March 2004

Office 2003: Secure and Deploy Business Solutions with Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office

Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System is a new technology that brings the advanced features of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework to applications built for Microsoft Office Word 2003 and Microsoft Office Excel 2003. Deploying solutions built with this technology requires that you understand how runtime security is enforced in managed applications and how to configure users' systems to run your solutions without introducing security holes.To promote that understanding, this article will demonstrate how to establish trust, explain policy considerations and permissions, and explain what trusted code is all about. Secure assembly deployment is also covered in detail. Brian A. Randell and Ken Getz

C# In-Depth: Harness the Features of C# to Power Your Scientific Computing Projects

The C# language has been used quite successfully in many kinds of projects, including Web, database, GUI, and more. One of the last frontiers for the application of C# code may well be scientific computing. But can C# measure up to the likes of FORTRAN and C++ for scientific and mathematical projects?In this article, the author answers that question by looking at the .NET common language runtime to determine how the JIT compiler, Microsoft intermediate language, and the garbage collector affect performance. He also considers C# data types, including arrays and matrices, along with other language features that play an important role in scientific computing applications. Fahad Gilani

Timers: Implement a Continuously Updating, High-Resolution Time Provider for Windows

The timestamps that you can obtain from Windows NT are limited to a maximum resolution of 10 or 15 milliseconds, depending on the underlying hardware. At times, such as when you need to timetag frequent events, it is desirable to achieve a higher resolution. For example, what if you want to be able to contact a thread or perform some other task at intervals more frequent than 10 milliseconds? Suggested ways of achieving better resolution include using performance counters in conjunction with the sytem time to calculate smaller time increments. But using performance counters is a technique that presents its own problems. This article shows one possible way of overcoming limitations inherent in this approach. Johan Nilsson

ISA Server 2004: Developing an Application Filter for Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004

The beta version of Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 is now publicly available. It includes a rich SDK with several extensibility mechanisms that allow third parties to integrate their specialized solutions on top of the ISA platform. In this article, the author explores the application filter extensibility mechanism, which enables you to add high-level application layer filtering capabilities to ISA Server and to provide rich content filtering solutions. He also highlights the new features of the ISA Server 2004 SDK, then moves on to describe how to develop a basic application filter that monitors all data going through the ISA Server, and how to integrate a filter into the ISA Server management console to create a seamless interface experience for your users. Yigal Edery

Error Handling: Throwing Custom Exception Types from a Managed COM+ Server Application

Exception handling semantics in .NET are based on type, so you can create custom exceptions that have their own properties and methods. In .NET, exceptions are first-class citizens, and since they're the built-in error handling mechanism, all .NET-compliant languages must support exceptions. In addition, COM+ services are available to .NET code as Enterprise Services, so you can leverage exceptions in your Enterprise Services design.In this article the author describes custom exceptions, throwing exceptions across COM interop boundaries, and working with Enterprise Services. Bob DeRemer

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