Articles filed in category '.NET Getting Started'

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

ADO.NET is a powerful toolbox but it's not a software magic wand.To get the most out of ADO.NET classes, developers must fully understand the model and study a few best practices. Based on years of real-world experience with ADO, ADO.NET provides a richer set of more powerful tools. But, ADO.NET is not designed to be an out-of-the-box tool that reduces any programming work to just point-and-click. In this article, you'll learn about common best practices for using three ...key element of any data access strategy: connections, security, and transactions.See More

Silverlight Unleashed - Embedding the Silverlight Control Manually - Letting Silverlight.js Handle the Dirty Work - Understanding Your Hosting Options - Interacting with the Silverlight Control Programmatically

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

Essential C# 2.0 is a clear, concise guide to C#—including the features new to C# 2.0. The book clearly presents material for beginners and experts and provides contrasts and comparisons between C# and other languages. The C# language is covered comprehensively and each important construct is illustrated with succinct code examples. Complete code examples are available online. Mark Michaelis has organized the material for quick access. Graphical “mind maps” at the beginn...ing of each chapter show what material is covered and how each topic relates to the whole.See More

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 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

This article highlights some of the new toolkits and components coming out of Redmond for COM Interop.The Interop Forms Toolkit, the Interop UserControl Prototype, and the techniques used in Sedna’s NET4COM allow Visual FoxPro developers to incorporate .NET components into their applications.

Today’s clients seem to be getting more and more demanding regarding the flexibility of their applications and the speed in which modifications can be made. In this article, I will show you how to design applications with extensibility points so that they will grow with the clients’ needs as well as provide a way to “swap” functionality in and out as needed.

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.

A practical look at what’s involved in converting your Visual FoxPro (VFP) applications to Visual Studio and SQL Server. Let me say up front that I am a long-time FoxPro developer and that I love VFP. I also love .NET and SQL Server and I’ve headed up and participated in many conversions. Most of the conversions I’ve worked on were not driven by technical necessity, but by customer demand that software be built with .NET and SQL Server. Whatever the reason, conversion fr...om VFP to .NET is a significant undertaking.See More

ASP.NET represents a significant leap forward from traditional Active Server Pages (ASP) development. In this article, I'll show you what it takes to begin building ASP.NET Websites with Visual Studio .NET. This article will provide you with the knowledge you need to jumpstart your foray into the world of ASP.NET development.

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.

In today’s world of fast food, fast cars, and instant gratification, people expect to be in touch at all times.We have become conditioned to staying in touch with businesses, friends, and families. Because of this desire for instant data, we have the Internet, cell phones, Wi-Fi, MP3 players, and DVD players. As the equipment needed to drive this thirst has become smaller and smaller, we find ourselves looking for portable replacements for our bulky desktop computers.

ASP.NET has considerably raised the bar for Web development with very rich developer functionality built into a flexible and highly extensible object model.If you have a background of hand-coding ASP or other scripting or CGI-style technology, .NET's redundant code reduction and development process simplification seems almost too good to be true. But data binding for controls leaves a lot to be desired in terms of ease-of-use and reading the data back into the data sourc...e. This article examines what's wrong with simple data binding and provides a set of subclasses, making data binding a lot quicker and requiring much less manual code.See More

Extend your knowledge of inheritance to more easily extend your applications.

Whenever more than one person works on a software development project, introducing some process to coordinate the activities of the team members is a priority.The larger the team, the harder it is to manage. To meet this need, Microsoft created Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). VSTS is a state-of-the-art Software Development Life Cycle tool suite that is tightly integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. VSTS provides deep support for .NET projects; however, whenever ...a software solution includes components developed on a platform other than .NET, such as Microsoft Visual FoxPro (VFP), VSTS loses some of its value because the projects aren’t integrated into VSTS. Leveraging the extensibility features of VSTS and VFP, this article will help you integrate VFP projects into VSTS team projects enabling your team to apply a comprehensive process to your entire software development effort.See More

Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix (http://www.asp.net/webmatrix.WebMatrix), which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers.

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

Replication figures as one of the more prominent features of SQL Server 2000.Replication is a complex application that uses a combination of stored procedures and executables to distribute and copy data between SQL Server databases. If you take care not to get lost in the details and confused by occasionally misleading terms, replication can be an important component in the database architecture of a SQL Server application. In this article, you'll learn about the termino...logy surrounding replication, the types of replication available in SQL Server, and how to configure (that is, install) replication.See More

When Visual FoxPro developers take the plunge to learn .NET, the most common reaction is, “I could do such-and-such, this-and-that in VFP-how can I do it in .NET?” This special edition of The Baker’s Dozen will offer solutions for many of the typical challenges that VFP developers face when tackling .NET. I’ll start by covering .NET solution and project structures and an overview of the .NET Framework, and I’ll spend time showing how to use .NET reflection to do some of ...the things that VFP developers could accomplish with macro-expansion. Then I’ll cover different .NET features such as Generics, ASP.NET 2.0, and I’ll show how to create a reusable data access component. Finally, I’ll build the architecture for a set of reusable data maintenance classes in .NET.See More

Visual FoxPro’s (VFP) Data Manipulation Language (DML) is one of VFP’s most compelling features. It is also the most obvious feature VFP developers miss in .NET languages such as C# and Visual Basic. However, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), a new query language for .NET developers is a new feature in the upcoming releases of C# 3.and Visual Basic 9.0 that addresses these shortcomings.

New to Sedna, Visual FoxPro emulates the My namespace first introduced in Visual Basic 2005.The My namespace makes .NET Framework classes more discoverable and allows you to write less code. Sedna, the next version of Visual FoxPro (VFP), includes a My namespace as well, for the same reasons. In this article, I’ll look at how Sedna implements My.

The Data Explorer introduced in VFP 9.0 allows developers to work with different types of data from diverse data sources independent of specific projects.The Sedna update extends this already powerful and productive tool.

Inheritance is one of the most fascinating features in the Visual Studio.NET languages. We have discussed this feature in several articles in the past, mainly to explain the basic concepts. Now we are going to take a look at what inheritance can actually do for you, rather than how it works.

Rick Strahl takes a frank look at the "Good", "Bad", "Obnoxious" and "Unknown" qualities of .NET.

Visual Studio .NET offers a rich tool set, but anyone who has ever used Visual FoxPro will soon notice that many of their favorite features are not available. However, a new set of public domain classes can add these functions to both Visual Basic .NET and C#.

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

Inheritance is the single most important new object-oriented feature in Visual Studio.NET. Surprisingly, not much has been written about the subject, and most of the information available is either very basic and an "overview" at best, or just plain misleading. In this article, I give you a real-world overview of what inheritance - especially visual inheritance, can do for you.

Web services with Visual FoxPro (VFP) have never been easy. The most common Web service tool for FoxPro is the SOAP Toolkit, which has been discontinued and which had a host of problems when dealing with complex types passed over Web Services. In this article I’ll show how you can leverage the powerful Web service features of .NET and the new Windows Communication Foundation in your FoxPro application through COM Interop.

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

You can use ClickOnce to revolutionize how you install and update Visual FoxPro (VFP) applications. A dream come true, ClickOnce can put a stop to many of the deployment nightmares associated with distributing applications.

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