime (CLR) The .NET languages, including C#, Visual Basic, and C++ The .NET Framework class library Building Web Applications with ASP.NET Accessing Data with ADO.NET .NET framework integration with SQL Server 2005 The key to using a new technology is to understand the fundamentals. This book provides the robust foundation developers and technical managers need to make the right decisions and maximize the potential of this revolutionary framework. See More

Who said client deployment has to be difficult? Many developers would love to leverage the rich UI, high performance, and offline capability offered by smart client applications; however, they’ve been turned off by the high TCO caused by client deployment headaches. The advent of ClickOnce client deployment technology in the .NET Framework 2.0 heralds a new era where client deployment takes on the ease and reliability of Web deployment.

In a prior installment of this series of articles about CODE Framework (“CODE Framework: Writing MVVM/MVC WPF Applications”, Jan/Feb 2012), I discussed how to use the WPF features of CODE Framework to create rich client applications in a highly productive and structured fashion reminiscent of creating ASP.NET MVC applications, although with WPF MVVM concepts applied. In this article, I will dive deeper into the subject and discuss the unique benefits of the CODE Framewor...k WPF components which enable developers to create the part of the UI that is actually visible in a highly productive and reusable manner.See More

The CODE Framework provides a set of tools for developing n-tier, service-oriented applications. In addition, there is a set of recommended patterns and practices that provide guidance in enabling developers to achieve Rapid Application Development, Contract-First implementation, and a system that allows you to change a contract without breaking an implementation. However, one question which has been repeatedly asked throughout our trainings and seminars is, “How do I Un...it Test when I’m using the CODE Framework?” This article will examine the question and attempt to answer it.See More

In prior articles, I have shown how to create WPF-based applications using the CODE Framework and the MVVM and MVC patterns. This enabled developers to create quality applications quickly and in a fashion that can easily be understood by developers of all skill levels. In those articles I showed how to use view-models and views to create UIs. In this article, I am going to take this concept further by showing you how you do not even have to create new views and view-mode...ls, but instead can use the ones CODE Framework defines for you out of the box.See More

In the last issue of CODE Magazine, we took a look at CODE Framework’s WPF features. This time, we are going to look at a completely different area of the framework: Creating business logic and middle tiers as SOA services. SOA is the cornerstone of many modern applications, creating systems that are more maintainable, flexible, and suitable for a wide range of scenarios, ranging from Windows to Web and Mobile scenarios using a wide variety of technologies, and outperfor...ming conventional multi-tiered applications in a range of metrics. Using CODE Framework, it also becomes easy and extremely productive to build SOA layers.See More

The CODE Framework is an open-source application framework by the makers of CODE Magazine. It is entirely free of charge. It covers a wide range of features that can be applied altogether or individually in an À la carte fashion. All of these features revolve around a single concept: Building advanced business applications in a productive and maintainable fashion while maintaining great application architecture. In this article, we are focusing on a subset of the CODE Fr...amework, specifically the components used to build WPF applications using the MVVM and MVC patterns.See More

The .NET Framework presents exciting new opportunities for developers. By now, you may have heard that .NET represents a departure from COM, the focal point of Windows development for the past several years. Because of the investments in COM, it is quite likely you will want to implement COM in VS .NET. Conversely, the .NET Framework has a number of nice features that you will want to implement in COM-based applications. This article illustrates how COM and the .NET Framework can work together.

Creating custom column types for the DataGridView control isn’t nearly as tricky as it once was.In this article, you’ll learn how to take advantage of inheritance to create your own bar graph column in a grid cell.

