Capture Signatures Remotely from Your Pocket PC   14 Dec 2006 04:24 GMT
You don't have to work for Federal Express to outfit your delivery or salesforce with a remote signature capture and transmission feature. With just a Pocket PC and the simple instructions herein, you'll soon be sending John Hancocks to and from your server with accuracy and grace.
Source: DevX

Critical Security Update for Visual Studio 2005   13 Dec 2006 22:04 GMT
Microsoft has released security bulletin MS06-073. The security bulletin contains all the relevant information about the security update. This information includes file manifest information and deployment options.
Source: MSDN

Output Caching in ASP.NET 2.0   13 Dec 2006 00:00 GMT

One of the most sure-fire ways to improve a web application's performance is to employ caching. Caching takes some expensive operation and stores its results in a quickly accessible location. ASP.NET version 1.0 introduced two flavors of caching:

• Output Caching - caches the entire rendered markup of an ASP.NET web page or User Control for a specified duration.
• Data Caching - a programmatically-accessible, in-memory data cache for storing objects in the web server's memory.

For a more in-depth discussion on ASP.NET 1.x's caching capabilities, refer to Scott McFarland's Caching with ASP.NET and Steve Smith's ASP.NET Caching: Techniques and Best Practices articles.

In ASP.NET 2.0, the caching system has been extended to include SQL cache dependencies, cache profiles, and post-cache substitution for output cached pages. The Caching for Performance section of the ASP.NET 2.0 QuickStarts provides a good overview of ASP.NET 2.0's caching options. This article explores output caching in ASP.NET 2.0, starting with an overview of output caching and followed by a detailed look at creating pages that include both cached and non-cached markup using fragment caching and post-cache substitution techniques. Read on to learn more!
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Source: 4GuysFromRolla

Explore ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part Infrastructure   12 Dec 2006 04:17 GMT
Web Parts can help you build better Web sites. Find out why and learn the ins and outs of building and deploying them.
Source: DevX

ADO.NET vNext Part 2: Using the Object Services Layer   08 Dec 2006 18:04 GMT
The Entity Data Model and ADO.NET vNext let you deal with tabular data as objects, eliminating much of the effort endemic to older data-retrieval and modification code.
Source: DevX

VPC Image of IE6 on Windows XP SP2 Available   07 Dec 2006 20:18 GMT
You can now get a Virtual PC Image of Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows XP SP2 as a free download for testing purposes. Now you can test your Web applications from one machine using IE 6 and IE 7.
Source: MSDN

Free Sample Chapters and 45% off Select Visual Studio 2005 Books   06 Dec 2006 17:56 GMT
For a limited time, download free sample chapters and take advantage of 45% off select Visual Studio 2005 titles. Offer is good until January 15, 2007.
Source: MSDN

Storing Binary Files Directly in the Database Using ASP.NET 2.0   06 Dec 2006 00:00 GMT

In building a data-driven application, oftentimes both text and binary data needs to be captured. Applications might need to store images, PDFs, Word documents, or other binary data. Such binary data can be stored in one of two ways: on the web server's file system, with a reference to the file in the database; or directly in the database itself.

Text data - things like strings, numbers, dates, GUIDs, currency values, and so on - all have appropriate and corresponding data types defined in the database system being used. With Microsoft SQL Server, for example, to store an integer value you'd use the int data type; to store a string value you would likely use a column of type varchar or nvarchar. Databases also have types defined to hold binary data. In Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and earlier, use the image data type; for SQL Server 2005, use the varbinary(MAX) data type. In either case, these data types can hold binary data up to 2GB in size.

When storing binary data directly in the database, a bit of extra work is required to insert, update, and retrieve the binary data. Fortunately, the complex, low-level T-SQL needed to perform this work is neatly abstracted away through higher-level data access libraries, like ADO.NET. Regardless, working with binary data through ADO.NET is a bit different than working with text data. In this article we will examine how to use ADO.NET and the ASP.NET 2.0SqlDataSource control to store and retrieve image files directly from a database. Read on to learn more!
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Source: 4GuysFromRolla

Build Custom Code Generators in C#   05 Dec 2006 00:13 GMT
You don't have to rely on libraries and frameworks to avoid writing repetitive code; instead, learn to generate such code automatically, using a custom input format to describe the code you want to generate.
Source: DevX

An Easy Way to Find All Open Forms in VB.NET   04 Dec 2006 22:25 GMT
Use this method to determine whether a form is open.
Source: DevX