Issue: 2000 - Fall

Fall 2000 Editorial Markus Egger and Rick Strahl

Automatic asynchronous messaging is an important technique for scalable, component-based applications.Microsoft provided its first asynchronous messaging mechanism in the form of Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ). This technology is the basis for Queued Components, a COM+ feature that makes asynchronous messaging as simple as calling regular COM Components.

Before you say "Who cares, I've already seen them..." or "Who cares, I don't use Visual FoxPro...", take a quick look at this article.I think you'll discover some things that you didn't know; and if you don't currently use Visual FoxPro, you might even discover you, too, are looking forward to the next version of Fox.

With ever-larger Web applications being built to service very large numbers of simultaneous users pounding away at Web sites, the issue of scaling applications beyond a single machine is important for Web application developers and network administrators.While hardware capabilities seem to be increasing to the point that high-powered single machines can handle tremendous loads, there will always be those apps that push beyond a single machine. In addition, for many admin...istrators and IT planners, it's often not good enough to say that a server can handle x number of users. They want redundancy, backup and overflow support, so a Web server or hardware failure or an unexpected surge of visitors doesn't cripple the corporate Web site. In this article, Rick discusses the issues of scalability and how load balancing services can help provide redundancy and extra horsepower to large Web sites.See More

Data in XML format will play a significant role for the foreseeable future.Moreover, it's clear that XML and XSL will play a significant role in most, if not all, of my future applications. Why is it, however, that almost everything we read talks about merging XML+XSL on the client side, which requires IE 5 or higher browsers? In this article, Steve shows how to apply XSL transformations on the server to get around this problem.

Business-To-Business (B2B) communications are rapidly becoming an essential component in today's economy.Some say B2B transactions will soon outnumber Business-To-Customer (B2C) transactions. While we have learned how to do B2C quite efficiently, B2B presents an entirely new set of challenges that we have yet to resolve. Previous attempts were successfully used, but were too expensive to be used as often as B2C. Microsoft tries to resolve this dilemma with Microsoft BizT...alk Server 2000, and it is looking promising! This article provides a first in-depth overview.See More

Everything you wanted to know about customers but were too busy coding to ask.In the last column, we discussed the initial contact and the issues that are important in that first meeting. In this column, we discuss negotiating the terms of the contract.

Markus Egger Fall 2000 Services Article

XML is quickly becoming the preferred method of passing information, not only for the Internet, but also across applications and within applications.Until now, developers have been forced to create our own routines to convert data stored in a database system into XML. With the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2000, however, you can query data directly from SQL Server in XML format.

Integrating a web site with a structured database poses a particular challenge. How can a developer provide a flexible, easy to use, yet robust search interface for users to query the information stored in the database? In this article Beth provides a complete solution for this problem using Visual FoxPro, ADO and XML, by providing a dynamic searching mechanism in the middle tier that users can control from the front end.