“Web application development has come a long way in a fairly short period of time.” A quote like that surely won’t send anyone into shock anytime soon because it’s accepted as fact. From basic, static HTML pages to totally data-driven and data-centric Web applications, the demands on a Web developer are much more complex and demanding than they were just a few years ago. The advent of social networking sites like MySpace, which is written in ASP.NET 2.0, interactive mapp...ing sites, and sites streaming full motion video has required the Web developer to adapt and change with the times. One of the best tools to use to build these types of Web applications is Microsoft’s ASP.NET 2.0. In this article I am going to delve into some of the more interesting features of ASP.NET 2.0 and show you how you can begin using ASP.NET 2.0 on your next Web project.See More

In real-world applications you just can't do without encryption.The problem with cryptography, though, is that sometimes it may make you use an overly complex API. The .NET Framework classes for cryptography don't require you to become an expert mathematician or a cryptography guru. In the .NET Framework you'll find symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic providers as well as hash providers. Some of these provider classes end up calling into the unmanaged CryptoAPI librar...y while other parts of the .NET cryptography solution are purely managed code.See More

The .Net framework provides two base classes for controls; one for Windows forms and the other for ASP.NET server controls.We can extend the existing controls by adding specific functionality to them or develop our own controls from scratch. Such controls are called custom controls. We can also group controls together and create another control, such as an address box, that contains couple of textboxes and labels. Controls that are grouped together and are based on Syste...m.Winforms.UserControl are called user controls. This article explains the process of creating a user control and demonstrates how we can extend the functionality of the framework's DateTimePicker control.See More

Does the idea of using an app that’s never been tested give you the willies? It should, and Paul talks about finding the sticking points so you can be confident that your code works as intended before someone fires it up.

Visual Studio .NET provides an incredible leap forward from its predecessor in terms of functionality, but eventually, every developer finds a sought-after feature that just seems overlooked. VS.NET provides great features and capabilities, from intelligent wizards to very useful drag-and-drop functionality such as that provided by the Server Explorer tool window. If there's a problem, it could be one of too much success. A simple stroll through the IDE reveals feature a...fter productivity-inducing feature, providing the developer with a high set of expectations. Eventually, you may find that an expected feature is missing. Fortunately, Microsoft included a very powerful extensibility model, allowing integration of new, custom features directly into the IDE.See More

The complex, component-style development that businesses expect out of modern software developers requires greater design flexibility than the design methodologies of the past. Microsoft's .NET Framework makes extensive use of attributes to provide added functionality through what is known as "declarative" programming. Attributes enhance flexibility in software systems because they promote loose coupling of functionality. Because you can create your own custom attribute ...classes and then act upon them, you can leverage the loose coupling power of attributes for your own purposes. See More

The task of creating dynamic ASP.NET Web Forms whose behavior is based upon user interaction and depends upon the purpose and intended goal of the Web Form.Web Forms that require only controls and functionality provided by the built-in ASP.NET Web server controls are easy to create. But creating Web Forms that require or are designed with extended controls and functionality can be a challenge.

This article demonstrates the techniques for compiling dynamic code in your .NET applications.

Component-oriented programming must allow for clients and components to evolve separately.Component developers should be able to deploy new versions (or just defect fixes) of existing components without affecting existing client applications. Client developers should be able to deploy new versions of the client application and expect it to work with older component versions. As a component technology, .NET must enforce version control, allowing for separate evolution pat...hs and for side-by-side deployment of different versions of the same component. .NET should also detect incompatibility as soon as possible and alert the client.See More

Error handling?everyone's favorite topic right?Even the best designed applications need to handle and properly manage errors the errors you can plan for and those you cannot.In this article, you'll learn error handling techniques in ASP.NET. Topics will range from handling common errors with the Try...Catch syntax to logging unhandled errors into the Windows Event Log.

You may think of generics as a Ferrari that you only take out for special occasions; but they are better compared to your trusty pickup, perfectly suited for everyday use.

