Issue: 2002 - March/April

  • Rod Paddock - March April 02 Editorial
  • Software development is a collaborative process.This article is the first in a series focused on the tools and techniques developers use to effectively work in concert. Special attention will be paid to the needs of distributed teams where some or all of the team members travel frequently or work remotely.
  • The .NET Framework presents exciting new opportunities for developers. By now, you may have heard that .NET represents a departure from COM, the focal point of Windows development for the past several years. Because of the investments in COM, it is quite likely you will want to implement COM in VS .NET. Conversely, the .NET Framework has a number of nice features that you will want to implement in COM-based applications. This article illustrates how COM and the .NET Framework can work together.
  • You know about the importance of securing your data.But, how do you add industrial strength security to your program? The answer is simple: use the Windows Crypto API.
  • Testing SQL Server is an often-overlooked area of the software development process, because programmers primarily place testing focus on code residing in the middle tier or the client desktop, rather than the database. However, as SQL Server databases become a more important component of applications, they cannot be left out of the developer's testing process. An important place to start, to ensure your code works the way you want it to, is with SQL Server configuration....See More
  • Microsoft .NET brings many important advances to the software engineering world.We believe that Windows developers everywhere have reason to celebrate the arrival of .NET, but Visual Basic developers should be the most ecstatic. We get true inheritance, structured exception handling, and a state-of-the-art IDE?but, perhaps the coolest thing .NET provides us as VB developers is the Framework Class Library (FCL). To commemorate the release of .NET, we thought we would pres...See More
  • For the first time ever, Visual Studio has a language independent Integrated Developers Environment (IDE), which includes a number of new productivity enhancements. However, many of the most powerful features are not obvious.
  • The Sequence Diagram is one of the most interesting and useful diagrams in the Unified Modeling Language (UML).It helps you document and understand the dynamic aspects of your software system?specifically the sequence of messages that are sent and received between objects. Sequence diagrams can help you comprehend and solve difficult issues in the process-intensive portions of your applications.
  • xCase (RESolution, Ltd.) is a desktop data-modeling software package that has developed into a very useful, yet cost-effective, tool for everyday database design and maintenance.The recently-released "Professional Version 6.01" has much to recommend if you are doing database development in Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, Visual FoxPro, Jet, or many other database platforms.
  • One of the painful realities of software is that as it becomes increasingly rich with features, it becomes increasingly difficult to use.Despite the best intentions of software companies to design usable software, there is often a large conceptual gap between what users know and what software designers expect users to know. For a simple application, the gap may be small. For complex applications, the conceptual gap can be huge. As this conceptual gap widens, users are mo...See More
  • David Stevenson commentary Mar/Apr 2002