(Graeme Simsion) Imagine you’re in an elevator, and someone asks (as they do in elevators) “what’s the purpose of data modeling?”. My guess, supported by some research, is that your between-floors response will include the theme of communication – and particularly communication with business stakeh

(Paul Kimmel) Archimedes is quoted as having said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I can move the earth.” This statement endures because it introduces a concept so powerful and simple that it can profoundly change lives. A lever and fulcrum can move a much greater mass than can direct forc

(Irina Medvinskaya) Windows stores some important information (e.g., computer name and user name) in the environment variables. The ability to access these variables to retrieve their values comes in handy in many applications. In this tip, I look at how you can use VB.NET to retrieve the informatio

(John Peterson) The advent of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was a huge leap forward in document presentation on the web. Using CSS, you were finally able to separate a document’s content from the associated layout and presentation information. With the inclusion of Themes in ASP.NET 2.0, Microsoft ha

(Dipal Choksi) ASP.NET 2.0 allows storing connectionString elements within the connectionStrings section in web.config. The web.config section containing connection strings can be encrypted for security. The connectionStrings section is commonly used in most applications as the intuitive location fo

(Noe A. Gutierez) Throughout the years, I have been witness to many Data Warehousing projects that started as an effort to help the business users make business decisions using information and along the way transformed into data centralization exercises. Somewhere during the project execution, the t

(Scott Mitchell) When a user clicks a submit button in a form, their browser makes a request back to the web server for the specified URL. On the web server, the user’s input is processed and some action is taken based on the input. A database record might be added, an email might be sent, and so on

(Rick Strahl) ASP.NET is a powerful platform for building Web applications, that provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and power for building just about any kind of Web application. Most people are familiar only with the high level frameworks like WebForms and WebServices which sit at the very

(Namratha Shah) Wizard control is newly added in ASP.NET 2.0. This control enables us to create an wizard based interface for a user. Typically a wizard interface will be used when we require a user to input a lot of data. Wizard enables us to take the data from the user a series of multiple steps.

(Tony Patton) As Microsoft works on version 3.0 of its .NET Framework, more developers are turning their attention to .NET development. Thankfully, getting started with .NET is easy with the tools freely available from Microsoft.