Issue: 2005 - July/August

Rod Paddock Editorial Article July/August 2005

Angry Coder - Jonathan Goodyear and J. Ambrose Little - July/August 2005

This installment of "The Baker's Dozen" presents a Windows Forms database application that demonstrates some of the primary attributes of a distributed architecture. These attributes include authentication and connectivity, data management, business objects, user-interface modules, and reporting. The featured application is a job-costing and invoicing application for a Masonry company, and is available for download. The application contains many functions that are requir...ed in most business applications. This article steps through the construction of these key pieces and provides classes and methodologies that you can apply to your next application.See More

The third release of the .NET Framework (version 2.0) introduces many changes and innovations not just in the application frameworks, but also in the essential mechanics of assemblies themselves.Microsoft strived to improve on a few limitations of the original assemblies model, as well as provide new features and capabilities in assemblies and in the tools used to build and manage them, predominantly Visual Studio 2005. These include application assembly reference, refer...ence aliasing, friend assembly, better strong name protection, specific versioning, and targeting specific CPU architectures, and more. This article describes each such new feature, and when applicable, recommends best practices and guidelines.See More

Two-way data binding can save you a ton of coding, as long as you can get the bound controls to behave the way you want them to.Using the BindingSource and Binding objects in .NET 2.0, getting what you expect in minimal code becomes a whole lot easier. In this article, I will explore how to use the BindingSource and Binding objects to set up associations between complex data sources and bound controls. I'll show you how to keep multiple controls that are bound to the sam...e data source synchronized, and how to control the formatting and parsing of the data in those controls.See More

So much of the literature about writing application now involves Web services.Many publications and blogs consider Web services to be the silver bullet because they are so easy to implement in .NET and do very easily interoperate with disconnected systems. But are people really using Web services the way they should be used? I beg to differ on that point.

Data-bound controls make ASP.NET programming much easier.They expose a bunch of properties and methods to link their properties to a valid data source and they know how to build their user interface to reflect the contents of the data source. Data-bound controls work by repeating a template for each data row and try to make an optimized use of system resources such as the viewstate. This article guides you to building a real-world, data-bound control that displays a pure HTML bar chart.

Visual Studio .NET is the new standard for developing .NET applications.Although Visual Studio .NET does a number of things very well to assist in the development process, there are certainly areas that need improvement. One of those areas is dealing with a build process that requires something a little more than just compiling source code.

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

Doc Detective - July/August 05

Ken Getz - Finalize Column - July/August 2005