Issue: 2002 - September/October

  • Rodman (Rod Paddock) reflects on the September 11, 2001 crisis to argue that, beyond professional achievement, the true value in life lies in friends, family, and freedom. He uses the tragedy to illustrate how quickly life and global connections become fragile, and how meaningful exchanges with loved ones sustain us. The piece then broadens to celebrate international collaboration in his field, before urging developers to prioritize human relationships and personal time ...See More
  • The newest version of Visual Basic now has support for full object-oriented programming, provides access to the .NET Framework and use power and flexibility of the Common Language Runtime. Never have there been more reason for VB developers to consider making the move to Visual Basic .NET. Yet, amidst the excitement surrounding the .NET platform, some major productivity features have been lost in the shuffle.
  • User controls represent an interesting and powerful level of page reusability in ASP.NET. You can build user controls by extracting and combining blocks of code from existing pages. You can also assemble ASP.NET controls together in a sort of embeddable form for use in Web pages. In this article, you'll get a crash-course on how to design, write and use ASP.NET user controls.
  • New computer languages are rare and successful ones are rarer still, yet Microsoft decided to create a new language to go along with the .NET Developer Platform. Why weren't existing languages good enough?
  • The first article in this series detailed how to build data-aware forms in Visual Studio .NET using the Data Form Wizard. It demonstrated how easy it is to build forms using a point-and-click interface. You also learned that the generated form was especially suited to production development. This article continues where that article left off and introduces you to techniques to improve data-aware forms created with the Data Form Wizard.
  • Perl is a language that has been around for a while and is one of the most popular open source languages among system administrators, Web developers and the research community. Meanwhile, Microsoft's .NET technology, which is comprised of a framework and set of tools, was recently released for creating sophisticated applications. Is it possible to have any connection between these two different worlds? Yes it is! Perl is now a .NET language. This is the first of a two-pa...See More
  • Daniel Leclair argues that Visual Studio .NET lacks some beloved FoxPro capabilities, and introduces the Visual FoxPro Toolkit for .NET—a free, public-domain .NET assembly that re-creates many VFP-style functions (225 in total) across arrays, strings, data, and more. Written in managed code and operable without VFP installed, the 56K DLL serves as “training wheels” for VFP developers transitioning to .NET while rewarding VB.NET and C# users with familiar, familiar-functi...See More
  • Most of you are probably aware that the web.config file in an ASP.NET project controls the behavior of your Web site. If you make a change to one of the built-in settings in this file, ASP.NET automatically detects those changes and applies them immediately. Wouldn't it be nice if you could have your own settings in this file applied immediately as well? In this article you will learn how to do just that. You will also learn the difference between the Application object ...See More
  • Eiffel Software Inc.'s Eiffel for .NET is now available as part of ESI's EiffelStudio™ . Eiffel for .NET combines the power of two object technology variants: Eiffel (including Design by Contract™, multiple inheritance, genericity and seamlessness of software development) and .NET (including language interoperability, Web services and other advanced facilities.).
  • Doc Detective offers a playful, practical guide to navigating the Visual Studio .NET documentation by answering real reader questions and clarifying common confusions, from accessing Access data with ADO.NET to redistributing the .NET Framework and understanding ASP.NET intrinsic objects. Through direct, accessible explanations and pointers to key MSDN topics, the column helps newcomers move beyond seemingly confusing examples (like SQL Server–heavy tutorials) and reveal...See More