Articles filed in category 'Techniques'

Since the first announcements of Microsoft's new .NET platform, ActiveX control developers and tool vendors have been scrambling to adjust their products and their marketing strategies. This article reports on the changing component market and points you to many of the newly announced .NET Developer Tools.Since the first announcements of Microsoft's new .NET platform, ActiveX control developers and tool vendors have been scrambling to adjust their products and their mark...eting strategies. This article reports on the changing component market and points you to many of the newly announced .NET Developer Tools.Since the first announcements of Microsoft's new .NET platform, ActiveX control developers and tool vendors have been scrambling to adjust their products and their marketing strategies.This article reports on the changing component market and points you to many of the newly announced .NET Developer Tools.Since the first announcements of Microsoft's new .NET platform, ActiveX control developers and tool vendors have been scrambling to adjust their products and their marketing strategies.This article reports on the changing component market and points you to many of the newly announced .NET Developer Tools.See More

Extreme Programming and Scrum compliment each other, but they weren’t made from the start to fit together hand in glove.Practicing Extreme Programming and Scrum are more effective when practiced together, and even more effective when practiced together as Behavior-Driven Development.

In this article, you will create a CODE Framework RESTful service and an iPhone application from scratch. For the client side, you will utilize XCode (yes, you’ll need a Mac!), which uses Objective-C as the primary language. This article won’t teach you the language; you need to know the basics of Objective-C. Even if you don’t know anything about it but want to code right away, read the article “Building a Twitter Search Client on iOS,” by Ben Scherman, available for al...l CODE readers in the Xiine application for Windows, Android, and iPhone. For the database, you’ll use any instance of SQL Server 2008. The service will be written in C#, using the latest version of CODE Framework, available on http://codeframework.codeplex.com, where you will find not only the download link, but also a lot of useful information.See More

While sleepless the other night, I was channel surfing and ran across a rerun of the 1968 science fiction classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.”If you haven’t seen this movie, it’s definitely a must see. HAL, one of the main characters of the movie, is a slightly psychotic speech-enabled super computer. HAL is responsible for steering the Discovery spacecraft on its ill-fated Jupiter mission. As I watched the movie I was completely amazed at HAL’s abilities. HAL handled press ...interviews, played a wicked game of chess, has varied opinions on art, controls life support, and can read lips. Not to completely destroy the movie if you haven’t seen it, but I have to say that I am grateful that most of the movie’s predictions aren’t true. However, like the HAL of 1968, speech-enabled applications have become a core requirement for both corporate and commercial developers. In this article, I’ll help you explore the Microsoft Speech Platform that comprises the Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK) and Microsoft Speech Server 2004. I’ll also show you how you can use these technologies with Visual Studio 2003 to both build and deploy speech-enabled applications.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

One of the very many cool new features in Visual Studio 2005 is the debugger visualizer.With debugger visualizers, developers are able to define what information they would like to see about a particular .NET class or even one of their own classes during debug mode. And as the name suggests, you can also choose how you would like to visualize these details.

In the first part of this article (CoDe Magazine, September/October 2005) you learned how to create an inherited Web control, as well as a fairly functional rendered Web control. In part two of this article you’ll learn three professional touches for your custom Web control. First, you’ll learn how to make all parts of your custom control resize correctly. Next, you’ll learn how to capture an event when the button is clicked or when text in the textbox changes. Finally, ...you’ll learn how to add basic styling. See More

Software developers live and breathe debugging. It’s an essential and integral part of our day-to-day job. Whenever we are confronted with any bug in code, our typical first question is, “How can I reproduce this issue?” Any problems that cannot be reproduced are generally considered tricky to resolve. In order to really understand the challenges with debugging hard to reproduce issues, let’s walk through a few scenarios here.

Punit explores the necessary detail of testing and a useful collection of tools that you can employ. His advice ensures not only that your code runs as designed, but that the testing process is as painless as possible.

A Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system is an identification system that uses radio waves to retrieve data from a device called a tag or transponder. RFID surrounds us in our daily lives-in supermarkets, libraries, bookstores, etc. RFID provides a quick and efficient way to collect information, such as taking stock in a warehouse, as well as tracking the whereabouts of items.

