October 2003 - Posts
Visual Studio .NET 2002/2003 has great designer support for ADO.NET with Windows Forms and Web applications. However, I'm not doing data access directly from the presentation layer, but instead from components in a library.
Whidbey will have ADO.NET designer support for component libraries! This feature is not in the alpha builds, but it will be available with the Beta. :-)
Christian
.NET 2.0 has a new FtpWebRequest class to upload and download files to a FTP server. This class can be used similar to FileWebRequest and HttpWebRequest.
If you need such a class with 1.1 or want to extend WebRequest for other protocols, there is a FTP sample in the book Professional .NET Network Programming.
Christian
.NET 2 has new factories that makes it easier to write data-programs independent of the databsae.
With .NET 1.0, we could program independent of the database using interfaces:
IDbConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString);
IDbCommand command = connection.CreateCommand();
command.CommandText = "select * from customers";
connection.Open();
IDataReader reader = command.ExecuteReader();
while (reader.Read())
{
//...
The connection object can also be created with the Activator class - to make it independent of the database. What about creating a SqlDataAdapter? This needs to be done similar to the connection. A custom factory class is very useful with 1.0.
.NET 2.0 offers database-independent factory DBProviderFactory:
DbProviderFactory provider = DbProviderFactories.GetFactory ("System.Data.SqlClient");
DbConnection connection = provider.CreateConnection ();
DbDataAdapter adapter = provider.CreateDataAdapter ();
The available providers can be found in the configuration file.
Christian
PDC Information from the Microsoft Research keynote - Rick Rashid:
1998 Microsoft had the Terraserver with more than 1 TB data of satellite pictures from earth. Now we can look into the sky:
skyserver.sdss.org
10 TB of picture data, 1 TB catalog information.
Source code to access web services can be downloaded here:
www.skyserver.org
http://skyquery.net/
Christian
A new Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap 2004-2005(6) is available!
The article not only mentions the improvements of Whidbey, but also gives some information about Whitehourse (inluding pictures) which is a tool to design service-oriented applications and operations infrastructure simultaneously.
Christian
Chapter 2 is sent to the publisher :-)
This chapter covers contexts - discussing both COM+ and .NET Remoting contexts, and how they relate, as well as building a simple serviced component, JITA, and object pooling.
Christian
At PDC I've bought the new books from Al & Dave. Definitely worth having a look at: new ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and XML features.
A First Look at ASP.NET v 2.0
A First Look at ADO.NET and System Xml v 2.0
Every PDC attendee received the book "Introducing Longhorn for Developers" from Brent Rector. This book goes even more into the future. It seems that this book cannot be bought (the current edition) outside PDC.
Christian
Doug Purdy demonstrated versioned serialization in his presentation "Indigo: Using XSD, CLR Types, and Serialization in Web Services".
Until now the BinaryFormatter was not version-aware, that's why we always had to implement the ISerializable interface to deal with versioning. The attribute [OptionallySerializable] may now help! This attribute can be applied to types that are added with later versions of the class, and may not be deserialized.
The name of this attribute may change before the release.
Christian
With Indigo there's no longer the question to choose between .NET Remoting and ASP.NET Web Services.
Indigo covers all: Indigo Web Services and Indigo RemoteObject Services. ;-)
Christian
Indigo will not only be available with Longhorn, the bits will also be available with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Information from Don Box during his PDC presentation "Indigo: Services and the Future of Distributed Applications".
Update: Of course this doesn't mean that Indigo will be available before Longhorn. However, at that time it is not necessary to wait until all systems have been updated to Longhorn before this technology gets its real use.
Christian
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