Liberty on Beta 2
Building a Complex Custom Control: Rolodex  This article marks the end of "Liberty on Whidbey" and the beginning of a new column: "Liberty On Beta 2." Each article will demonstrate a real-world problem Jesse's had to solve for a client, and will leave you with a complete design and working code. Jesse had a customer who asked for a complex Windows application that would let him scroll through a list of customers, suppliers, or employees, using the visual metaphor of a Rolodex, much as he might look at contacts in Outlook.   [ONDotnet.com]

Building Web Parts, Part 3  In this last installment of his Web Parts series, Wei-Meng Lee will show you how to let users dynamically add Web Parts to page and how to restore Web Parts that they have closed.   [ONDotnet.com]

Generics in .NET 2.0  Using generics in .NET 2.0 screams of potential. But what are generics? Are they for you? Should you use them in your apps? Venkat Subramaniam, author of .NET Gotchas, answers these questions and take a closer look at using generics, and their capabilities and limitations.   [O'Reilly Network]

Refactoring with Visual Studio Macros  Refactoring is a method of improving your code without breaking or modifying the external functionality of your application. Refactoring has been growing in popularity partially because it is one of the key practices of extreme programming and because it goes hand in hand with test driven development. Refactoring consists of a plethora of different small changes (or “refactorings”) that you can make to your code. These changes are small enough to quickly test and have a low risk factor, but in total, they increase the overall quality of your code base or application. In this new article,James Avery discusses a macro approach to refactoring.   [O'Reilly Network]

Porting a Project from Visual Studio .NET to Mono  Three years ago, when .NET was still in pre-release status, Kevin Farnham developed a C# application to automatically generate stock market web pages. Recently, he ported the project to Mono and Debian Linux. Follow along to see how the port went.   [ONDotnet.com]

Liberty on Whidbey
Liberty on Whidbey: What's New in Beta 2: Web Parts Revisited  Jesse Liberty has been working with Whidbey (.NET 2005) for a little over a year, and believes that .NET 2005 2.0 is a great improvement over 1.x. That said, the beta has had a bit of a hard time settling down, and so many of the earlier columns he wrote about Whidbey are, at best, a bit out of date. In this column he revisits, fixes, and expands on one of his favorite 2.0 features: Web Parts.   [ONDotnet.com]

Building Web Parts, Part 2  In part one of this series, Wei-Meng Lee discussed how to create Web Parts and configure them to look good. But he didn't touch on one of the most important feature of Web Parts; that is, how to let users move the Web Parts from one zone to another. In this article, he shows you how to move Web parts and how you can configure Web Parts to make use of SQL Server 2000.   [ONDotnet.com]

Refactoring Support for Visual Basic 2005  Microsoft recently announced that they have teamed up with Developer Express Inc. to release Refactor! for Visual Basic 2005 Beta 2, a free plugin for Visual Studio that enables Visual Basic developers to simplify and restructure source code inside of Visual Studio 2005. Wei-Meng Lee walks you through the new refactoring.   [ONDotnet.com]

Building Web Parts, Part 1  Web sites today contain a wealth of information; so much that a poorly designed site can easily overwhelm users. To better help users cope, portal web sites today (such as MSN) often organize their data into discrete units that support a degree of personalization. In this first of three articles, Wei-Meng Lee discusses how to use Web Parts for user customization in your ASP.NET 2.0 web sites.   [ONDotnet.com]

Liberty on Whidbey
Putting A Browser Into Your Windows Application  There are times when it would be awfully convenient to have the capabilities of Internet Explorer inside your Windows application. The classic case is when you want to look at an XML document, and you'd like to take advantage of IE's ability to show the document as a collapsible and expandable hierarchy. In this article, Jesse Liberty will show you how to do that, in just a few easy steps.   [O'Reilly Network]

