Articles filed in category 'VB.NET'

Ken Getz' .Finalize() column.

.Finalize() Column

Ken Getz' .Finalize() column.

Ken Getz - Finalize Column - July/August 2005

.Finalize() Column

Ken Getz - May/June 2005 Finalize column

Ken Getz Mar/Apr 05 Finalize COlumn

Ken Getz Nov/Dec 05 Finalize Column

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

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is an open REST-ful protocol for exposing and consuming data on the web. Also known as Astoria, ADO.NET Data Services, now officially called WCF Data Services in the .NET Framework. There are also SDKs available for other platforms like JavaScript and PHP. Visit the OData site at www.odata.org.

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

The first article in this series detailed how to build data-aware forms in Visual Studio .NET using the Data Form Wizard. It demonstrated how easy it is to build forms using a point-and-click interface. You also learned that the generated form was especially suited to production development. This article continues where that article left off and introduces you to techniques to improve data-aware forms created with the Data Form Wizard.

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.

July August 2008 .Finalize(): column by Ken Getz.

Wiki Web sites (Wikis) are great collaboration tools that you can easily create with ASP.NET. This article describes some of the advantages that Wiki Web sites provide and how you can use ASP.NET and SQL Server to create your own Wiki. You'll learn how to write powerful parsers using the .NET regular expressions class and you'll discover how to add sophisticated search functionality to your Web sites by using SQL Server's Full-Text Search service.

Casting, or converting the value of a token from one type of data to another is common to most (if not all) programming languages. Visual Basic has long had a series of casting functions, such as CStr, CInt, Clong, etc. to allow conversion of one type of variable to another. While the idea of casting is simple and familiar when discussed in the context of a simple variable containing a value (.NET value types), the meaning and behavior of a cast is less clear when discus...sed in the context of objects.See More

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.

Microsoft’s Azure platform has finally been released into production. This new entry into the cloud computing market provides .NET developers with a scalable, robust platform for developing applications.After over a year in CTP, Azure is finally ready for prime time. At PDC 2009, Microsoft announced the release of new components, such as the management API, that make Azure worth considering for use in production environments. In this article, I’ll demonstrate how to use ...the different components of Azure Services to build a self-scaling application.See More

In the Fall of 2002, Microsoft introduced Tablet PCs based on the popular Windows XP operating system.By default, this new platform includes applications with special Tablet PC features enabled, such as Ink Input and Pen-based operation. In order for this platform to become truly popular, third-party vendors will also have to ink-enable their applications. Luckily, this is a pretty straightforward task.

The next version of SQL Server (code name Yukon) has extensive support of the Common Language Runtime (CLR).Previous versions of SQL Server (2000 and earlier) had a mechanism for creating custom data types. These data types were nothing more than aliases to system data types. In Yukon, you can create your own fully functional custom data types.

When I first met the ASP.NET DataGrid control, it was love at first sight. Together we built several applications, taught dozens of classes, published countless articles and tips; we even wrote a book. I can say with no fear of lying that we have an intimate knowledge of each other. When I need the Web DataGrid to perform some rather odd task, I only have to cast a glance (or two, if the task is quite complicated.) With this in mind, I enthusiastically accepted a proposa...l from one of my clients: Build a Windows Forms application with grid functionalities. Although at the time I had no serious experience with the Windows Forms DataGrid control, I took the gig because I thought a Windows DataGrid works more or less the same as an ASP.NET DataGrid. Next, hardly containing some genuine enthusiasm, I optimistically conjectured it could have been even easier smart controls are handiest compared to HTML markup. See More

Using Visual Studio 2005, create a new Windows application by choosing New Project from the File menu. Click on the Visual Basic (Windows) project type, and select the Windows Application template. Call the new app something like Databinding, and click OK.

Using .NET reflection and external metadata makes it easy to add data validation to your objects.Nearly every application that collects data, whether from a Windows- or Web-based form or from a file, needs to validate that the data is in the correct format.

DotNetNuke 2.0 is the latest version of the increasingly popular, open-source, content management portal. It was originally released as an open source project on Dec 24, 2002. In the past fifteen months it has grown to over 50,000 lines of managed code. One thing is for sure, you won't be alone using it! The DotNetNuke support forum is one of the most active and dynamic forums on the www.asp.net Web site. There are currently over 45,000 registered users on the official D...otNetNuke Web site and membership continues to grow at an exponential rate.In this article, Jim will cover some of the new features in DNN 2.0 as well as discuss upgrading portals from prior DNN versions. He also explores the new data access methodology and walks you through the steps involved in developing custom DNN 2.0 modules.See More

Using the new Data Sources Window in Visual Studio 2005, developers can now drag columns of their typed DataSets or properties of their own business objects directly to their form. Visual Studio 2005 will create, name, and label controls for each bound property. For those that prefer to lay out the forms with the toolbox, developers can use "Connect the Dots DataBinding" to drag and drop from the Data Sources Window onto their existing controls.

