(Jim Ericson) When businesses negotiate price with technology vendors or consider new projects internally, they frequently demand persuasive proof of a positive return on investment as a requirement to go forward. Often described as the time it takes to recover the cost of an investment with a r

(Dino Esposito) Server controls are the building blocks of any ASP.NET application. Any change to a control’s architecture may have ramifications on the whole application — which can be both good and bad. New features added to a base class can benefit a slew of top-level controls; changes in the int

(Tony Patton) I thought it was finally time to take Visual Studio 2005 for a test drive with the availability of the release candidate version and the final product to be shipped in November. There is plenty of hype surrounding the product’s November 7, 2005 release and its related products like ver

(Scot Hillier) I never cease to be amazed at how much time and effort organizations put into preparing spreadsheets and documents to handle basic business functions like accounts receivable and invoicing. Much of this time is spent on repetitive tasks that could be easily automated. Smart documents

(Amirthalingam Prasanna) This article explains how to use .NET 2.0’s data provider factory classes to develop a pluggable data layer that is independent of database type and ADO.NET data provider.

(Pradeep Kishore Gowda) One of Python’s appeals is its simplicity. Python does not enforce any kind of ‘style’ by default (well, apart from the indentation). This contributes to programmers’ carrying over their previous language’s ‘best-practices’ into Python. A lot of times, these practices end up

(Chris Peters) Part of Microsoft’s grand design for the way computer users conduct business includes the concept of using .NET Web services. This month, I present a primer in .NET Web services, some background information, and an example program that uses Web services.

(Scott Mitchell) There are times when the textbox is not the most suitable means for collecting a particular piece of input. Learn alternative Web controls in ASP.NET for collecting user input. (pdf)

(Stephen Perry) There are more than 50 GUI controls available in the .NET Framework Class Library. This chapter takes a selective look at some of the more important ones. They all derive from the System.Windows.Forms.Control class that provides the inherited properties and methods that all the contr

(Jonathan Yarden) In less than a decade, Internet security has evolved from an almost esoteric topic to become one of the more important facets of modern computing. And yet it’s a rarity to find companies that actually consider information security to be an important job function for all workers—and