Issue: 2004 - May/June

Rod Paddock Editorial May Junel 2004 Issue

Jonathan Goodyear (the Angry Coder) discusses MVPs and ASP.NET.

Code Access Security (CAS) is the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) mechanism for maintaining security based on the identity of code.Most developers don't have to work with CAS on a daily basis because the .NET Framework libraries take care of much of the work involved in securing code. However, when you do need to work with CAS, having a good understanding of CAS policy management is essential. Waiting until the eleventh hour in the project lifecycle and realizing that... you need to configure security policy is painful. For example, if you have a Smart Client application that runs over Internet Explorer, you will need to consider what permissions your application requires and how you are going to configure policy so that your code will run on a client machine. Or, suppose that your application defined a custom permission for a scenario not already covered by the permissions that ship with .NET. Here again you need to understand CAS policy. This article discusses the essential elements of CAS (evidence, permissions, and policy), shows how .NET CAS policy works, and explains reasons for making various policy decisions.See More

Building an audit trail into your application provides a mechanism for tracking who updated what when, and the new generics feature in Whidbey helps you build that trail.The Whidbey release of .NET will include a new Common Language Runtime (CLR) feature called generics. Generics allow you to use a variable to represent a desired data type, and thereby create very generic code (hence the name) that works with any data type.You define the data type for the generic variabl...e at run time and the CLR substitutes that data type for the variable everywhere in the code that it is used; basically providing you with strongly typed generic code.See More

Encapsulate asynchronous functionality directly into your business objects.The .NET Framework facilitates calling object methods asynchronously through the use of delegates. You may already know how to do this using helper code, but there is a cleaner and much cooler way of packaging this kind of functionality right inside your business objects.

The official release of Microsoft's Web Services Enhancements (WSE) toolkit promises to help developers deal with at least some of the pain and suffering accompanying the emerging Web services' standards.Updated to support the OASIS WS-Security specification and a promising WS-Policy specification, developers will be able to build standards-compliant Web services in less time and with less code.

Every company has some form of Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) process?whether it is formal or informal. An SDLC includes people, processes, and tools that span the design, build, and support of your information systems.

Replication agents are the basic components of SQL Server 2000 replication.Before you settle on the type of replication you want in your application architecture, it is important to understand how each type of replication works and what agents they use. Since the different types of replication use different combinations of replication agents, understanding what those agents do helps clarify the resulting SQL Agent jobs when you install replication. For example, snapshot,... transactional, and merge replication all use the Snapshot Agent to initialize the subscriber's data. Then they employ other agents to implement the replication process. In this article, you'll learn about the roles of the replication agents and learn how to inspect the properties and profiles of the Snapshot and other agents.See More

This is the first in a series of what I hope will be one of your favorite columns for years to come! I am the host of a talk show on the Internet called .NET Rocks! (see advert), in which I interview the movers and shakers in the .NET community.

Tips and Tricks from the Doc Detective

Ken Getz' .Finalize() column.