Tell Us What You Think: The Second ONDotnet Survey  We're asking ONDotnet readers to participate in our second online survey. We've sweetened the pot with a chance to win books and MAKE magazine subscriptions. Here's how it works.   [.NET]

C#: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: An Interview with Anders Hejlsberg, Part 1  Anders Hejlsberg, in charge of the ongoing development of the C# programming language for Microsoft, talks about the past, present, and future of C#. Among other topics, he covers the implementation of C# generics (compared to Java), nullable types, and how language integrated query is implemented.   [.NET]

What Is ASP.NET  Part of the .NET framework, ASP.NET allows developers to build dynamic web apps and web services using compiled languages like VB.NET and C#. Wei-Meng Lee provides a look under the ASP.NET hood, describing how it works, its improved support in areas like state management and tracing and debugging, and important new features in version 2.0. Wei-Meng is the author of ASP.NET: A Developer's Notebook.   [.NET]

What Is .NET  .NET is probably one of the more muddled and mismanaged brands in the history of Microsoft. Elucidator James Avery clarifies things by describing the two chambers at the heart of .NET: the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and its essential components, and the Base Class Library (BCL) and its major features.   [O'Reilly Network]

What Is Visual Studio  What can you really do with Visual Studio? James Avery discusses some of the various applications you can build using Visual Studio, some of its most compelling development features, and what you need to know to get started writing quality applications in Visual Studio. James is the author of Visual Studio Hacks.   [ONDotnet.com]

Localization in ASP.NET 2.0  The Web is an international place. Why shouldn't your websites be ready for international visitors? With the introduction of ASP.NET 2.0, Microsoft aims to make it easy to localize your website for individual users, no matter where they hail from. Wei-Meng Lee shows you how you can localize your ASP.NET 2.0 web applications.   [ONDotnet.com]

Calling Web Services Asynchronously  Making synchronous calls to web services can be problematic on occasion, because they have the potential to cause considerable delay. The reason for this is the manner in which synchronous calls work: the application blocks the client until the web service call returns. To overcome the necessity of having to wait for the web service response, we can call web services asynchronously. Raj Makkapati walks you through how to call web services asynchronously.   [ONDotnet.com]

Understanding the BackgroundWorker Component  Multithreading is one of the most powerful concepts in programming. Using multithreading, you can break a complex task into multiple threads that execute independently of one another. By default, your Windows application uses a single thread of execution. Wei-Meng Lee shows you how multithreading has been simplified in VB2005 using the BackgroundWorker component.   [ONDotnet.com]

Important Notice for ONDotNet Readers About O'Reilly RSS and Atom Feeds  O'Reilly Media, Inc. is rolling out a new syndication mechanism that provides greater control over the content we publish online. Here's information to help you update your existing RSS and Atom feeds to O'Reilly content.  [ONDotnet.com]

Unit Testing in .NET Projects  Now is a pretty exciting time for unit testing in .NET. Tremendous progress is being made on several fronts: IDE integration, process integration, and new test fixtures. Jay Flowers and Andrew Stopford explain how to use Visual Studio's new integrated unit testing, as well as the NUnit and MbUnit testing frameworks.   [ONDotnet.com]

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
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]

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

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