Catering to the strength of the third-party .NET component market and the power of the .NET Framework itself, Microsoft includes several powerful new WinForm controls in the Base Class Libraries for Windows application development.The WinForm controls provided by the .NET Framework 1.1 are extremely useful, and the framework for developing new custom controls provided in 1.1 is very strong, but sometimes the development community expects more out-of-the box. Many needs o...f the development community are satisfied by the basic collection of WinForm controls while some developers have voiced their need for more functionality. Microsoft appears ready to rise to the occasion with the inclusion of many new WinForm controls.See More

There are some big, exciting changes happening around Visual Studio! Microsoft is shifting the focus of VS from being just a developer tool to being an entire platform. As part of that shift, the Visual Studio Gallery web site went live on Feb 27, 2008. The site is your one-stop resource for cool productivity tools called Visual Studio extensions. An addition to CodePlex’s repository of collaborative projects and CodeGallery’s place to find sample apps and code snippets,... Visual Studio Gallery is THE place to find extensions targeted at Visual Studio. Extensions can be anything from macros to item, project or solution templates to add-ins to full-blown extensibility packages. You’ll find both free and paid extensions built by both professional companies and community members.See More

Regular expressions, also referred to as "regex" in the developer community, is an extremely powerful tool used in pattern matching and substitution.In this article, Jim will introduce you to regular expressions, what they are, why you would want to use them, and finally, how you can begin putting them to work in Visual Studio .NET.

New releases ASP.NET Core and .NET Core have come up with some interesting high-level architecture that you’ll want to read about. You’ll definitely want to play with these tools after Rick shows you some cool new tricks.

Wow, another year has gone by, and as you read this, you are probably returning to the office after a few more or less relaxing holiday time spent with friends and family and a New Year's celebration. Interesting things have happened in our industry in the last 12 months, but I predict that the next 12 months will be quite a bit more interesting! Seldom before have I been as excited about new technologies and developments as I am now.

In episode #271 of .NET Rocks! (www.dotnetrocks.com) Richard and I spoke with Don Demsak about LINQ to XML. Here’s an excerpt from that interview.

Markus Egger discusses the need to create multi-threaded applications.

We all know that applications have evolved, and not just towards Web deployment, .NET Framework development, and mash-up functionality.

Have you ever thought that the language you were coding in lacked some important tools? Vassili shows you how to write your own language without building a compiler.

Peter introduces you to GraphQL so your REST API client list can grow and change without a lot of pain. You can use strongly typed schema, eliminated over- and under-fetching, and you can get analytics about how clients are really using your API.

What does XNA stand for? It’s a recursive acronym that stands for “XNA’s Not Acronymed”. Aren’t developers fun?

At PDC 2005, Microsoft introduced brand new technology known as LINQ, which stands for “Language Integrated Query.”The feature-set hiding behind this acronym is truly mind-boggling and worthy of a lot of attention. In short, LINQ introduces a query language similar to SQL Server’s T-SQL, in C# and VB.NET. Imagine that you could issue something like a “select * from customers” statement within C# or VB.NET. This sounds somewhat intriguing, but it doesn’t begin to communicate the power of LINQ.

I have a client that has a few Windows Services and some EXEs that run on a computer to perform various business functions. Every once in a while, the processes fail and need to be restarted. I helped the client write a Windows Service to monitor their running processes and ensure that they are up and running and to notify them and to attempt to restart those processes. As part of this process, I had to write a class to get a list of all of the processes running on the c...urrent computer or on another computer on their network.See More

Users already have many usernames and passwords for different popular online services, and with OpenID and OAuth, you can leverage those. Why burden users with yet another set of credentials for your site if they can use their Google or Facebook account, or any other OpenID or OAuth account? In this article, I will show you how to do this with ASP.NET 4.5, but more importantly help you understand what’s going on behind the scenes.

The Process class allows you to gain full control over system processes.You can start and stop processes and retrieve information about running processes such as the list of loaded modules and the characteristics of the memory occupied. The class also features handy methods to know whether a process is responding or has just exited and with which return code. Programmers also have full control over the style of the window the process runs in. After an overview of the cap...abilities of the Process class, this article demonstrates how to hide running console processes, monitor their execution, and capture any output. I'll use this strategy to create a sample Compression class to use with WinZip and gzip (popular tools for compressing data).See More

Are you curious about cross-platform .NET applications?Do you have a need or an interest in how to write .NET applications that will run on OS X? Do you need to deploy your application to a *nix box? If you’ve answered “Yes” to one of these last two questions or are curious about running .NET code on *nix, then read on.