Visual Studio 2010 makes T4 easier to find and supplies a powerful new feature called preprocessed templates. Kathleen shows you how to use T4 in Studio 2005 and beyond.Microsoft included its T4 generation language in the box in Visual Studio 2008 and added important new features in Visual Studio 2010. Visual Studio 2010 makes generation easier to find and supplies a powerful new feature called preprocessed templates.Code generation lets you automatically create signific...ant portions of your application. It has the potential to decrease bugs and increase your ability to alter code across your application as needs change. Microsoft’s generation language is T4 and it is included in the box starting with Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2010 makes T4 easier to find and supplies a powerful new feature called preprocessed templates. I’ll show you how to use T4 in Studio 2005 and beyond.See More

In .NET Rocks! episode 355, Richard and I talked to Ted Faison about event-based and event-driven programming. There’s more to it than you think. Ted Faison has more than 30 years of experience in the software industry and has been involved with object-oriented-programming and component-based development since the inception of those technologies. He is currently working on .Net projects for the Motorcycle Industry Council and Amtrak. Ted is the author of the books Event-...Based Programming: Taking Events to the Limit, Component-Based Development with Visual C#, and a few others.See More

.NET Rocks Carl Franklin Column Sep/Oct 05

One of the important features of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) is drag and drop.Using a mouse you can drag and drop a file from one location to another or you may drag a file and drop it onto an application to launch it.

Partial classes are a hot new feature of the next .NET compilers.Specifically designed to overcome the brittleness of tool-generated code, partial classes are a source-level, assembly-limited, non-object-oriented way to extend the behavior of a class. A number of advantages derive from intensive use of partial classes; for example, you can have multiple teams at work on the same component at the same time. In addition, you have a neat and elegant incremental way to add functionality to a class.

May/June 2008 MVP Corner by Jean-Paul S. BoodhooSo you have researched agile development techniques, and are all fired up to put them into practice.Armed with this drive and passion to learn, what are some steps that you as an individual can take to incrementally grow your knowledge and practice of agile development techniques?

Martin introduces Design by Contract and Code Contracts, and gives you a sneak preview of Pex—Microsoft’s new test-suite generator. Along the way, he will show you how to add contracts to ADO.NET entities and some interesting coding strategies, good practices, and pitfalls you may encounter while making a deal with your code.With Code Contracts, Microsoft delivers its own flavor of Design by Contract for the .NET Framework. But wait, what is this thing sometimes called C...ontract-First Development? How will it change the way you develop software and write your unit tests? And first and foremost, how do you use Code Contracts efficiently?In this article, I will introduce Design by Contract and Code Contracts, as well as give you a sneak preview of Pex-Microsoft’s new test-suite generator. Along the way, I will show you how to add contracts to ADO.NET entities and some interesting coding strategies, good practices, and pitfalls you may encounter while making a deal with your code.See More

Sahil explores the three cardinal rules of working on any JavaScript project and introduces some cool new tools.

You can create your own Windows Forms, Web Forms, or class templates to reuse code and maximize your productivity in Visual Studio 2003.

Here we are again with a new Visual Studio. It’s hard to believe that 10 years have passed since Visual Studio .NET (codename Rainer) was released. Rainer represented a watershed moment for Windows developers as the promise of a unified language environment had finally been delivered.

Operator overloading provides an intuitive way to support mathematical and comparative operations on your objects.Operator overloading is one of those features that you don't need very often, but when you need it, operator overloading is very nice to have. You will find operator overloading in C# now, but you won't find it in Visual Basic until the upcoming Visual Studio 2005 release.

Indigo is the next generation application connectivity and services from Microsoft, superseding the variety of .NET connectivity solutions available today: ASMX Web services, Remoting, and Enterprise Services. Since .NET debuted some five years ago, all three technologies have been inundated in either hype or misconceptions. With Indigo around the corner, it is time to take a long hard look at these three technologies, and separate fact from myth so that you will be best... prepared for Indigo. This article starts by examining the existing technologies, describing their merits and shortcomings, putting them in the correct perspective of a modern distributed application, and suggests where to best apply them. Then the article briefly describes the Indigo programming model, and assesses how to best mitigate the cost of the migration.See More

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

Retaining a single set of user settings for your application is easy.Retaining multiple sets of user settings is much more challenging.

