ASP.NET 2.0 CSS Friendly Control Adapters 1.0 Released!   01 Dec 2006 00:56 GMT
Have you ever wanted to emit standards compliant and CSS based markup rather than the default table based markup provided in ASP.NET 2.0? Adaptive control behavior in ASP.NET 2.0 gives you the ability to customize the functionality of ASP.NET controls.
Source: MSDN

Migrating Apps to Modern Times   30 Nov 2006 22:05 GMT
For software companies that are ready for bigger markets, Redmond has designed the NXT initiative to help ISVs adopt the Microsoft platform and find delivery partners with specific experience in technology migration and modernization.
Source: DevX

Using Microsoft Robotics Studio to Program Parallax's Boe-Bot   30 Nov 2006 01:18 GMT
With the newly released Microsoft Robotics Studio and Parallax's Boe-Bot Robot Kit, which uses Bluetooth technology, robotic programming has become accessible to anyone with .NET programming skills.
Source: DevX

Iterate Through Characters in a String Using String.ToCharArray   29 Nov 2006 20:43 GMT
Learn how to use String.ToCharArray to iterate easily through a string.
Source: DevX

Creating CSS Friendly Websites with ASP.NET 2.0   29 Nov 2006 00:00 GMT

One of the features of ASP.NET 1.0 was its adaptive rendering capabilities that allowed for the markup rendered by an ASP.NET web page to be appropriate for the visiting browser. In short, when an ASP.NET page is visited its Web controls are rendered into markup that is sent down to the browser and displayed. The markup generated by the Web controls, however, depends upon the browser being used to visit the page. When visited by an "uplevel browser" ASP.NET Web controls render HTML 4.0-compliant markup; for "downlevel" browsers, the Web controls render HTML 3.2-compliant markup. In ASP.NET 1.x, browsers were labeled as "uplevel" or "downlevel" via the <browserCaps> element in machine.config or web.config (one downside of ASP.NET 1.x was that, by default, only IE 4.0 and up was marked as "uplevel" meaning modern browsers like FireFox and Opera were flagged as downlevel). See A Look at ASP.NET's Adaptive Rendering for more information on ASP.NET 1.x's adaptive rendering functionality.

ASP.NET 2.0 provides the same adaptive rendering as ASP.NET 1.x, although a browser's capabilities are determined by Browser Definition Files rather than a <browserCaps> element. (<browserCaps> support still exists in ASP.NET 2.0 for backwards compatibility, but has been deprecated and its use should therefore be avoided.) In addition to adaptive rendering, ASP.NET 2.0's rendering framework also can be configured using control adapters. A control adapter is an optional class that, if present and properly configured, is used to render the Web control instead of using the control's default rendering logic. In short, using control adapters you can take the core functionality of a Web control, but completely customize the markup emitted. This is useful if you want to modify the default rendering for all browsers or if there are particular user agents - certain cell phones or portable devices, perhaps - for which you need to provide a customized rendering.

A good example of the power of ASP.NET 2.0's control adapters can be seen with the ASP.NET 2.0 CSS Friendly Control Adapters. This set of free control adapters, released by Microsoft, provide a set of control adapters that render a variety of built-in ASP.NET controls using preferred CSS techniques. For example, by default the Menu Web control renders as an HTML <table>; with the control adapters, however, the Menu is rendered as an unordered list using CSS positioning to appropriately display the menu. Moreover, the CSS control adapters ignore any control-level style settings that would get rendered as inline style elements in the rendered markup and instead require that style information be separated out and specified via CSS classes.

In addition to a control adapter for the Menu control, the CSS Friendly Control Adapters include adapters for the TreeView, GridView, DataList, DetailsView, Login, CreateUserWizard, and a variety of other controls. In this article we'll look at how to get started with the CSS Friendly Control Adapters and how they can clean up and improve the markup of your website. Read on to learn more!
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Source: 4GuysFromRolla

When and How to Use Dispose and Finalize in C#   27 Nov 2006 22:36 GMT
Although the .NET framework frees managed memory and resources transparently, it's not as adept at freeing unmanaged resources; you have to help it out by implementing the Dispose and Finalize patterns in your code.
Source: DevX

.NET Matters: Deserialization Progress, and More   22 Nov 2006 20:59 GMT
Stephen Toub shows how to track deserialization progress of a BinaryFormatter and display the result in a progress bar.
Source: MSDN

Service Station: Web Service Software Factory   22 Nov 2006 20:48 GMT
Web Service Software Factory is designed to help you build Web service solutions that follow known architecture and design patterns, as Aaron Skonnard explains here.
Source: MSDN

Netting C++: The Design Space of the Common Type System   22 Nov 2006 20:46 GMT
Stanley Lippman moves his TQL application to the Microsoft .NET Framework using the C++/CLI language extensions in Visual C++ 2005.
Source: MSDN

Cutting Edge: The Client Side of ASP.NET Pages   22 Nov 2006 20:15 GMT
This month Dino Esposito dissects the client-side source code generated by ASP.NET pages.
Source: MSDN