(Stephen Toub) I write a lot of one-off utilities for personal use, and since they don’t require any sophisticated user interfaces, I often use a System.Windows.Forms.PropertyGrid bound to a settings class in order to allow the user to configure a tool’s operations. Unfortunately, sometimes I do

(Alex Homer) One of the major advances in ASP.NET 2.0 caching is support for SQL cache invalidation. This feature lets you retrieve or generate a rowset, usually as a DataSet or DataTable, and then hang on to it until the original source data changes. That removes the balancing act formerly required

(David Menninger) For those who have “seen the light,” business intelligence (BI) solutions offer an unprecedented level of insight into the operations of a company. While the individual components of BI solutions may span budgeting and planning, compliance, audit issues across all functions, those

(Tony Patton) Microsoft’s submission of the C# language and the CLR (Common Language Runtime) as industry standards has led to many open source projects based on the .NET platform. One such notable project is NUnit, a unit-testing framework for all .NET languages. I’ll demonstrate the simplicity

(Tim Stall) Unit testing is becoming very popular among .NET projects, but unit testing the Data Access Layer (DAL) still remains a common obstacle. The problem stems from the very nature of databases: they are slow, common, persistent, external, and relational. This conflicts the nature of unit tes

(Michael Earls) Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 is an exciting platform for enjoying all of your media from the comfort of your sofa. However, there are many times that you might wish to extend Media Center to perform functionality that it does not have “out of the box.” Microsoft has created a

(Juval Lowy) Today .NET offers three distinct technologies for application connectivity: Web services, remoting, and Enterprise Services. Each offers something that the other does not: interoperability, extensibility, and productivity. In preparing for Indigo, you need to choose today a technology t

(Tom Quinn) This article provides a comprehensive outline of the factors that need to be considered to achieve the most productivity from your Linux cluster.

(Aaron Skonnard) Version 2.0 of the Microsoft .NET Framework makes numerous improvements at various levels in the Web services protocol stack. In addition, better tool support and an increased focus on interoperability make your life easier. In this column I’ll walk you through several of the ma

(Tony Patton) Visual Studio .NET is a powerful development tool, yet it’s often overkill or too pricey if you’re in a smaller shop or working on a smaller project. Thankfully, there are a myriad of alternative tools available. This article outlines the pros and cons of these alternatives. (R)