When I was a kid, I loved baseball. I lived it 24/7. In the summertime, happiness meant a pickup game during the day and a Phillies doubleheader at night. I’m still a kid at heart and I still love baseball - and I also love SQL Server. And right now, happiness means seeing all the cool new features in SQL Server 2012. There are so many of them that I can’t list them in a single article. So, I’m penning a two-part Baker’s Dozen. The first part of this “twin-bill” (yes, ex...pect a few baseball analogies!) will be 13 new T-SQL and database engine features in SQL Server 2012. The “night-cap” in the next issue will be 13 new features in SQL Server Integration Services and the new Business Intelligence Semantic Model.See More

A skilled database developer might find it difficult to accept that other tools can increase productivity. When Microsoft released SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS 2005), I did not think that any tool could possibly make me more productive than the C# and T-SQL code I was writing by hand. After some reconsideration (and subtle persuasion from peers), I discovered that SSIS 2005 contained many features that indeed reduced my development time - WITHOUT sacrificin...g flexibility. Microsoft added new functionality in SSIS 2008 to make a strong product even better. In this article, I’ll present 13 different examples that demonstrate the power of Integration Services.See More

Database developers who learn Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) know that they face a number of learning curves. In prior Baker’s Dozen articles, I’ve covered many of the steps for creating both SSAS OLAP and SSAS Tabular databases. In this article, I’m going to cover another topic: How to add or change data in analytic databases.

I know what you’re thinking: an article in CODE Magazine about Excel and PowerPivot? Yes, that’s correct; this installment of the “Baker’s Dozen” covers an important new tool to come out of Redmond: Microsoft PowerPivot. In a nutshell, PowerPivot provides some of the business intelligence capabilities that developers are accustomed to seeing in OLAP tools like Microsoft Analysis Services. So why should you and I care? Because these “end-user” tools still require some pro...gramming and configuration. So in this article, I’ll cover the installation of PowerPivot, a brief example of how to use it in Excel - and of course, since this IS CODE Magazine, I’ll show some DAX formula expressions to get the most out of PowerPivot. See More

Even with all the new features in the Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence (BI), sometimes the only way to accomplish a task is with good old fashioned T-SQL code. (Fortunately, “code” is the acronym for this great magazine!) In this latest installment of The Baker’s Dozen, I’ll present 13 T-SQL programming tips that could help you accomplish different database tasks.

John builds on the modeling tools he showed us in the last issue (Dependency Graph and Layer Diagram) using UML diagrams in Visual Studio.

You’ll still write a good deal of code in ASP.NET 2.0.Don’t completely trust those who say that ASP.NET 2.0 cuts 70% of the amount of code you’re called to write. You’ll end up writing more or less the same quantity of code, but you’ll write code of different quality. You’ll have more components and less boilerplate code to tie together pages and controls. Features like the provider model, data source controls, and master pages make coding easier and equally effective. B...ut since there’s no magic behind, you have to learn the implications of each feature you employ. In the end, ASP.NET 2.0 comes with code behind, not magic behind.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.

Continuing on our odyssey exploring the features of Visual Studio 2010, we turn our attention to the New Project dialog box. You noticed a difference no doubt, but may not be aware of just <i>how much </i>it has changed. Sit back, relax, open up Visual Studio 2010 and follow along as we dive into the details.

Have you ever found a great app idea but struggled to use it? Q explains some basic steps you can follow to be sure that your creation doesn’t get put in the pile of unused apps.

The iPhone is one of the most compelling and exciting user interfaces to appear on any consumer electronic device, with many innovations that make it a pleasure to use. How can you deliver a similar experience with your .NET applications?This article demonstrates how you can implement these features in your .NET applications in a step-by-step format as you recreate the iPhone interface using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology with both Visual Studio 2008 an...d Microsoft Expression Blend.See More