A new feature of .NET is its ability to handle exceptions. This article demonstrates implementing Microsoft's Exception Management Application Blocks.

Machine Learning doesn’t have to be the big scary monster lurking in the dark. Bri and Cesar show you how Microsoft’s ML.NET lets you design your own models specific to your deployment context and needs even if you’ve never played with ML before.

Sahil continues his interesting series by writing a fronted to the Mobile app he wrote the backend for in the November/December 2014 issue.

Mobility is one of those fields which everybody knows is a definite part of our future, in 5 to 10 years or so. Think again.Amber steps out of her client's office, enters her car, pulls out her mobile phone and dials the number to her main office. She's calling Martin?her internal sales representative to inform him that she finally closed a deal with her client. She needs him to place an internal order at the warehouse. There are many items on that order, including 500 u...nits of product X, configuration A. After a quick query in the central inventory management system, Martin informs her that there are only 250 units left of that configuration, but there are more than plenty for her order if the client would be willing to switch to configuration B. Amber now needs to call her client back and save the deal. The client will be very disappointed, the whole thing will have to be negotiated over the phone, and Amber will probably have to cut her margins or else she'll lose everything.See More

Gaining the full potential of object binding requires more than just dragging and dropping your properties onto forms. In this article I’ll present a few tricks you need to know to get the most from your object binding.

Just when it seems like Office 365 is everywhere, you’ll learn something that makes you glad it’s so ubiquitous. Sahil continues his new series with an interesting look at Office 365’s WebHooks.

Web Services is a powerful technology, even in its basic form.However, with .NET, you can easily couple Web Services with .NET's new data services to provide a powerful data delivery mechanism that works over the Web, making it possible to build distributed applications that work easily without a local data store. In this article, Rick describes various ways you can use Web Services and ADO.NET DataSets to pass data between client and server applications to build truly disconnected applications.

Brian Kernighan [1] once said, "Debugging is twice as hard as writing code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." This quote gets a little giggle out of most developers, but on the serious side, there is a lot of truth in it. Writing code that does cool or useful things certainly is much easier than writing code that does cool or useful things reliably.

If you’ve got large datasets, you don’t want to slow the system down every time you save them to your SQL Server database. Rod shows you an uncomplicated way to keep your records zipping along.

Social networking has reached critical mass. One unique social networking platform, Twitter, launched in March of 2006 and took the world by storm with its social networking and microblogging platform.The developers of Twitter had the forethought to provide a REST -based API. Numerous developers have used the REST-based API to build Twitter clients on dozens of different platforms. In this article I’ll demonstrate how to access Twitter using the .NET platform.

You always want the software you write to have great performance.The reason isn't shocking?users look to software to quickly and efficiently handle their workload. Often times, meeting this performance requirement (whether it is explicit or implied), can be a difficult, even daunting task. Tuning an application to perform at its peak level involves a thorough understanding of the architecture and environment into which you will deploy your application. However, you can't... truly begin to optimize an application's performance if you don't understand how to empirically measure that performance. From this perspective, your application must emit enough data to enable real time performance monitoring.See More

Michael compares Python to .NET and C#, and shows us why you’d want which one and when.

Just when JavaScript seemed aggravatingly ubiquitous, Rick bumped into Web Assembly and Blazor, and learned that there are choices when it comes to compiling code.

One feature of the .NET environment is the ability to read meta-data from classes and namespaces created in .NET. This article demonstrates accessing this data.

In our previous article, Reflection Part 1: Discovery and Execution, we introduced the System.Reflection namespace and its classes which allow developers to view assembly metadata, query for and discover types, and invoke code?all at run-time. In this article we will examine reflection emit?the ability to dynamically generate code at run-time.

