(Wei-Meng Lee) Biometric recognition is one of the most reliable ways to confirm the identity of an individual. And by now, many people are undoubtedly familiar with the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader (see Figure 1).

(Wen Ding) Visual Studio 2005 Team System includes a newly designed load test tool. Formerly code-named "Ocracoke," this new tool provides many exciting features you can use for performance and stress testing your Web sites, Web services, and other server components. And, combined with its handy rep

(Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi) In previous versions of Visual Studio, the build process was mostly a black box, and there were few things that you could do to customize your build process. With the release of Visual Studio 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, your managed projects can be built using

(Peter Aitken) Geometric transforms let you take an image and distort it in some way, such as rotation, translation, flipping, or stretching. Geometric transforms are a rather complex topic and are well beyond explaining in a single article. But you can learn and use one very handy aspect of transfo

(Hannes du Preez) As a Visual Basic programmer, you are likely to encounter the Windows API. This article will explain in detail what the Windows API is, as well as the different implementations of the API in Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET.

(Eric Smith) When I’m writing Web applications, I may need to use lots of objects at various times while the application is running, but I generally don’t always need all of them. Each object that gets instantiated takes system memory, and I try to keep my applications as small as possible for the b

(Iqbal M. Khan) Caching greatly improves application performance because it reduces expensive trips to the database. But, if you want to use caching in your application, you must decide what to cache and where to put your caching code. The answer is simple. Cache your domain objects and put caching

(Peter Nichols) The advent of ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 Express has kicked the door wide open for creating integrated applications. Many of the security tasks required for an applications authentication and authorization mechanisms to be hooked into Active Directory have been dramatically s

(Steve Schofield) This article covers some basic steps and commands to encrypt your connection string and other items in a configuration file using ASP.NET 2.0. Microsoft has made it easier to have a portable key that encrypts certain sections in a web.config that are normally clear text. I have not

(Scott Mitchell) A common website user interface pattern is a list of items with a checkbox in each row. The archetypical example is the web-based email client, which allows a series of messages to be selected by checking that email’s checkbox. Once one or more emails have been selected, the user ca