Microsoft has decided to drop development of OracleClient from its ADO.NET roadmap; while the provider remains available, use of it should be avoided in new applications accessing Oracle data sources.
- By Jonathan Bruce
- 12/22/2009
Windows provides an ongoing stream of general system notifications that you can fairly easily hook into.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 12/17/2009
Large-scale Silverlight applications can end up making hundreds of calls from the application to WCF service operations. Here's how to consolidate those calls into a single method.
Peter looks at the options for client-side development and the practicalities of leveraging ASP.NET.
Peter deals with all the people who want to disable the Back button. First, he tells them to stop asking but (finally) breaks down and suggests a solution.
DataViews fire a range of events that you can use to ensure that data is correct before it goes to the database -- and they're especially useful when you're using the GridView or DetailsView.
The jQuery library makes it easier to create applications that execute in the browser. By leveraging existing ASP.NET technologies and merging them with jQuery, you can create faster, more responsive applications.
The Microsoft SharePoint Conference (SPC) 2009 event defied the tough economic times. With more than 7,400 attendees, SPC eclipsed the size of this year's TechEd and MIX confabs combined.
- By Andrew J. Brust
- 12/01/2009
With more than 340 billion trillion quadrillion (and that's no typo) possible values, the probability of having two identical GUIDs is basically non-existent.
- By Alex Papadimoulis
- 12/01/2009
Visual Basic 10 introduces new generic tuple classes that can help you get more done with less -- if you're careful about it.
- By Bill McCarthy
- 12/01/2009
All Classic VB apps have at least one top-level window. Normally out of reach, you can put them to good use if you know how to get to them.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 11/16/2009
At design time, you can tie parameters in the DataSource to a variety of data sources. But sometimes the source for your values can't be set at design time. Here's how to set those values at runtime.
ASP.NET MVC provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to changing how controllers, actions, routes and more work within an application. Having flexibility is good especially when you need to make a modification quickly without having to write a lot of code to get the change in place.
You can't always make all of your data retrieval decisions at design time -- sometimes you have to wait for the user to tell you what data to get. Peter shows you how to work with a DataSource to retrieve data dynamically at runtime.
NTFS offers an almost unknown way to obscure streams of data behind the most innocent looking files. Find out how to do this with VB6.
- By Karl E. Peterson
- 11/03/2009
Learn how to work through debugging challenges posed by stable composition in MEF Preview 7, and get insight into using MEF with Silverlight.
- By Kathleen Dollard
- 11/01/2009
Nobody believed the French. Not the entire country, or Frenchmen in general, but rather the folks who worked at the European Branch Office in Paris. The bug they described-their computer's internal date was randomly changing-reeked of user error and seemed far too implausible to be caused by the corporate reporting system.
- By Alex Papadimoulis
- 11/01/2009
A few months back, VSM columnist Andrew Brust wrote about Microsoft moving away from building the type of products that fueled its early success.
- By Michael Desmond
- 11/01/2009
How factoring out common patterns in your Azure worker roles can improve development.
After the much-delayed release of SQL Server 2005 finally came to pass at the end of its namesake year, Microsoft made a promise to release a new version of SQL Server every two to three years, from that point on.
- By Andrew J. Brust
- 11/01/2009