Fractal images are strikingly beautiful, bright, and complex and they're everywhere these days - from art galleries to image compression to movie graphics to environmental modelling (see Figure 1). It really is amazing to see a concept from the dusty world of mathematics jump up and gr...

The Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 SDK allows you to build rich, deeply integrated new features into Visual Studio. The functionality you have access to through the SDK is identical to the functionality used by many teams within the Visual Studio organization here in Microsoft to develop ne...

My favorite construct in the C# programming language has to be the foreach loop. I get a little jolt of pleasure every time I use it. I can enumerate rows in SQL Queries, nodes in XML documents, ArrayLists, and Hashtables. You name it, I can enumerate it all without mucking around with...

There has never been an operating system release more important to .NET developers than the release of Windows Mobile Version 5.0. With this release, Microsoft is poised to take your productivity in writing mobile applications higher than it has ever gone before. Rich multimedia capabi...

Data Transformation Services (DTS) is a set of graphical tools that you can use to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data from many different sources to a single or multiple destinations. DTS was originally released with SQL Server 7.0 to provide a more manageable interface for doing ...

Microsoft is releasing a new version of SQL Server after a gap of five years. This version (SQL Server 2005) introduces a horde of new attention-grabbing features like native XML storage and querying (using XQuery), CLR integration, SQL Web Services, query notifications, and the Servic...

In May 2000 I was invited to Microsoft's corporate headquarters in Redmond for a special 'technology experts' summit. At this summit, the forty or so of us in attendance were given a special sneak preview of a technology upon which Microsoft planned to 'bet the farm,' so to speak. They...

In the beginning... In one of those odd moments of synchronicity that I have learned to appreciate, I bumped into the editor-in-chief of .NET Developer's Journal during an e-mail exchange about a month ago. Derek and I had worked together several years back on a reasonably successfu...

In this 'Data Access' column, I will discuss topics relating to the Microsoft .NET data access stack, known as ADO.NET. This installment starts with an overview of the different pieces of the stack and finishes with an interesting development in the world of SQL Server, .NET, and XML W...

If you want to extend your existing systems as well as your knowledge of .NET development while building solutions for smart devices, the upcoming .NET CF (Compact Framework) and SDE (Smart Device Extensions) are definitely the way to go.