I began reading Shared Source CLI Essentials with a rather high set of expectations. I knew that one of the authors, David Stutz, was an ex-Microsoft employee who had recently gone on record criticizing Redmond's attitude toward open source.

Microsoft has a rich history of development environments and platforms built around the creation of reusable objects and components to maximize developer productivity. These environments are designed to mask some of the underlying complexities of the platform.

In today's enterprise applications nobody is going to comment on the quality of your middle-tier components or the databases to which you persist your application's data. Enterprise applications, like all others, are judged using the age-old adage: first impressions count.

(October 1, 2003) - The first day of the .NET track at Web Services Edge 2003 got off to a great start today with an hour-long session - given by Empowered Solutions’ John Bristowe -- on Web Service Enhancements 2.0. Web Service Enhancements - or WSE as it is commonly known - is a Mic...

Graphics and GUI (System.Drawing, System.Windows.Forms [SWF]) continue to be a couple of the most worked-on areas in both Mono and Portable.NET. Other areas under heavy development include cryptography, Web services, coverage and build tools for Mono, dependency charts for Portable...

In a world where developers are baying for the attention of customers, very few people can claim to command that of the developer. Their blogs may be the only clue to the higher level of thinking at which they operate, creating the answers to when and why code works - in addition to th...

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 is arguably the most advanced integrated development environment (IDE) available today. Prepare to see your Visual Studio .NET environment on steroids!

I am in love! Of all the products I have had the pleasure to review as editor-in-chief of .NET Developers Journal, InstallShield Developer has gone the furthest toward reaffirming my faith in the software development industry.

Perhaps the most important, yet most overlooked, area of application development is that of deployment. A flawed installation, or worse - one that corrupts other applications - does not instill faith in your software and makes for very unhappy clients. Having been in this situation mys...

(August 13, 2003) - There are lots of things that you can’t start too early - saving for your kid’s college education, estate planning, planning your next vacation, to name a few. How about the performance of your distributed .NET applications? Do you know how your .NET applications wi...

Mono recently gained a couple of new corporate sponsors, so this is a good time to look at some of the project's commercial connections. The Mono implementation of SWF (System.Windows.Forms) continues to improve, and the Portable.NET implementation of SWF is taking off.

Parasoft's .TEST product aims to automate the creation and execution of testing for quality assurance of .NET code. Specifically, it can produce four kinds of tests: white box, black box, regression, and static analysis.

The Tablet PC SDK from Microsoft ships with a couple of high-level controls to help developers rapidly build ink-enabled applications. The three controls that I'll look at in this article are the InkEdit, InkPicture, and PenInputPanel.

It has been another good month for open-source .NET: .NET has become an ISO standard, and both DotGNU and Mono achieved milestones I mentioned last month.

The .NET Framework can be a pleasure to use, but there's so much to master that all too often we set out to do something basic only to realize we've forgotten exactly how it's done. For this very reason the concept of cookbooks exists ­ references whose purpose is to refresh the memory...

The introduction of the Tablet PC has given developers and end users an entirely new way to interact with their computers: pen and ink. The concept of pen-and-ink input is not new ­ pen-based computing has been around for some time ­ but what the Tablet PC does is combine the latest in...

The data access layer is a very important building block of data-centric applications. Any of today's well-designed architectures mandates having an abstraction layer over the data access library. In this article I will develop a class library that works like Microsoft Data Application...

Anyone who has created a Web project using Visual Studio .NET 2002 is aware that VS.NET ties the location of the Web project to a virtual directory on Internet Information Server (IIS). The name of the project folder must be identical to the name of this virtual directory so that the p...

In this day and age of cost-cutting layoffs and job insecurity, you've probably found yourself in some challenging situations. Recently, I found myself in the position of being the sole developer of a .NET application using SQL Server 2000. So I did my best to design a solid database u...

Much has been made of .NET's language-neutral features and how programmers can choose from a wide variety of languages ranging from C# and VB.NET to niche languages such as Python and Eiffel. But there is one dialect that all language variants speak - and that is the language of regula...

As I write this, .NET Framework 1.1 and Visual Studio 2003 have just been released; these will have little effect on the open-source implementations of .NET, but there is still much to talk about this month. Keep in mind that when I mention future release dates, these are often more wi...

Ms. Prince's goal in writing this book is to teach beginners how to develop simple but complete Windows applications. She shows users how to code, test, and debug their applications as well. The book is divided into five sections. The first section teaches you how to code and test obje...

Have you ever needed to know the status of a user's computer, only to discover that the user had stepped away from his/her desk and locked the computer? Sometimes tracking down a user is difficult, and with today's tight schedules, we do not always have time to wait. Using the System.M...

There are many projects to move graphics libraries (WinForms, GTK#, and OpenGL) and Java compatibility (IKVM, DotGNU, and JANET) to .NET; this month, I will focus on these and a couple of other projects.

I was recently called in as a consultant on a project requiring .NET connectivity to a Sybase 12.0 database. I had no idea where to find a driver for this database, but was quickly referred to DataDirect Technologies as a potential source for 'this kind of thing.' Much to my delight, ...

I came upon this book under very odd circumstances, to say the least. I am a developer first and foremost, so the suggestion by my employer that I sit through a half-day seminar on the art of making technical sales was greeted with less than enthusiasm.

This is the first installment of Dennis Hayes' Monkey Business column, which will supply news on open-source .NET implementations, including Rotor, sponsored by Microsoft; Mono, sponsored by Ximian (and headed up by Miguel de Icaza); and Rhys Weatherley's Portable.NET, from DotGNU.

The .NET Framework is an exciting and enabling technology, allowing developers using many different languages and platforms to share tools and components like never before. Open-source efforts to bring .NET to Linux and other platforms are starting to pay off, and I can't think of a be...

The Windows Forms namespace in .NET includes a number of classes for building Windows-based applications. One such class is the PictureBox control, which displays an image within a control window. This article shows how to extend the PictureBox control in a custom PhotoBox control that...

Introductory books are always a challenge to create, especially when they attempt to cover a topic as large as developing on the .NET Framework. However, at 350 pages and $35, Microsoft .NET for Programmers does an admirable job of skimming the cream off the surface and presenting it i...

I will always remember obtaining my advance copy of this manuscript, as it required a walk from my hotel room in lower Manhattan to the W Hotel in Times Square. The trip was well worth it, however!

(November 20, 2002) - It has often been said, 'You don't know what you've got until you lose it.' As I watched a recent demonstration of Infragistics' NetAdvantage Suite, it occurred to me that you also don't often realize what you're missing until you find it. Microsoft's ASP.NET te...

(March 7, 2003) - Networking is one of the core tasks of enterprise-level programming, and for the programmer familiar with the C# language, Professional .NET Network Programming will provide the information to put network programming at the heart of their .NET applications. The follow...