Issue: 2002 - May/June

Rod Paddock uses a lighthearted box-of-onions anecdote to argue a serious point about consulting: the value of choosing the best tool for the job, not what’s most familiar or easiest for the consultant. When a client faced Mac incompatibility with Visual FoxPro, Paddock suggested Citrix, and the client’s success validated that recommendation. The story illustrates that good advisers think outside the box and prioritize the client’s outcomes over personal gain, even if th...at means passing up an opportunity to build a flashy solution.See More

Since the first announcements of Microsoft's new .NET platform, ActiveX control developers and tool vendors have been scrambling to adjust their products and their marketing strategies. This article reports on the changing component market and points you to many of the newly announced .NET Developer Tools.Since the first announcements of Microsoft's new .NET platform, ActiveX control developers and tool vendors have been scrambling to adjust their products and their mark...eting strategies. This article reports on the changing component market and points you to many of the newly announced .NET Developer Tools.Since the first announcements of Microsoft's new .NET platform, ActiveX control developers and tool vendors have been scrambling to adjust their products and their marketing strategies.This article reports on the changing component market and points you to many of the newly announced .NET Developer Tools.Since the first announcements of Microsoft's new .NET platform, ActiveX control developers and tool vendors have been scrambling to adjust their products and their marketing strategies.This article reports on the changing component market and points you to many of the newly announced .NET Developer Tools.See More

May June 2002 Product News

In his article, Markus Egger explores how Microsoft strategically fosters developer communities by dedicating significant resources and creating a collaborative ecosystem. Through discussions with key Microsoft personnel, Egger highlights the company’s approach of empowering developers with freedom, information, and support while integrating community feedback into product development. The initiative spans multiple language-specific groups and global efforts, supported b...y dedicated roles and partnerships like INETA. Egger conveys Microsoft’s shift toward customer-centric engagement, emphasizing the importance of viral knowledge sharing and sustained investment to cultivate vibrant, self-sustaining developer ecosystems.See More

In this article, Kevin McNeish highlights the value of UML collaboration diagrams as effective tools for illustrating both the dynamic interactions and static relationships between business objects in software design. He contrasts collaboration diagrams with sequence diagrams, emphasizing their unique ability to visualize object relationships and validate static models. Kevin explains the core elements of collaboration diagrams—objects, links, and messages—and discusses ...their use in representing complex interactions, including iterations, conditionals, and object state changes. Ultimately, he advocates for collaboration diagrams as a complementary perspective that enhances understanding of object collaborations beyond what sequence diagrams alone can offer.See More

.NET My Services is Microsoft's first attempt at creating a professional, commercial and widely available Web Services platform.The .NET My Services umbrella hosts a number of different Web services, such as a Calendar service, a Contacts repository, and much, much more. These services are major building blocks for the "Everywhere, Anytime" vision, but best of all, they are relatively easy to implement and use in your own applications and Web sites!

ASP.NET provides developers with the ability to cache dynamically generated pages.This means that it is now possible to cache pages built on posted data and querystrings! For instance, an e-commerce site that generates the same catalog from the database over and over on nearly every user request can now simply cache the catalog pages. Caching saves precious database server CPU cycles and renders pages down to the client much faster. Of course, when the catalog data is up...dated, the cache can simply refresh itself. Furthermore, developers can define the length of time an item is to be cached, indicate cache dependencies, create cached versions per browser, and indicate where an item should be cached (client, server, proxy, etc.).See More

Rick Strahl argues that .NET provides powerful yet approachable tools for retrieving HTTP content, centering on HttpWebRequest/HttpWebResponse and a practical wrapper (wwHttp) that simplifies common tasks without sacrificing access to underlying features. He demonstrates how to fetch and post data, manage encodings, cookies, authentication, and proxies, and explains event-driven and multi-threaded approaches to HTTP work. Through code examples and design notes, Strahl em...phasizes building reusable, maintainable HTTP access with a balance of simplicity and configurability for real-world applications.See More

In component-based programming, the basic unit of use in an application is a binary-compatible interface.The interface provides an abstract service definition between the client and the object. This is in contrast to the object-oriented view of the world that places the object implementing the interface at the center. An interface is a logical grouping of method definitions that acts as the contract between the client and the service provider. Each provider is free to... provide its own interpretation of the interface and its own implementation. To use a component, the client only needs to know the interface definition and have a binary component that implements that interface. This extra level of indirection between the client and the object provides for interchangeability between different implementations of the same interface, without affecting client code.See More