August 2003

ASP.NET: Jump Start Your Web Site Development with the ASP.NET Starter Kits

If you're building an ASP.NET Web site you could probably use a good, solid code foundation to start with and build upon. Wouldn't it be nice to start with a complete site, make a few tweaks and customizations, and go live? The ASP.NET Starter Kits are packaged solutions that let you do just that. The five kits—Community, Reports, Commerce, Portal, and Time Tracker—supply full, reusable code that can be easily customized. In addition, there are a number of ISPs that support automatic deployment of ASP.NET Starter Kit Web sites, leaving you with little left to do when you have to get there fast. Here, the author introduces the ASP.NET Starter Kits and builds a community Web site with lots of advanced features such as ratings, user polls, upload quotas, change notifications, and themes. Paul Litwin

DataGrid: Tailor Your DataGrid Apps Using Table Style and Custom Column Style Objects

One of the most enduring challenges in writing user interfaces is figuring out how to display large amounts of data efficiently and intuitively without bewildering the user. The problem becomes particularly thorny when the interface must reflect hierarchical relationships within the data that the user needs to modify. The Windows Forms DataGrid control gives developers a powerful and flexible tool to meet this challenge. This article explains its basic operations and shows how to extend the DataGrid to display columns of data in an application-appropriate manner. Kristy Saunders

XSLT: Simplify Development and Maintenance of Microsoft .NET Projects with Code Generation Techniques

Code generation techniques using technologies such as XSLT are playing an increasingly important part in software projects as they support the development of a rapidly maintainable code base. This article discusses some of the benefits and possible applications of code generation.To demonstrate these techniques the author develops a Web Forms application that supports the maintenance of records in a SQL Server database, using the database's own metadata to drive the generation process. The SQL Server database schema is extracted using SQLXML 3.0 data access and processed through XSLT stylesheets that generate both a database access layer and a Web Forms user interface with query and update pages. Peter Ashley

DCOM Interop: Generate Custom Managed C++ Wrappers for Easier COM Interoperation Using DCOMSuds

Now that you're writing managed code, you'll certainly want to use your existing COM components, but you can't simply call them directly. Instead, you have to wrap the COM component in a runtime-callable wrapper that acts as a proxy between the component and your managed code. While the CLR provides wrapper classes for this purpose, there will be times when you'll want custom objects to wrap your COM components. One way to get the low-level access you need to precisely control resource cleanup, pass security information, and get access to CLR features is to write your own wrapper class in managed C++. This article shows you how. Vishwas Lele

Web Services: Extend the ASP.NET WebMethod Framework with Business Rules Validation

In an earlier article the authors showed how to build a custom WebMethods extension that provides XML Schema validation, a function that is lacking in ASP.NET. In the process they established a foundation for enforcing business rules during the deserialization of XML data. The technique, which is described in this article, uses declarative XPath assertions to test business rule compliance.In building this business rules validation engine, the authors integrate the validation descriptions into the WSDL file that is automatically generated by the WebMethod infrastructure. Finally, they demonstrate how to extend wsdl.exe, the tool that generates WebMethod proxy/server code from WSDL files, to make use of their extensions. Aaron Skonnard and Dan Sullivan

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