Ned introduces the most significant advance in error handling since exceptions and he shows you a new way to look at errors.This article introduces the most significant advance in error handling since exceptions.You get improved tools for today and a glimpse of radical possibilities for tomorrow. You get a framework which supports more expressive error handlers and gives them equal access to error context information. You get a roadmap for adding improved error handling ...capabilities, including class-level error handlers and the ability to fix errors at run time. Above all, you get a new way to look at errors.See More

Modern applications are no longer isolated, stand-alone applications, limited to a single process or machine. Distributed applications allow you to put components in close proximity to the resources they use, allow multiple users to access the application, enable scalability and throughput, and increase overall availability and fault isolation. Component-oriented programming is especially geared towards distribution because it is all about breaking the application into a... set of interacting components, which you can then distribute to different locations. .NET has a vast infrastructure supporting distributed applications and remote calls. This article focuses on just a single aspect of .NET remoting: the different object activation models available to a distributed application.See More

HTTP content retrieval is an important component for applications these days.Although .NET reduces the need to explicitly retrieve content from the Web through built-in mechanisms in the Web Services framework, ADO.NET and the XML classes, there are still many needs to retrieve Web content directly and manipulate it as text or data downloaded into files. In this article, I will describe the functionality of the HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse classes and provide an ea...sy to use wrapper class. The class simplifies the HTTP access and provides most of the common features in a single interface while still providing full access to the base functionality of the HttpWebRequest class. In the process, I will describe some sticky issues like string encoding and Cookie handling and some related topics like implementing events and running multiple threads to service Web requests.See More

Since the earliest versions of the Windows operating system, all Windows have been rectangular.However, the number of applications that break out of this boring mold is rising. Even Microsoft, the king of rectangularity, is starting to create applications that use shaped windows, such as Media Player. Unfortunately, creating shaped forms has always been quite tricky. Until now that is! The .NET Framework and the Windows Forms package in particular make it easy to produce... forms that have rather sophisticated shapes.See More

If you want to re-use some of the concepts John introduced in the last two issues, you’ll want to learn all about Dynamic Lambda Expressions work in .NET.

John explores the flexibility of dynamic queries and multiple data types within the same dictionary. You’ll be amazed at how simple it really is!

If you are a .NET software developer, you have heard of F#. You may have read an article, seen a talk at a user group, or otherwise heard the buzz. However, if those means of reaching you have failed, at the very least, you have noticed it conspicuously appear in the list of languages you can base a solution on in Visual Studio 2010. If you write code on the .NET Framework, you would have to be living under a rock to have not heard of F#.

Every company has some form of Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) process?whether it is formal or informal. An SDLC includes people, processes, and tools that span the design, build, and support of your information systems.

Have you ever wanted to use a strongly-typed collection to bind your data presentation controls to, only to find that you have very limited sorting capabilities, if any at all?If you are trying to stick to good object-oriented design and shrink the amount of data that you keep in memory, transfer from your data source, or serialize to clients, you likely have run into this situation because you are using strongly-typed collections of your domain objects. So what do you d...o if you need to sort those collections for presentation or faster searching?See More

Sometimes an application needs to keep its data in its own secure "sandbox". This article demonstrates creating these isolated applications in .NET.

Since the beginning of .NET, developers have been able to take advantage of multithreading when developing applications. In fact we’ve been given more than one programming model to accommodate just about any requirement that might come across. There’s the Thread class, the Thread Pool, the Async Pattern, and the Background Worker. Well, as if that isn’t enough, we now have a couple of more patterns that bring with them another genre - parallel programming.

The .NET Framework doesn't change the structure of the file system, nor does it build a new layer on top of it.More simply, but also more effectively for developers, it supplies a new object model for file system-related operations. A managed application can work with files and directories using high-level methods rather than low level understanding of the file system. This article provides an overview of methods and classes contained in the System.IO namespace.

