Issue: 2004 - September/October

Rod Paddock Editorial September October 2004 Issue

Jonathan Goodyear (the Angry Coder) September/October 2004

Productivity is one of the major goals of Visual Basic 2005 and with "My" Microsoft may just have hit a home run.Although Visual Basic .NET is just as powerful as C# for building business applications, it did not get the initial push that C# did back at PDC 2000 when Microsoft unveiled .NET. This was not meant to slight Visual Basic and Visual Basic developers, but rather represented the state of the Visual Basic .NET language which was not as far along in the developmen...t process as C#. Opponents to the Basic syntax took this and ran with it. Microsoft has tried to attack this misconception but has also caused some of the problem, initially by pushing .NET for Web services development so hard that many developers and managers incorrectly got idea that .NET was primarily for Web services. With Visual Basic 2005 the power of the .NET Framework is fully exposed and the true power of Visual Basic is once again starting to take form and that power is productivity. Whereas C# is about language first and foremost Visual Basic is about language and tools to make the development process faster.See More

Many developers have a dream: easy and efficient data binding.To be really quick and profitable, RAD (rapid application development) tools and techniques must be strong in data binding. They must provide a programming interface that is both easy to use and effective. Easy design-time composition of user interfaces; effective support of complex scenarios of interrelated data, dependencies, and filtering. In Windows Forms, the data binding machinery is highly sophisticated... and designed to meet common needs of former client/server applications, now migrating to the more modern .NET multi-tier design. This article reviews common Windows Forms data binding techniques and provides answers and explanations.See More

Using the new Data Sources Window in Visual Studio 2005, developers can now drag columns of their typed DataSets or properties of their own business objects directly to their form. Visual Studio 2005 will create, name, and label controls for each bound property. For those that prefer to lay out the forms with the toolbox, developers can use "Connect the Dots DataBinding" to drag and drop from the Data Sources Window onto their existing controls.

The sun is shining and I am sitting at a large, umbrella-covered picnic table overlooking a shimmering pond, my state right now is pretty relaxed. I have been fortunate enough to have spent the last few days at a cabin in the northern part of Maine. The birds are chirping, kids are playing, and there's not a Moose in sight. The only state management I'm concerned with right now is my own state of mind, and right now I am feeling pretty good. State management, whether you... are dealing with your own state of mind or if you are working with ASP.NET, is a very fundamental and important task.In this article I am going to cover the important and sometimes confusing topic of state management. I will explore the state management fundamentals, covering both client-side and server-side state management options.See More

The Class Designer feature of Visual Studio 2005 allows you to visually manipulate your classes.A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes. The new Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) Class Designer provides a visual design environment that allows you to visualize and manipulate your classes. Being able to see your classes and work with them using a visual designer can significantly increase your productivity.

Application instrumentation gives you the ability to perform runtime diagnosis of enterprise application state, which is critical to mission success.To help with instrumentation and logging, .NET ships with tracing types in the System.Diagnostics namespace. Using these types, you have the ability to log information to multiple output streams for diagnosis of application runtime behavior. Information produced by instrumentation and tracing types enable you to examine the ...runtime state of an application and fix problems that would be otherwise expensive and painful to solve.See More

The .NET Framework provides many new collection classes that you can iterate (for-each) through.But did you know that you can also iterate through values in any of your classes, not just those that use or inherit from collections?

Using .NET reflection and external metadata makes it easy to add data validation to your objects.Nearly every application that collects data, whether from a Windows- or Web-based form or from a file, needs to validate that the data is in the correct format.

I am the host of .NET Rocks!, an Internet audio talk show for .NET developers online at www.franklins.net/dotnetrocks and msdn.microsoft.com/dotnetrocks. My co-host, Rory Blyth (www.neopoleon.com), and I interview the movers and shakers in the .NET community. We now have over 60 shows archived online, and we broadcast a new show every Thursday night from 10PM to Midnight, Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5). For more history of the show check out the May/June 2004 issue of CoD...e Magazine, in which this column first appeared. See More

Tips and Tricks from the Doc Detective

Ken Getz' .Finalize() column.