February 2003 - Posts
If you are developing applications targetting Oracle database, you will be better off using Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET), an Oracle database-access API for use with the Microsoft .NET environment. Check out this article which discusses the ODP.NET's usage, features, and performance improvements.
On the heels of success of VBTV, comes now MSDN TV.
MSDN TV is a short bi-weekly show featuring useful technology tips and insights from the behind-the-scenes folks at Microsoft.
First episode: AppSettings in ASP.NET. Cool !!
You can add search shortcuts in IE 6 very easily. Just create a text file (save it as .reg file and later merge it with the registry by double-clicking it) and enter the following information:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\G]
@="http://www.google.com/search?q=%s"
Next time you need to search google, just type G <search item> in the address bar.
Microsoft is redesigning the MSDN home page. You got to chose from three prototypes. Which one did you like? I voted for the third one. It's the cleanest of all with lots of white space and has got a sort of portal feel to it.
An article on Site Skinning in the March 2003 edition of MSDN magazine.
One way that Web sites and applications become better able to meet the needs of customers is by allowing them to personalize their experience. For Web sites, this means displaying the content as the user wants to see it. For rich-client applications, this often means allowing the user to choose the user interface through a technique known as skinning, which is similar to themes in Windows XP. This article shows how you can apply skinning to Web sites, wrapping their functionality in a new user interface. The technique uses the rich XML classes in the .NET Framework and the built-in extensibility of ASP.NET.
This is so cool, a pen-based forms design tool for Visual Studio.Net. This was demo'ed in VSLive! and Shawn writes that they wowed a late-evening tired crowd. I ask who won't get wowed by such a tool, the dead ones are already turning up in their graves....:)
[via Shawn A. Van Ness's Blog]
I answered a question on a Microsoft .Net newsgroup about an error that a guy was getting when he tried to add a web reference to a .vsdisco file. The error that he was getting:
"The document was not recognized as a known document type (WSDL, XML Schema, or Discovery document) for the following reason: - the content type 'application/octet-stream' is not valid for an XML document."
Well, I kind of knew the answer that .vsdisco HTTP handler got disabled during the final release of .Net framework and you could enable it by removing the comments in the machine.config file for vsdisco entry. But why would MS do that. Here's the answer by Aaron Skonnard. MSDN has another security article which discusses the decision to comment out .vsdisco http handler.
Found an implementation of HTML tree graph on an unknown weblog to me. I really liked it. Basically it uses XSLT to convert a XML file to pure HTML. But then this guy had used Java to convert the XML to HTML. Well, apparently one line does this in ASP.Net. This line:
<asp:Xml id="myXml" DocumentSource="tree.xml" TransformSource="tree.xslt" runat="server" />
Here's the output:
In this article Quilogy Senior Consultant and Trainer Bob Kimbrough shows you what it takes to create MDI application with the Windows .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET.
I miss those days when I was content making MDI applications using VB 6. Looking back, for the last three years I have not made a single Windows Forms application. It has been all Web stuff.
CNet News.com reports:
Microsoft plans to embed a business-reporting feature into its SQL Server database software, a move that will likely cause jitters among specialized business-reporting software companies.
I love companies throwing such surprises. This will be very interesting to see how Crystal Decisions and other vendors react to this development. Crystal Decisions already ships Crystal Reports with Visual Studio.Net.
More Posts
Next page »