How many software tasks DON’T involve reading through data? Answer: very few. Developers work all the time with database data, XML data, DataSets, collections, lists, and arrays-all with different syntax and functionality for each one. Developers who write T-SQL code often covet set-based language statements when they work against other types of data. Additionally, developers who have coded against strongly-typed custom collections wish they could write SQL database quer...ies with IntelliSense. Language Integrated Query (LINQ), a set of extensions to the .NET Framework for the next version of Visual Studio codename “Orcas”, brings the promise of integrated and uniform query capabilities to increase developer productivity when working with different types of data. While LINQ is a large topic worthy of books, this edition of The Baker’s Dozen will provide a crash course to learn what’s under the LINQ hood.See More

We've all faced those irritable questions about our applications running in production. Typically a system administrator will spring one on you on a Friday afternoon just when you're finishing out the week with a game of foosball. Why did this request fail? What is causing so many disk IO spikes? What requests are failing as a result of this error? Why is the application running so slowly? Why are all the resources being gobbled up on the Web server? These questions ofte...n make us stare blankly for a while, mumble something, and then scramble back to our cave (or server room) for hours on end trying to provide answers,See More

.Net is a maturing platform. The first .NET alphas and betas went to a selected group of people years and years ago. At this point, we are approaching the third major installment of Visual Studio .NET (now called "Visual Studio 2005"). Surely at this point, nobody has to explain what .NET and the Managed Platform is. Or do we?

Many products are taking advantage of the enhanced exception management features that the .NET Framework provides, yet very few are going the extra mile to provide instant solutions.

The recent Professional Developer Conference (PDC) fostered great excitement about the power of the .NET Framework v2.0. Unfortunately, it is going to be well into next year before most developers even get a whiff of all things Whidbey; and that's only in beta form. Some important .NET language and framework enhancements are in a big holding pattern, though, and I don't think that's right.

This article explains in depth how to implement multi-threading in your .NET applications.

The first step in securing your application is to understand threats. This article discusses how to understand where your application may be threatened.

If you want to develop code that’s flexible, extensible, maintainable, and testable, you’ll want to read Paul’s article about some basic things to keep in mind before you start.

Microsoft .NET brings many important advances to the software engineering world.We believe that Windows developers everywhere have reason to celebrate the arrival of .NET, but Visual Basic developers should be the most ecstatic. We get true inheritance, structured exception handling, and a state-of-the-art IDE?but, perhaps the coolest thing .NET provides us as VB developers is the Framework Class Library (FCL). To commemorate the release of .NET, we thought we would pres...ent what we consider to be the top ten most useful, utterly awesome (and coolest) classes bundled inside the .NET FCL.See More

Sometimes your .NET applications need to interact with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to authenticate users, get a list of users, retrieve groups, or determine which users are within which AD groups. There are a few different approaches you can use to retrieve information from your AD database within your domain.

GDI+ is a technology that developers generally associate with Windows Forms applications because they use it to draw anything on the screen from custom controls to diagrams.However, you can also use GDI+ in ASP.NET Web applications whenever you want to serve up dynamic images. You can use GDI+ to create dynamic banners, photo albums, graphs, diagrams, and more.

This time around I’ll expand on these concepts and show you how you can use jQuery in combination with ASP.NET as an AJAX backend to retrieve data. I’ll also discuss how you can create ASP.NET controls and otherwise interact with jQuery content from ASP.NET pages in Web Forms.

People often think of HTML as the sole domain for Web applications.But HTML's versatile display attributes are also very useful for handling data display of all sorts in desktop applications. The Visual Studio .NET start page is a good example. Coupled with a scripting/template mechanism you can build highly extendable applications that would be very difficult to build using standard Windows controls. In this article, Rick introduces how to host the ASP.NET runtime in de...sktop applications and utilize this technology in a completely client-side application using the Web Browser control.See More

Applications use many forms of configuration data, storing settings that are used in applications, enterprise, client computers, and user settings.The Configuration Management Application Block (CMAB) is typically used for application settings, but it can be enhanced to support more complicated settings as well.

Ken Getz Jan/Feb 08 FInalize article.

Keeping up with Visual Studio’s frequent and often simultaneous releases from multiple sources can be nearly impossible. In another of his edifying series, John Petersen gives us the scoop.

