Robyn and Phil tackle the topic of how to make .NET applications perform well. As usual, they try to take a terse, practical approach to the mysteries of JIT, CLR and GC. After giving many performance tips, they come to the conclusion that rules and tips are less useful than rolling up your sleeves and measuring or profiling everything possible, to see what's really happening with your application.… Read more
Dan Archer documents his epic struggle with an apparently simple task of authenticating user credentials. For some reason, a task that should be performed by a simple API call leads to a great deal of head-scratching and googling.… Read more
If you want to get serious with Unit Testing, then you'll need to understand how to extend the NUnit framework in different ways for your own particular test requirements and how to tailor test behaviour. Test Expert Ben Hall, of the SQL Generator team, shows how it is done, with special reference to the art of testing SQL code.… Read more
Generics in C#, enable you to define classes, interfaces, delegates or methods with placeholders for parameterized types used within. This allows you to define classes that use a generic type, and define the type at the time of instantiation or method calls. This makes your code strongly typed, but makes maintenance easier.
Prasanna describes the improvements in .NET v3.5
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John Bower steps up a gear, produces a Lamborghini, and examines the process of using a high-speed function loop to create a fast-paced Silverlight application.… Read more
Sometimes, silly programs have a less obvious useful purpose. Andrew Clarke takes his classic 'Waffle Generator', and provides it in various forms, including a CSS Stylesheet tester, and as a Generator for SQL Data Generator. The Waffle Generator puts text into your test database!… Read more
Webservices without tears? Popup maps in your websites? Word-completion? Ajax-based Search-engines? No problems, with Daniel's sample application to guide you.… Read more
Because MSbuild underpins the Visual Studio 'build' process, you can use MSBuild to explore and extend the build process to suit your needs. If you are finding the job of building Microsoft .NET applications tedious , the chances are that there is a way that using 'extended MSBuild' for your automated builds will save you time, effort and code.
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If there is one thing that developers and users always seem to disagree on, it is the relative importance of documentation. We take a look at the whole technology of producing Help and Documentation for tools and applications, and then review one particular product; EC Software's Help & Manua… Read more
Improving the performance of your application often boils down to rephrasing the problem you are trying to solve. James discusses common pitfalls and problems when creating applications in .NET.… Read more
The ASP.NET GridView is great for very simple tables, but the real world is not always as straightforward as we would like it to be. Sometimes we need to specify the format of the data from the database, and the way it is rendered in the table, more exactly.… Read more
Just when it seemed that there were were no adequate scripting systems for DBAs that could access .NET, along came two. Powershell and Python.… Read more
LINQ may be getting the most attention in the forthcoming .NET 3.5, but there are also several new language features that add functionality and make life easier for the programmer. John Papa explains more...
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The users of your application will be more likely to tolerate pauses in your application whilst processing goes on, if you provide a 'waiting' page.… Read more
Take a look at how you can increase productivity and reduce maintenance with your ASP.NET 2.0 website, as Dan Wahlin shares his techniques for handling master pages.… Read more
Francis Norton shows how to use regular expressions to fulfil some real world data validation requirements, demonstrating techniques ranging from simple number format checks, to complex string validation that requires use of regex's powerful "lookahead" feature.… Read more
If you would like to learn how to build and customize your very own Windows service to retrieve posts from multiple RSS feeds, and then store those posts in a SQL Server database, let John Papa guide you through his tutorial.… Read more
Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX Extensions provide developers with a quick and simple way to add AJAX functionality into any ASP.NET Website. In this article, Dan Wahlin demonstrates how to use the UpdatePanel control, which performs asynchronous postback operations that update a portion of a page rather than the entire page itself. … Read more
See for yourself the flexibility of XAML, as Jesse Liberty and Alex Horovitz show you how to create an interactive Windows application declaratively, in .NET 3.0.… Read more
