(Phil Curnow) The original aim of this article was to explain Up-casting and Down-casting. Having started writing the article, I was struggling to find an ideal way to describe these two concepts. Having thought further about it, one way I found was to introduce the concept of polymorphism to help e

(Joe Gillespie) The next couple of pages are about palettes. Colour palettes were very important in the early days of the Web when most people used monitors that could only display 256 colours or less. These systems are now becoming increasingly rare and the dithering problems associated with restri

(Hannes Foulds) I have spend most of my professional career in a Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Content Management server 2002 environment and have learned to appreciate the value of custom WebControls – In SharePoint we have WebParts which are just glorified WebControls and in MCMS 2002 we have

(Cyrus Peikari and Seth Fogie) The proper implementation of Security and Electronic Signature Standards (SESS) requires a formal and procedural approach. This is accomplished by creating a series of comprehensive policies that address the many security issues facing your organization. From the initi

(cigwork) One of the redeeming features of VB.NET — and VB before it — is the ease with which it is possible to create indexed properties.

(Scott Swigart) A Microsoft Visual Basic 6 application can access .NET class libraries, but to do so, it must go through an interoperability layer, known as a client callable wrapper. This wraps the desired .NET class, and exposes it so that it appears as a traditional COM object, which can be used

(Michael Sorens) With the visual designer of Visual Studio 2005 it’s simple and straightforward to stir together a database connection, a SQL query, and a DataGridView control to get a Windows WYSIWYG application. Toss in a few buttons, a dollop of labels, and a text box or two, and you can provide

(Sanjit Sil) A transaction is a set of operations that must either succeed or fail as a unit. The goal of a transaction is to ensure that data is always in a valid, consistent state. For example, consider a transaction that transfers $1000 from account A to account B; clearly there are two transacti

(Bryan Sullivan) Some of the most common and dangerous application security vulnerabilities that exist in ASP.NET Web-based applications come not from the C# or VB.NET code that make up its pages and service methods, but instead from the XML code that makes up its Web.config files. Incorrect configu

(Alex Homer) The first article in this series showed how to create custom configuration sections in your ASP.NET application configuration file, while the second article demonstrated using Windows Group Policy at both the machine and domain level to control configuration settings from a central loca