Issue: 2000 - Spring

  • Spring 2000 Editorial
  • COM+ introduces a new way to architect and extend applications:The COM+ Event Service. This service is extremely flexible and much easier to handle and maintain than all other COM based event models we've seen so far. They are especially useful for business events that can now be published throughout the system without losing any control over business rules.
  • XML is one of the key technologies that is driving Enterprise Web development today.XML promises a standard data format that can be shared easily by different organizations. In this installation of this two part series, Rick reviews XML's key features and problems as a data representation format for relational data and objects. He'll also introduce some free tools to provide easy translation between XML and traditional data structures and shows how to use them with quick...See More
  • When creating a Windows DNA application, it is not enough to start creating COM objects and run them under MTS.Rather what is needed is a standard approach to analyzing DNA applications. This article provides a pattern language for COM objects. The purpose of this pattern language is to standardize discussion of types of components so that the design of these applications becomes more standardized.
  • Applications grow more and more complex, while turnaround times get shorter and higher quality is expected.Application boundaries are becoming blurred since data has to be available throughout the system in a seamless fashion. Data also has to be available in distributed environments, and as if that weren't enough, distributed systems are also expected to work when connections are down! How do you keep up with all of this?
  • Remember batch files? They were simple, easy to program, and very productive since many tasks could be automated.Windows still allows batch files, but batch files don't allow any control over the Windows shell and Windows environment. By introducing the Windows Scripting Host, Microsoft has introduced a script and COM based engine that can access the Windows Shell, the computer's environment and network settings using simple VBScript or JScript code. In addition you can...See More
  • Customer relationships are an often-overlooked part of what we, as programmers, do. But customers are essential; after all, they're the ones we are creating systems for. We've heard from many programmers that customers are obstructive, stubborn, and computer-illiterate. Have you experienced similar frustrations? Why do projects often seem like battles, rather than cooperative efforts to solve specific problems?
  • String processing is an important aspect of today's applications.Web applications in particular, rely heavily on string transformations and special formatting of data, as well as generating strings for output to the Web dynamically in the form of HTML, XML or even binary data. In this article, Steve demonstrates and compares performance of some of the powerful string functions in Visual FoxPro.
  • Microsoft's Web Application Stress Tool provides an easy way to simulate large numbers of users against your Web application.This tool makes it possible to make intelligent decisions about hardware and software load incurred by your application and how much traffic a given machine or group of machines can handle. In this article Rick shows how the tool works and how to properly interpret the performance data it generates.
  • The series of test conducted here are based on the "String Processing with VFP" article published in the Spring 2000 issue of CoDe Magazine.