(Tony Patton) Web Parts are one of the more interesting features in ASP.NET 2.0. They are a new family of controls available for building dynamic Web interfaces that allow users to easily customize or personalize a page. Web Parts are components that users can display, hide, or move. This week, I pr

(Jon Rista) One of the wonderful features of .NET has been its XML configuration features. In the days of .NET 1.x, common application settings, database connection strings, ASP.NET web server configuration, and basic custom configuration data could be stored in a .config file. Custom configuration

(Eric Smith) You often need to compare strings (or other data types), but sometimes a value could be null or DBNull if it’s coming from the database. The built-in C# comparison functions don’t handle nulls properly, so I wrote a couple of functions to take care of this for me.

(Thiru Thangarathinam) The first installment of this three-part article series introduced the core concepts of ADO.NET vNext, including the Entity Data Model (EDM), Entity SQL, and the Mapping Provider. It also discussed the steps involved in executing entity SQL queries against the EDM and retrievi

(Muhammad Mosa) A transaction is a unit of work. You use transactions to ensure the consistency and integrity of a database. If a transaction is successful, all of the data modifications performed during the transaction are committed and made permanent. If an error occurs during a transaction, you c

(Tony Patton) I have been working with Web development projects for over a decade, so I have had the opportunity to use various technologies as the Web evolved. I often encounter new Web developers preaching the latest and greatest technologies, but the truth is, there are plenty of functioning Web

(Ed Tittel) Those who read my tips for SearchVB know that I devote at least one third of my coverage to the topic of cool tools for visual development environments, with an emphasis on Visual Studio and Visual Basic .NET. With an aim of revisiting some of the best from this year in time for Yule,

(Matthew David) One of the four foundations in .NET 3.0 is the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), an overhaul of the presentation interface of all Windows applications. The typical interface has worked well for 20 years, but the time has come for a change.

(Jayant Kulkarni) While browsing through the Net, I came across many articles on events and delegates. But, I did not find any articles that cover most of the contents under one roof. This article is an attempt to do just that.

(Brian Brewder) Application security is important, but how secure is secure enough? If you are writing an online Advent calendar, security probably isn’t that important. On the other hand, if you are writing software that triggers a nuclear device, security will probably be the primary feature (it p