Rick Samona shows enhancements to Visual Studio 2005 that help make applications more secure. Learn fundamental design principles for building secure apps. See how FxCop and Code Access Security help create more secure managed code apps, while PREfast and the /GS switch help secure native code apps.

(Mark Goetsch) Sequence diagrams are used to map out class interactions. A sequence diagram is made up of objects, each with its own object lifeline. Interactions between the objects occur by messages that are sent from one object to the next. By convention, the messages are sent from left to right

(Richard Turner) This paper provides guidance on how to best use Microsoft Web service and distributed systems technologies in order to build distributed, service-oriented systems using today’s platform. The impact of future technologies such as “Indigo” is considered, and how Microsoft product

(Jon Skeet) This is a big topic. Don’t expect this page to do more than scratch the surface – indeed, if you believe you’re already fairly experienced and knowledgeable about character encodings and the like, this page may well not have anything new or useful for you. However, there are still many p

(Tony Patton) The location of a Web application during development changes depending upon the state of the project. It begins its life on the developer’s workstation and often lives on a test server and ends up in production (if everything goes according to plan). The move from one server to ano

(scott) A professional web site will have a standardized look across all pages. For example, one popular layout type places a navigation menu on the left side of the page, a copyright on the bottom, and content in the middle. It can be difficult to maintain a standard look if you must always put the

(Dino Esposito) Microsoft Office documents not only offer an easy and effective way for users to communicate and collaborate, but they also get smarter with each new release and increase connectivity with the remainder of the software universe. In some cases, though, Office applications can’t re

(Soumendra Mohanty) The data warehouse should be considered a work in progress, always needing improvements. Part-2 of this article discusses the factors that affect complex data environments and how they can be managed and improved.

(Paul Kimmel) .NET 2.0 supports templates called generics. The basic concept is the same: Define a method or a class with one or more methods, specifying the data type as a replaceable element. By convention, the capital letter T is used. Finally, when you use the method or class, indicate a type fo

(Douglas Reilly) Shawn Wildermuth is the “go-to guy” for information on ADO.NET. He is the author of Pragmatic ADO.NET: Data Access for the Internet World and numerous articles, is a Microsoft MVP, and works as an independent consultant in Atlanta.