C# Generics: Collection Interfaces  The .NET framework provides two sets of standard interfaces for enumerating and comparing collections: the traditional (non-type-safe) and the new generic type-safe collections. In this excerpt from Programming C#, 4th Edition, Jesse Liberty focuses on the key type-safe collection interfaces, reviewing each collection interface and providing code examples that demonstrate how to implement each one.   [O'Reilly Network]

Liberty on Whidbey
XML DataSource Controls in .NET 2.0  With .NET 2.0's XML DataSource control, you can bind to an XML document just as easily as you bind to tables in a database. If the XML document you load is hierarchical, the data is exposed hierarchically, which makes it ideal for mapping an XML document to a TreeView control. Jesse Liberty explains how the XML DataSource works in ASP.NET.   [ONDotnet.com]

Building .NET Add-Ins for Windows Media Center Edition  Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 is an exciting platform for enjoying all of your media from the comfort of your sofa. However, in many cases you might wish to extend Media Center to perform functionality that it does not have "out of the box." Microsoft has created a software development kit that lets you write your own software that runs in Media Center. In this article, Michael Earls shows you how to write your first .NET add-in for Media Center Edition of Windows XP.   [ONDotnet.com]

Liberty on Whidbey
Enhanced Text Input in Windows Forms 2.0  Visual Studio 2005 provides enhanced controls for managing data input in Whidbey. To get you started, Jesse Liberty takes a look at the masked editing control, which allows you to restrict the input from a user that a Windows Form will accept and to control how it is displayed by using a mask.   [O'Reilly Network]

Miguel de Icaza Explains How To "Get" Mono  It's perhaps the most controversial project in the open source world, but this mostly stems from misunderstanding: Mono, the open source development platform based upon Microsoft's .NET framework. Immediate reactions from many dubious Linux developers have ranged from confusion over its connection with .NET to wondering what the benefits of developing under it are. Throughout the course of its four years of intense development, sponsored by Novell, Mono founder Miguel de Icaza has had to frequently clarify the .NET issue and sell the community on it. In this new interview, Howard Wen asks Miguel to explain himself one more time.   [ONDotnet.com]

An Introduction to Developing Software for Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005  At a recent consumer electronics show, Bill Gates suggested that the Media Center PC would be the centerpiece for combining online entertainment sources with existing video sources. As Sean Alexander (a product manager for Media Center) later suggested, Windows Media Center Edition will be the "hub for whole-home entertainment". Windows XP Media Center Edition allows you to do those things today. Michael Earls starts you out with how to write applications for Windows Media Center.   [ONDotnet.com]

Liberty on Whidbey
Enhanced Text Input in Windows Forms 2.0  Visual Studio 2005 provides enhanced controls for managing data input in Whidbey. In this new column by Jesse Liberty, he discusses the advanced WinForms Text Input control.   [ONDotnet.com]

Liberty on Whidbey
Data Binding in ASP.NET 2.0  Not only has Microsoft made radical changes in how data binding is done between ASP.NET 1.x and 2.0, but it has also created significant differences between how it is done in Windows Forms and ASP.NET in 2.0. This keeps life interesting (Jesse Liberty says, gnashing his teeth). In this new column, he dives into data binding in the new Web Forms.   [ONDotnet.com]

Encrypting Connection Strings in Web.config  One of the best practices in ASP.NET is to save your database connection strings in the Web.config file instead of hard-coding it in your code. It's not such a good idea to save your connection strings as plain text in Web.config – you should ideally encrypt the connection strings so it leaves no chance for a potential hacker to easily get more information about your database server. In ASP.NET 2.0, Microsoft has taken this further by allowing you to encrypt the connection strings in Web.config, all without much plumbing on your part. In this new article by Wei-Meng Lee, he shows you how it works!   [ONDotnet.com]

Building Mono on Windows  Mono, the open source implementation of the CLR, is not just for non-Microsoft platforms. Kevin Shockey walks you through the three phases required to build Mono on Windows without using the .NET framework.   [ONDotnet.com]

Click here for all .NET articles listed in chronological order.

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