Articles & Tutorials 
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Why has REST been getting so much attention recently? It's no accident that Yahoo, Google and Amazon have chosen not to use SOAP to expose their APIs. Learn some of the issues of using SOAP, and how a RESTful based architecture can resolve some of these.. 
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WPF completely overturns the classic approach to developing Windows applications and adds user interface flexibility and pizzazz unavailable to Windows developers up to now. George looks at one aspect of this - implementing controls..
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The first step to building reliable systems is to accept that it is impossible.
Instead, we will attempt to build a more reliable system from a collection of smaller unreliable components. The idea is to manage failure rather than pursue an impossible perfection. Find out how.
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After a long beta period, Visual Studio .NET 2008 is finally on general release. There are a ton of new features and enhancements in this release that make it almost a no-brainer to upgrade - I thought I’d take a moment and list my top ten favorites in no particular order..
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Richard takes a looks at a preview of a Microsoft incubation project called Volta, offering a new way of deploying applications written using single-tier architecture to a multi-tiered client/server environment without having to rewrite the code..
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Learn about some of the new features in C# 3.0 including automatic properties, collection initializers, extension methods, lambda expressions and anonymous types..
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Hard coding passwords into your application or your web site is a bad thing. Barry looks at how we can use trusted connections to provide the authentication we need, without the need for these potential security hazards..
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Learn how you can use an alternative session storage method, using SQL Server - very useful if you're running sites across multiple servers, or need session state to persist across application restarts..
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Granville gets down with the CLR, and takes a look at CIL/MSIL - the intermediate language that every .NET language gets compiled to, and has full access to the capabilities of the CLR..
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What is the one activity or phase that improves the quality of your application? The answer is an easy one: Testing, and plenty of it. Traditionally, testing is a phase somewhere towards the expected end of the project - when the cost of any code or requirement changes is known to be much higher. Craig looks at how TDD can address this by adopting a more agile approach..
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The forthcoming 2007 Microsoft Office System offers many new opportunities for software developers. Matt Nicholson looks at the new user interface and the Open XML file format, finds out what's happened to VSTO, and explores the possibilities opened up by SharePoint Server 2007 and Groove 2007..
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Learn how to read and write Open XML files in the new Microsoft Office 2007, with a particular examination of the Excel file format..
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Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is Microsoft's implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) and the Common Information Model (CIM). Although WMI is COM-based, Andriy Klyuchevskyy shows you how you can access it from C# and VB.NET through System.Management, thanks to COM Inter-Op..
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This article demonstrates the art of creating and architecting high-performance and scalable .NET applications, covering all stages, from planning to development and their perspective best practices..
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Just as XML itself has evolved, so the XML related classes in .NET Framework 2.0 have changed. Alex Homer finds out what's different..
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Till now we were talking about non-mainstream languages to use Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). Learn what exactly AOP is, and how you can go about getting this functionality in C#..
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This article will demonstrate two ways one could implement the DataReader to bind a DataGrid, that includes caching, paging and persistent bi-directional sorting, all without the use of a DataAdapter/DataSet at all, and includes ASP.NET 2.0 GridView version!.
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In this article, we will examine how to create a fully functional DataGrid and GridView in .NET 2.0 with all the features you'd find set up on Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL Mail, and further demonstrate how you can multi-select items across pages and batch delete them all..
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Almost every time exceptions are mentioned in mailing lists and newsgroups, people say they're really expensive, and should be avoided in almost all situations. Jon Skeet examines the claim..
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An article presenting benefits and techniques for using test-driven development in .NET, specifically examining the NUnit testing framework..
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Explore the source of the common interoperability challenges facing Web services integration across platforms. This third part in a series describes how the different naming conventions between J2EE technology and .NET can cause difficulty in Web services interoperability..
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An introduction to the murky world of Unicode and character encodings..
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The System.String type (shorthand string in C#) is one of the most important types in .NET, and unfortunately it's much misunderstood. This article attempts to deal with some of the basics including interning, literals and encoding..
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Part 2 of this series explores the source of common interoperability challenges facing Web services integration across platforms. Follow along as Wangming Ye analyzes the interop failures resulting from the use of certain data types and ways to overcome them such as collections, arrays, or primitive data types..
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A lot of confusion has been wrought by people explaining the difference between value types and reference types as 'value types go on the stack, reference types go on the heap'. This is simply untrue (as stated) and this article attempts to clarify matters somewhat. .
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ADO.NET supports many ways to manage memory-resident data returned in a DataSet. This example demonstrates how to use the additional functionality exposed by ADO.NET to sort and filter data..
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.NET remoting allows the development of distriubuted applications. It allows applications to use objects contained in other processes. We wil quickly look at the basics on how to set up a simple .NET remoting system..
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Weaving together Web services to create cross-organizational business processes requires all partners to program to the same standard model and to avoid exposing proprietary implementations. However, the ultimate goal of making Web services interact seamlessly is still a frequent concern and a hot discussion topic. The first part of the series stresses the importance of WSDL design and analyzes the strength and pitfalls of the traditional RPC/encoded style in Web services interoperability. .
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In theory the .NET debugging API is simple and a joy to use, but there is a lack of a detailed overview as to how to use it in the framework SDK. In this article, we'll cover how to write a debugger under .NET, and will also touch on the profiling API support..
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The first in a three part series, this article introduces the basic concepts of floating-point arithmetic: number formats, accuracy and precision, and round-off error. It includes an in-depth discussion of the .NET floating-point types..
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Mark walks you through how you go about creating a ".NET Applet" - a Windows Forms control hosted within a web page..
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Using Visual Studio for Applications to add scripting capabilities to your .NET apps. .