This article will demonstrate how you can design and build flexibility into your ASP.NET pages by adding controls dynamically at runtime.You'll learn to add simple controls to a page, progress to adding a user control into a Placeholder control, and then advance to using multiple Placeholder controls to build a template page that is flexible and easy to use.

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.

Pocket PC devices, such as the Compaq iPaq, present both an opportunity and a challenge for software developers.While there are many standard applications available, what tools can you use to develop custom applications? Don't despair, because the Microsoft eMbedded Visual Tools Development Kit will get you off to a great start.

If you want to capture your users' imaginations, enable drag-and-drop.Drag-and-drop doesn't fulfill requirements, but it contributes to making your application appear more professional and easy to use. In Windows Forms applications, drag-and-drop operations consist mostly of handling a series of events. By accomplishing a few mandatory steps and working with the information available in the event arguments, you can easily facilitate dragging and dropping files, text, and... any other sort of serializable data objects. This article demonstrates how to import files from the Windows shell and how to enhance some UI controls to make them accept input via drag-and-drop. Notable examples are the TextBox and the PictureBox controls.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.

The .NET Framework provides many new collection classes that you can iterate (for-each) through.But did you know that you can also iterate through values in any of your classes, not just those that use or inherit from collections?

The key to understanding lambda expressions is understanding delegates. Delegates play a tremendously important role in developing applications for the .NET Framework, especially when using C# or Visual Basic. Events, a special application of delegates, are used all over the framework. And the application and possibilities of delegates has only grown over time. C# 2.0 introduced the concept of anonymous methods and C# 3.0 and VB 9 take anonymous methods to the next level... with lambda expressions. This article reviews the evolution of delegates and examines possibilities and syntax of delegates and lambdas in .NET 3.5.See More

Ken Getz .Finalize() column for September/October 2008

Check out the new features in Visual Basic 10, the latest version of VB coming out with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0.

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.

Create a base form class to ensure that all of the forms in your application behave consistently. This technique minimizes the amount of repetitive code you need to write to manage the user's interaction with your forms.

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.

Nov/Dec 2007 .Finalize Column() Ken Getz

In episode #109 Matt Mannion from Clarity Consulting talks about the application his company developed with and for the Indy Racing League in Indianapolis, IN. Using Visual Studio .NET 2003 and VB.NET they were able to develop a great application for managing real-time racing data and reporting.Matt Mannion is an Engagement Manager for Clarity Consulting Inc., a Chicago-based technology consulting firm and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Matt has delivered many large-s...cale, WinForm and WebForm systems for a variety of industries, including retail, financial services, publishing, and banking. Contact Matt at mannion@claritycon.com.See More

Carl Franklin - Jan/Feb 05 .NET Rocks Column

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.

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

Sept/Oct 08 Editorial by Rod Paddock

Microsoft demonstrated a new technology at PDC called LINQ (Language Integrated Query). The following note from Alan Griver, a member of the LINQ team at Microsoft, offers some details related to the LINQ project. In future issues of CoDe Magazine we will have more details on LINQ.Microsoft demonstrated a new technology at PDC called LINQ (Language Integrated Query). The following note from Alan Griver, a member of the LINQ team at Microsoft, offers some details related ...to the LINQ project. In future issues of CoDe Magazine we will have more details on LINQ.See More

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

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

Windows or Web? A question you've asked and have been asked countless numbers of times for the past five years.And yet, when it comes to the mobile field and building business applications for smart devices, many are surprised when they realize the same question needs to be answered. The question is slightly dissimilar but the answers are entirely different. "Windows CE or Mobile Web?" you might ask. As for the answer, the .NET world can steer you in two very opposite di...rections: .NET Compact Framework or ASP.NET Mobile Controls.See More

July August 2008 MVP Corner by Kevin S. Goff

Productivity is one of the major goals of Visual Basic 2005 and with "My" Microsoft may just have hit a home run.Although Visual Basic .NET is just as powerful as C# for building business applications, it did not get the initial push that C# did back at PDC 2000 when Microsoft unveiled .NET. This was not meant to slight Visual Basic and Visual Basic developers, but rather represented the state of the Visual Basic .NET language which was not as far along in the developmen...t process as C#. Opponents to the Basic syntax took this and ran with it. Microsoft has tried to attack this misconception but has also caused some of the problem, initially by pushing .NET for Web services development so hard that many developers and managers incorrectly got idea that .NET was primarily for Web services. With Visual Basic 2005 the power of the .NET Framework is fully exposed and the true power of Visual Basic is once again starting to take form and that power is productivity. Whereas C# is about language first and foremost Visual Basic is about language and tools to make the development process faster.See More

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.

Polyglot programming refers to leveraging existing platforms by solving problems via solutions that compose special purpose languages.This concept leverages the multi-language nature of the CLR to create simpler solutions to vexing problems. This article delves into the motivation, benefits, and challenges of writing applications in this style.

First Premier Bankcard (www.firstpremier.com) is the 10th largest issuer of Visa and MasterCard credit cards in the United States.First Premier employs multiple thousands of people spread across the state of South Dakota. A major percentage of the employees at First Premier work in call-center operations helping people apply for credit cards.

