Issue: 2003 - May/June

  • May/June 2003 Editorial by Rod Paddock.
  • Product News
  • 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...See More
  • 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.
  • The .NET Framework doesn't change the structure of the file system, nor does it build a new layer on top of it.More simply, but also more effectively for developers, it supplies a new object model for file system-related operations. A managed application can work with files and directories using high-level methods rather than low level understanding of the file system. This article provides an overview of methods and classes contained in the System.IO namespace.
  • There was a time, not too long ago, when browser-based user interfaces were considered both the status quo and the Next Great Thing.The demand for Windows Forms-based applications started to dwindle as the developer community fully embraced browser/server applications with their centralized server components and ubiquitous user interfaces. .NET, however, brings a much more powerful library of distributed communication technologies (such as Web services and remoting). As ...See More
  • When you make a method call on an object, typically you must block the client while the object executes the call, and control returns to the client only when the method completes execution and returns.However, there are quite a few cases where you want to call methods asynchronously?that is, you want control to return immediately to the client while the object executes the called method in the background, and then somehow let the client know when the method execution is ...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.
  • XQuery will likely become the dominant language for querying data from most data sources.Although designed for querying XML data, you can use XQuery to tie together data from multiple data sources. In that respect it is much more powerful than SQL, which will slowly but surely be replaced as the main query language.
  • 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.
  • Basic error handling in SQL Server's programming language, Transact-SQL, is straightforward.But when you nest calls to stored procedures, and the procedures have SQL transactions, error handling becomes much more complex. In this article I'll show you some tried-and-true models for how to handle errors in nested stored procedures with transactions.
  • Tips and Tricks from the Doc Detective
  • David Stevenson discusses developers and deadlines.