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This extensive article details the process of creating complex list-based controls with rich design time support similar to my DotNetWidgets and OutlookBar controls..
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In part two of the series, the author of "GPS.NET" teaches developers how to write GPS applications suitable for the real world by mastering GPS precision concepts. Source code includes a working NMEA interpreter and sample high-precision application in C# and VB.NET. .
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In this article I will explain the classes and code necessary to put encryption to work in your applications. I will also explain the basic principles of operation of these classes and point out several pitfalls to avoid..
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This article discusses the .NET WebRequest and WebResponse classes used to retrieve HTTP content over the Web in detail. In the process a number of related .NET development issues are described including stream handling, string encoding, using delegates, implementing events and creating new threads to run HTTP requests simultaneously. .
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Knowing how and where to store things is bread and butter stuff for an Application Developer. This article examines an area of storage known as ‘Isolated Storage’ that was introduced to the Windows environment alongside the introduction of the .NET Framework. We’ll discover, what it is and how and why to use it. .
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Confused about the tiers, performance or scalability of your .NET apps? If so, James has come to the resue with his personal insight, tips and tricks on how best to structure your .NET apps..
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Learn how to print reports from C# and other .NET languages using the open source library presented here. Features include Printing DataTables, printing paragraphs of text using style classes, customizable page headers and footers, boxes, lines, graphics and much more..
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This is a step by step guide for a post-relational database for .NET, Matisse. The article is aiming at helping developers quickly evaluate this alternative solution as .NET database when they face problems of productivity, flexibility, extensibility, or maintainability..
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Shows how to use the built-in compilers in the .NET framework to allow users of your product to write script to control and hook in to the application..
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An extensive examination of using ADO.NET to access SQL Server databases, from establishing connections and executing stored procedures, to connection pools, data readers and data sets..
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Designers are essential in creating professional controls with polished design time behaviour. This article serves as an introduction to writing your own..
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Shows how to write the code needed to host the Windows Forms Designers in your own application. Sample code is provided to display a form in design mode and allow normal editing like in Visual Studio..
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Although this article won't be an exhaustive OOP treatise, its objective nevertheless is to present in a quick and dirty manner C#/VB Object-Oriented Programming. Moreover, even though this article may be slightly geared more towards C#, all important VB assessments or similarities are addressed and demonstrated. By the way, keep in mind C# is very case sensitive. Incidentally, don't be put off at the length of this article, a lot of it is simply repeated code examples for both languages..
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This is the second article of two parts on .NET threading. In this second part, I will discuss further the synchronization objects in the System.Threading .NET namespace, thread local storage, COM interoperability and thread states. .
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The first in a two part series, introducing how to create and manipulate threads with the .NET framework, including creating a thread, thread pools, syncronization, race conditions and timers..
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An introduction to using XSL transformations on XML documents, and how to perform these in VB .NET using the XslTransform class..
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This article illustrates a mixture of common .NET methods for formatting and presenting in a readable fashion any XML document you may encounter. The latest hype with XML Web Services and even the .NET Framework itself relies on XML as its backbone, therefore this is no light matter. .
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In the past, maintaining the state of an object in ASP often required some very inventive and painstaking code. In the brave new world of .NET, however, Object Serialization offers us a comparatively easy way to do just that, as well as some other useful tasks..
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ASP.NET is not just another upgrade or the next version of ASP. It is a unified web development platform that provides necessary services for developers to build Enterprise Web based Applications. ASP.NET allows you to use a full featured programming language such as C# or VB.NET to build web applications easily..
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This is a working C# .NET program that demonstrates how to integrate most of the features of the DataGrid and DataSet in a single project including select, insert, update, delete, confirm delete, sort, filter and page..
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HotQuant, LLC, builds on their previous ODBC article by demonstrating how to use encapsulation to isolate an application's data access layer and significantly streamline the code..
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We examine the ease with which source code can be obtained from .NET assemblies, and review two commercial products that help combat this through the use of obfuscation..
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Learn about the changes introduced by COM+, new features included in Windows XP for COM+, and how to use COM+ services from your .NET programs..
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The term web service has been used quite frequently lately: you hear people saying how good web services are and how they will dominate the future of software development, but what exactly are web services and how can we create them? In this article James shows us how to build two web services and also unravels all of the lingo surrounding web services..
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Sometimes you need the basic features of a database but don't want the hassle, and possibly cost, of creating one for a small application. With the .NET DataSet object and a simple XML document we can emulate the basic features of a database. .
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Creating connections and all your data objects are really easy Design-Time, but what if you need it for runtime? Here's how..
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An attribute is a new code level language construct in all major .NET languages. It provides integration of declarative information to assemblies, classes, interfaces, members, etc. at the code level. The information can then be used to change the runtime behavior or collect organizational information. In this article, I illustrate the power of attributed programming by examples that show a modular approach to issues that can crosscut many classes. .
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This article elucidates how to build and install-managed code that will be used from COM applications. A classic COM server is activated using the Service Control Manager (SCM). .
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In the first part of this series, Arun Ganesh introduces interoperability between the new .NET technologies, and how to use old Win32 API calls in your .NET applications..
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.NET Remoting allows for a clean seperation between client side code and server side code through the use of interfaces. In this article, we will create a remote object and referance it only by interface..
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Automate you website updates to avoid hours of tedious work with your HTML editor..
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Passing complex data types to and from Web Services without losing data integrity.
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.NET Remoting provides a powerful and high performance way of working with remote objects. In this article, David gives an introduction on how to use remote objects in .NET.
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A modest introduction to IL assembly language.
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Find out about all the great enhancements in Visual Studio.NET.
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Learn about the new forms package, allowing developers to take full advantage of the rich user interface features available in Windows.