Issue: 2002 - July/August

Rod Paddock Editorial July August 2002 Issue

Crystal Reports is officially a member of the Visual Studio .NET product.It is included in all major editions and ships in all languages available with Visual Studio .NET. Crystal Reports .NET provides developers with the fastest, most productive way to create and integrate presentation-quality, interactive reports that scale to meet the demands of end users. This article introduces you to Crystal Reports .NET and shows you how to create reports and view them in either a... Windows form or a Web form. I will also show you how to publish a report as a Web service and consume the service in a Web form.See More

HTML-based Web development has dominated application development for the last six years or so and there are no signs of that changing.However, things are changing as the .NET initiative takes hold. Although Microsoft has put a lot of effort into its Web-based interfaces, which include the powerful new ASP.NET Web Forms framework, I am guessing that there will actually be a push back to desktop-driven, forms-based applications once .NET takes hold.

Pocket PC devices, such as the Compaq iPaq, present both an opportunity and a challenge for software developers.While there are many standard applications available, what tools can you use to develop custom applications? Don't despair, because the Microsoft eMbedded Visual Tools Development Kit will get you off to a great start.

Visual Basic has featured extensibility for quite some time.Unfortunately, extending the Visual Basic IDE has been anything but intuitive. In comparison, you have been able to extend the Microsoft Office IDE through macros since Office 97. Not only could you use Visual Basic to do so but, best of all, you had the benefit of a macro recorder to jumpstart the process. One question always loomed, "Why can't Visual Basic have macro capabilities like Office?" Thankfully, Micr...osoft has delivered robust macro capabilities in Visual Studio .NET that are easy to learn and implement. This article introduces the new macro capabilities in Visual Studio .NET.See More

By now, you have been exposed to a lot of information about Visual Studio .NET.Of all the new technologies associated with .NET, perhaps no other technology is more mysterious than ADO.NET. The purpose of this article, the first in a series, is to give you a brief overview of ADO.NET and how it is implemented in Visual Studio .NET. Future articles will expand on the material presented here. After reading this article, you will be able to understand how the various ADO.N...ET objects and generated code work to provide data for your applications.See More

Component-oriented programming must allow for clients and components to evolve separately.Component developers should be able to deploy new versions (or just defect fixes) of existing components without affecting existing client applications. Client developers should be able to deploy new versions of the client application and expect it to work with older component versions. As a component technology, .NET must enforce version control, allowing for separate evolution pat...hs and for side-by-side deployment of different versions of the same component. .NET should also detect incompatibility as soon as possible and alert the client.See More

Testing SQL Server 2000 applications begins with making sure your production server is configured properly.You generally do this by verifying that the server's settings match a properly configured target computer. After configuring your server, you can go to work on validating your database configuration. This article will continue the theme of creating and implementing a Transact-SQL stored procedure to test a database's options for deviation from the default settings.

Software development is a collaborative process.This article is the second in a series focused on the tools and techniques developers use to effectively work in concert. This time, we look at a Web-based phenomenon, known generally as wiki, which has the potential to arm your distributed team with a fluid, open and low-noise forum for building and managing project artifacts as well as foster a collective knowledge and project continuity.

David Stevenson's Column - July August 02

With over 45,000 topics, finding what you need in the Visual Studio .NET documentation can be a daunting task. The Doc Detective is here to help, utilizing his investigative skills to probe the depths of the documentation.

This page is dedicated to non-technical aspects of our lives as developers.Look here in each issue for commentary and insight into the struggles and joys of balancing life and logic.