Issue: 2004 - July/August

Rod Paddock Editorial July August 2004 Issue

Jonathan Goodyear (the Angry Coder) July/August 2004

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

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.

In early 2004, Microsoft released a new set of extensions to SQL Server 2000 called SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.SQL Server Reporting Services provides a comprehensive platform for creating, managing, securing, scheduling, and outputting data from SQL Server, Oracle, OLE DB and ODBC data sources. When Microsoft created SQL Server Reporting Services they created it as an extendable platform. You can create your own data extensions and your own output extensions. In ...this article, I'll show you how to create your own custom data extensions for SQL Server Reporting Services.See More

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

Snapshot isolation is a new isolation level that reduces blocking reads and allows transactions to read previously committed versions of data, instead of uncommitted data.SQL Server's default isolation level of READ COMMITTED restricts transactions to reading only data that has been committed. This isolation level has the effect of blocking a transaction's read operation when the data is exclusively locked by another transaction. A lower isolation level called READ UNCOM...ITTED allows your transactions to read another transaction's uncommitted data while it is locked, but the values are not stable because the data is uncommitted. SQL Server 2005 introduces a new isolation level that provides a middle way between READ COMMITTED and READ UNCOMMITTED. The SNAPSHOT isolation level allows your transaction to read the previously committed version of the data that is currently being changed, so that your transaction's view of the data is consistent with the state of the data when your transaction began without being blocked by the other transaction. Snapshot isolation has the benefit of reducing blocking and deadlocking in your transactions that is due to blocking reads, without having to let your transactions read uncommitted data. (Note: this article is based on a pre-Beta 2 version of SQL Server called IDW3, build 9.00.790. Some details about the operation and behavior of snapshot isolation may change before the final version of SQL Server 2005 ships.)See More

Configuration settings make it possible for users and administrators to configure an application before it is run for the first time and while it runs..NET provides a good rudimentary mechanism for storing and retrieving configuration settings in the application's .config file with the ConfigurationSettings class, but this mechanism is missing a number of essential features. This article describes how to improve on the base functionality using a class that provides stron...g typing, allows for writing of keys, and provides optional encryption of keys.See More

I am the host of .NET Rocks!, an Internet audio talk show for .NET developers online at www.franklins.net/dotnetrocks and msdn.microsoft.com/dotnetrocks. My co-host, Rory Blyth (www.neopoleon.com), and I interview the movers and shakers in the .NET community. We now have over 60 shows archived online, and we broadcast a new show every Thursday night from 10PM to Midnight, Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5). For more history of the show check out the May/June 2004 issue of CoD...e Magazine, in which this column first appeared.See More

Tips and Tricks from the Doc Detective

Ken Getz' .Finalize() column.