Issue: 2002 - January/February

  • David Stevenson Editorial Article Jan/Feb 2002
  • Inheritance is one of the most fascinating features in the Visual Studio.NET languages. We have discussed this feature in several articles in the past, mainly to explain the basic concepts. Now we are going to take a look at what inheritance can actually do for you, rather than how it works.
  • As XML becomes more and more prolific in the world of data exchange it's increasingly important that data can be quickly and easily extracted from XML documents and moved into more permanent data stores.Although .NET offers several different ways for performing this task, the XmlTextReader represents the most efficient and scalable solution.
  • Web Services is a powerful technology, even in its basic form.However, with .NET, you can easily couple Web Services with .NET's new data services to provide a powerful data delivery mechanism that works over the Web, making it possible to build distributed applications that work easily without a local data store. In this article, Rick describes various ways you can use Web Services and ADO.NET DataSets to pass data between client and server applications to build truly disconnected applications.
  • Testing computer software is more than just randomly executing portions of the software.Professional-level testing uses industry-accepted practices to write tests that are the most likely to find bugs. This article will examine how to use a combination of several common testing methods to maximize the results of the time you spend on testing.
  • Class diagrams are among the centerpieces of the Unified Modeling Language.They are critical for helping you design classes that will serve as building blocks for your application. This article will cover the basics of class diagrams and help you see how you can use them in your software development?especially in building your business object classes.
  • Part 3, The User Interface and the Rating Web ServiceWe are finally going to get our feet wet in Visual Studio .NET and start writing some real code! In this article, we're going to focus on two areas of the ACME application. First, we will talk about the user interface and how it's implemented in ASP.NET ? along with a few problems we overcame by utilizing the powerful object-oriented features of .NET. Next, we'll write a web service in Visual Basic .NET to rate polic...See More
  • The .Net framework provides two base classes for controls; one for Windows forms and the other for ASP.NET server controls.We can extend the existing controls by adding specific functionality to them or develop our own controls from scratch. Such controls are called custom controls. We can also group controls together and create another control, such as an address box, that contains couple of textboxes and labels. Controls that are grouped together and are based on Syste...See More
  • The new XML features in SQL Server 2000 give the developer more power to implement distributed solutions.One of the newest features, XML UpdateGrams, allows the developer to handle the inserting, updating and deleting of records while getting around some of the limitations of URL queries and OPENXML. XML UpdateGrams perform their operations against an XML view, which is provided by an annotated XDR schema that contains the necessary information to map elements and attrib...See More
  • As developers, we're used to data sitting in tables and databases.However, this is not how data exists in the real world?it's merely how developers want data to appear. Typically, data resides in documents and forms, emails and spreadsheets. Smart Tags are Microsoft's first serious attempt to utilize that kind of information and make it available to knowledge workers in a sensible fashion.
  • Rick Strahl Commentary JanFeb2002
  • 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.