Increase Your Reach and Your Market with the Microsoft® Stack   28 Sep 2007 02:25 GMT
When choosing a development platform for your product, it's time to look beyond the typical desktop deployment. Because of tight stack integration, the Microsoft® platform offers market opportunities—and the ability to deliver new functional capabilities and the participation in a strong partner ecosystem—you wouldn't have previously considered. Here's how you can extend the reach of your code into new markets and what you, the software developer, need to know to go there.
Source: DevX

An Extensive Examination of Web Services: Part 11   26 Sep 2007 00:00 GMT

The .NET Framework makes creating and consuming Web Services a walk in the park. Creating a Web Service is as easy as marking a class with the WebService attribute; Web Services can be easily consumed because the .NET Framework includes tools to build proxy classes given a Web Service's WSDL file. All of the examples we have seen in previous installments in this article series have consumed Web Services from server-side code. That is, a Web Service is consumed when a postback occurs and server-side code in an ASP.NET page creates an instance of the proxy class and invokes one of its methods.

In 2007 Microsoft released their free ASP.NET AJAX framework, which simplifies building AJAX-enabled ASP.NET applications (see An Introduction to AJAX and Atlas with ASP.NET 2.0 for more information). The ASP.NET AJAX framework is best known for its myriad of AJAX-enabled Web controls, but it also includes functionality to create and consume Web Services through client-side script. Best of all, the workflow for creating script-accessible Web Services is very similar to creating Web Services consumed through server-side .NET code. To mark a Web Service as being consumable from client script, simply add the ScriptService attribute; the service can be consumed through script via an auto-generated JavaScript proxy class.

In this article we'll look at how to use Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX framework to consume Web Services from script. We will also examine how the low-level communication differs between Web Services consumed from .NET code versus Web Services consumed from JavaScript. Read on to learn more!
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Source: 4GuysFromRolla

How Do I: Create a Language Service?   25 Sep 2007 13:45 GMT
In this video, Hilton Giesenow illustrates a simple working Language Service. He begins by building a simple scanner for colorising based on regular expressions, then expands on this to implement the Managed Babel framework, integrating MPLex and MPPG directly into the Visual Studio build as well.
Source: MSDN

Apply Visual Studio Code Analysis to Beef Up Security   20 Sep 2007 23:55 GMT
Visual Studio's code analysis feature offers hidden extensibility opportunities for writing custom security code review rules.
Source: DevX

Book Excerpt: ASP.NET AJAX in Action   19 Sep 2007 21:29 GMT
Find out how ASP.NET AJAX works, and how you can best apply it to your own web sites.
Source: DevX

Displaying Random Images in an ASP.NET Web Page   19 Sep 2007 00:00 GMT

As web developers, we most often focus on backend web developer, buring our noses in defining and implementing the business logic, building CRUDs, and designing reports. Rarely are we concerned about maintaining the appearance and style of the website. For developers working in medium- to large-sized companies, this poses no problem as there are graphic designers whose job it is to design a slick layout and periodically update it in order to keep the site from becoming stale. In smaller companies, however, oftentimes the web developer writing the backend code is also the one responsible for maintaining the frontend.

One easy and cost-effective way of keeping a site from becoming stale is to display different images on a page each time it is visited. Many corporate websites use this technique on their homepages. For example, the homepage might have a picture of a facility or employees in the upper right hand corner. Rather than showing a single, static picture, each time the homepage is visited a randomly selected image is displayed.

There are a couple of ways to display random images, and this article will look at two different approaches. The first technique covered in this article is to simply display a randomly selected image file from a directory of files. This simplistic approach is easy to implement but is limited in a number of ways. We'll also look at a more professional approach that utilizes a free, open-source ContentRotator control I created back in September 2005. With the my ContentRotator control where you can specify what images, exactly, are candidates for being displayed as well as how likely a particular image should be selected relative to the other images in the image set. Read on to learn more!
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Source: 4GuysFromRolla

Show() vs. ShowDialog() in .NET   18 Sep 2007 23:14 GMT
The form class' ShowDialog method functions differently than its Show method. This tip explains how.
Source: DevX

How Do I: Create a Multi-View Editor in Visual Studio?   18 Sep 2007 15:03 GMT
In this video, Hilton Giesenow demonstrates how to create a multi-view editor that saves and loads two linked files in the same editor window in Visual Studio.
Source: MSDN

XML to Schema Tool   17 Sep 2007 23:59 GMT
The XML to Schema tool is a free project item template to automate creation of XML schema sets from any number of XML documents. If you are working with Language Integrated Queries (LINQ) to XML in Visual Basic 9, this utility can significantly improve your editing experience by adding XML schemas (.xsd files) to your project that add IntelliSense for XML properties.
Source: MSDN

Visual Basic Pack for Visual Studio 2005 SDK   17 Sep 2007 23:58 GMT
The Visual Basic Pack for the Visual Studio 2005 SDK includes SDK samples converted into the Visual Basic language and a new wizard for generating Visual Basic-based integration packages for Visual Studio.
Source: MSDN