Deborah covers many of the different ways you can use lambda expressions to work with your lists and make your code easier to read and write.Lambdas provide shortcuts for sorting, filtering, finding and working with information in lists, making your code easier to read and write.

.Finalize() column for Sept/Oct 2007

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.

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.

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

Visual Basic 9 in Visual Studio 2008 has a new set of language features that allows developers to work with XML in a much more productive way using a new API called LINQ to XML. LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query and it allows you to write queries for things like objects, databases, and XML in a standard way. Visual Basic provides deep support for LINQ to XML through what’s called XML literals and XML axis properties. These features allow you to use a familiar, co...nvenient syntax for working with XML in your Visual Basic code. LINQ to XML is a new, in-memory XML programming API specifically designed to leverage the LINQ framework. Even though you can call the LINQ APIs directly, only Visual Basic allows you to declare XML literals and directly access XML axis properties. This article will help you master these new features for working with XML in Visual Basic. See More

Jonathan Goodyear (the Angry Coder) discusses MVPs and ASP.NET.

Inheritance is one of the fundamental facets of object-oriented programming. In this article,Steve looks at inheritance, and in particular some of the mistakes that many developers make when applying inheritance.

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

Microsoft has recently announced that the next version of Visual Basic will support inheritance.Visual FoxPro has had inheritance for the past 5 years, since Version 3.0, and Visual C++ has always had it. This article will take a closer look at what inheritance is and what it will mean for Visual Basic 7.

This installment of “The Baker’s Dozen” finds the Baker expanding from pastries to eye candy: generating PowerPoint output. Many power users build presentations using data from Excel or other data sources. This article shows how to automate Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 from within a Visual Studio 2005 application. The article presents a class called GenPPT, which creates several different types of slides, including slides that integrate tables and charts. GenPPT is written ...in Visual Basic 2005, and the demo program that calls it is written in C#: this demonstrates using multiple .NET languages in a solution.See More

In graphical user interfaces such as Microsoft Windows, drawing on the screen is an important task.Everything displayed on the screen is based on simple drawing operations. Often, environments such as Visual Basic abstract those drawing operations away from the developer. However, the same drawing operations still take place under the hood. In Visual Studio .NET, developers have easy access to that drawing functionality whenever they need it through a technology called G...DI+. Using GDI+, developers can easily perform drawing operations such as generating graphs or building custom controls.See More

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

As the core API set underpinning managed application development in .NET, the Base Class Libraries, receive several long-awaited and notable additions in the Whidbey release.The Base Class Libraries (BCL) provide a standardized set of managed APIs to accomplish all of the common and most widely executed application tasks. BCL enhancements surface in as performance-based improvements, class-oriented feature additions, and the introduction of previously missing functionali...ty through entirely new classes.See More

Building an audit trail into your application provides a mechanism for tracking who updated what when, and the new generics feature in Whidbey helps you build that trail.The Whidbey release of .NET will include a new Common Language Runtime (CLR) feature called generics. Generics allow you to use a variable to represent a desired data type, and thereby create very generic code (hence the name) that works with any data type.You define the data type for the generic variabl...e at run time and the CLR substitutes that data type for the variable everywhere in the code that it is used; basically providing you with strongly typed generic code.See More

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.

A well-designed application that uses a relational database management system in the backend should make extensive use of stored procedures.A stored procedure is a named collection of SQL statements that you store in a database. To the client, a stored procedure acts similar to a function. You call the stored procedure by name, you can pass it parameter values, and it can return parameter values back to your client.

The richest set of cloud computing services comes from a little e-commerce company known as Amazon.com. Developers can access the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform using numerous tools including the .NET platform.Amazon.com is a major player in the cloud computing space and has numerous services available to developers. In late 2009, Amazon released the AWS SDK for .NET. This article will demonstrate using the AWS SDK to create a custom backup service using the Amazon S...imple Storage Service (S3).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.

The newest version of Visual Basic now has support for full object-oriented programming, provides access to the .NET Framework and use power and flexibility of the Common Language Runtime. Never have there been more reason for VB developers to consider making the move to Visual Basic .NET. Yet, amidst the excitement surrounding the .NET platform, some major productivity features have been lost in the shuffle.

Ken Getz Jan/Feb 08 FInalize article.

Knowing the flaws in Web server controls and how to work around them before you use them can save you hours of time.

If you have been a hardcore VB6 programmer and you've hesitated about switching to Visual Basic .NET, Visual Basic 2005 will change your mind and you'll want to take the leap forward to move to .NET.The common complaint that people who have made this leap already often hear from programmers who are reluctant to move to VB .NET is that it is not VB-like, and moving to .NET means you have to unlearn many of the things you have painstakingly mastered in VB6.

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

In this article, Karl uncovers a bundle of nifty Windows Form tricks.

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

HTML and XML have made the Internet what it is today, but both technologies are not necessarily tied to the Internet.Quite the contrary! Using HTML in regular Windows applications has always been a great alternative. Paired with XML and XSL, this technique is more powerful than ever, since there are a growing number of XML sources, such as SQL Server, Web Services, and XML-enabled Business Objects.