You’re going to have to hold onto your hat! Jeffrey looks at what’s new in VS 2015, and it’s all good.

As a .NET architect and developer I cannot imagine my everyday work without Visual Studio. I was always in a strange excitement when waiting for a new CTP, Beta or RTM of Visual Studio because I always expected some great new features with every release. During the years I have bought a few third-party add-ins and utilities for Visual Studio to make my development tasks easier and even created small add-ins to produce some useful piece of code. I knew that Visual Studio ...was extensible; I downloaded the SDKs and tried to get familiar with those hundreds of extensibility interfaces. However, due to lack of good documentation I often got frustrated. See More

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides a run-time environment for your services, enabling you to expose CLR types as services and to consume services as CLR types.Although in theory you can build services without it, in practice, WCF significantly simplifies this task. WCF is Microsoft’s implementation of a set of industry standards defining service interactions, type conversion, marshaling, and various protocols’ management. Because of that, WCF provides intero...perability between services, and it promotes productivity, including the essential off-the-shelf plumbing required by almost any application. This article describes the essential concepts and building blocks of WCF and its architecture, enabling you to build simple services. Future articles in this series will address specific aspects, such as transaction management and security.See More

Just when you think you know what’s up in C#, they release a new version. This one’s got pattern matching, tuples, and local functions along with improvements to existing features. Chris shows you where to dive in.

If you’d like a neat summary of the many interesting and useful changes in CODE Magazine’s free development framework, you’ve come to the right place. Markus talks about themes, input validation, security, and binding, Web API service hosting, calling REST services, and interacting with the community and GitHub.

If you have been working with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, you have probably been extremely eager to get your hands on the next version that is now part of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. Long referred to as “EF Version 2,” this version is now called Entity Framework 4 or EF4, to align with the .NET Framework 4.0 version.

It’s so new that the dust is still settling, and VS2017 was worth the wait. Markus explores the ins and outs of his favorite new features.

Visual Studio .NET provides a new set of features designed to improve and enhance the development experience. Most of these changes have to do with user ergonomics and are typical of a minor release of a Visual Studio product. Only a few of the changes are related to the underlying platform. This article assumes you are familiar with Visual Studio .NET 1.0 and it presents only the new features of the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) of Visual Studio .NET 1.1, fo...r both C# and Visual Basic .NET. J# is not discussed because it was not part of Visual Studio .NET 1.0. In the interest of space, some minor cosmetic changes (such as reorganization of the Start page) are not listed.See More

Functional programming is all the rage and Microsoft's foray into the functional world is called F#. Rachel introduces you to this first-class functional language with the ability to harness the rich .NET ecosystem.

Michiel van Otegem explains Software-as-a-Service by comparing various online products and shows you how to store information about users whether you use Active Directory or Windows Azure Active Directory in the cloud.

The .NET class Thread defined in the System.Threading namespace represents a managed thread.The Thread class provides various methods and properties to control the managed thread. Unfortunately, there is a significant potential for abusing these mechanisms, and most developers may not even realize they are doing anything wrong. This article describes the dos and don'ts of the Thread class, and then presents a wrapper class that simplifies starting a thread, correctly ter...minates a thread, and offers a more consistent class interface than that of the raw Thread class.See More

Extender classes do just that; they allow you to extend the functionality of a .NET control class. The Error Provider and Tooltip classes are two examples of extender classes in the .NET Framework. The Tooltip class represents a significant departure from how tooltips were implemented in earlier versions of Visual Studio. The Error Provider class provides a new way to inform users about invalid input. Although each class serves a different purpose, their implementation i...s quite similar. This article introduces these two classes and gives a brief, yet comprehensive primer on how to use themSee More

Rachel takes a close look at F# mailbox processors to help you efficiently process messages. She covers replying, scanning (for a particular message or subject), and coordinating multiple agents, and makes it easy once you know which connections to make.

Visual Studio Code is the hot new thing these days. Vassili tells you how to take advantage of some of its features, including CSCS, Rich Language Services, REPL language interpretation, and debugging.