(Keenan A. Newton) Microsoft recently launched the Microsoft Patterns and Practices section of their Web site, offering several complete architectural and design application blocks, complete with source code, that you can use in your .NET applications.

(Danny Lesandrini) I love writing VBA code but I am convinced that, many times what I am trying to accomplish can be done in a more efficient, graceful and elegant way using SQL queries. Over the last few months, I have tried to develop my applications with this in mind. The following article is a

(Tony Patton) One of the .NET Framework features often highlighted is its new data access model, ADO.NET. Some of its improvements over its predecessors include scalability, speed, and its disconnected nature features. A .NET data provider is used to access a database system; a good example is t

(Iain Thomson) Security has remained high on the agenda throughout the IT recession, and the year has seen some major steps forward, and a few steps back.

(Simon Bisson) Servers based on Intel’s x86 architecture are a commodity: cheap to buy and cheap to run, they have become the life-blood of the data centre. Once a few high-end UNIX systems sat and ran your business; now they’re surrounded by humming racks of cheap x86 systems, and they’re coming to

(Rocky Lhotka) It is commonly held as a truth that applications have a UI layer, a business layer and a data layer. In most of my presentations and writing I use a four layer model: UI, business, data access and data storage. In this case the “data storage” layer is really the same as the traditiona

(Glenn Stephens) Delphi has grown up since it launched nearly ten years ago. The latest version – Delphi 2005 provides support for developing Win32 and .NET applications as well as now supporting the C# language as well. There are many enhancements to almost all areas of the new release with the mai

(Dan Jurden) You could create a new Windows Forms application using a default form. Then you could add several controls, a lot of code to instantiate your objects and call methods, and then populate your controls to see what was returned. Oh, but wait: what if you call a method with different parame

(Fons Pieters) Part 1 of this series introduced the concept of information patterns and gave a sample set of architectural patterns. Part 2 will focus on historical patterns. Four information patterns will be named and explained by functional information application, dimensional data model desig

(Jeff Hanson) Storing and retrieving information for most applications usually involves some form of interaction with a relational database. This has presented a fundamental problem for developers for quite some time since the design of relational data and object-oriented instances share very differ