Chris Sells

When using JavaScript to build controls in a Windows Store app, you have access to HTML elements, WinRT controls and WinJS controls. See how you can mix and match these or even build your own.

Learn how the JavaScript framework for building Windows Store apps and the underlying Windows Runtime allow you to build apps with client-side state, offline storage, controls, templates, binding and much more.

Learn how to use the AtomPub protocol to pump up your blogs. Chris Sells includes a practical demonstration of mapping so you can expose a standard AtomPub service from a Web site and use Windows Live Writer to provide a rich editing experience against the service.

We introduce you to “Oslo” and demonstrate how MSchema and MGraph enable you to build metadata-driven apps. We’ll define types and values in “M” and deploy them to the repository.

The Windows Presentation Foundation provides new techniques for UI-based developing applications and makes better use of current hardware and technologies. In this article, Ian Griffiths and Chris Sells explain 10 of the most significant advances that make WPF superior to its Win32 predecessors.

The System.Windows.Forms namespace has increased by approximately 134 percent over the .NET Framework 1.1. There are 446 new public types; 113 existing types have been updated with new members and values; 218 types have been carried over from the original namespace. Read about it here.

In this article, the winning Windows Forms duo of Chris Sells and Michael Weinhardt team up again to explore lots of new features and additions to Windows Forms 2.0 that will let you build more flexible, feature-rich controls, get better resource management, more powerful data-binding abilities, and make your development life a whole lot more fun.

The upcoming version of the .NET Framework offers a host of enhancements an order of magnitude over and above existing versions. In particular, developers writing Windows Forms benefit from a variety of new and improved features targeting development, deployment, increased productivity, and auto-generated code. This article covers some of the key new features including designer enhancements, new controls, data binding, and deployment to give you a taste of what's to come.

This is the second of two articles discussing the extremely rich design-time features of the .NET Framework. Part 1 discussed the basics, showing you where to start and how to extend your control implementation through attributes and interfaces, as well as their effects on the property browser, code serialization, and other controls. Part 2 continues the journey by concentrating on design-time functionality that you can implement beyond your components and controls, including TypeConverters, UITypeEditors, and Designers. It would be impossible to cover everything you can do in two short articles, which is a testament to just how all-encompassing and flexible the design-time capability of the .NET Framework is.

Visual Studio .NET provides support for designing rich features into your controls and components, allowing you to set properties, set form placement, inherit from base classes, and much more. So how does Visual Studio .NET do all this? What does the Windows Forms designer do? What's the difference between a control and a component? How does Visual Studio integrate your controls so that they can access features of the .NET Framework?In this article, the authors answer these common questions by building a clock control and taking the reader along for the ride. In building the control, hosts and containers are illustrated, the property browser is explained, debugging is discussed, and a general overview of the design-time infrastructure is presented.

With the much-anticipated release of the .NET Framework 1.1, developers are eager to know what's been added to their programming bag of tricks. In this article, the author focuses on new developments in Windows Forms, such as namespace additions, support for hosting managed controls in unmanaged clients, and designer support for C++ and J#. Integrated access to the Compact Framework and new mobile code security settings also make this release noteworthy. Along with these features, the author reviews the best ways to handle multiple versions of the common language runtime and highlights some potential pitfalls.

Throughout this issue, you'll read all about the promise of Web Services and how the .NET Framework enables Web Service development. Many people will also be building their Web Services atop C++ code and frameworks like ATL Server, particularly when performance is paramount. In this article, the authors show how fully functional Web Services are built using ATL Server and Visual Studio .NET. Beginning with unmanaged C++ classes, they add ATL attributes that make the code work over HTTP.

Visual Studio .NET has lots of cool features. Obviously, it supports languages that target the common language runtime, like C# and Visual Basic .NET, and it lets you write CLR-managed code. But did you know that there are features of the environment itself, independent of the language features, that earn Visual Studio .NET the cool tool stamp of approval?In this article the authors count down their favorite environment features—the ones they think every developer will applaud. They include support for debugging stored procedures, project reference management, metadata in Class View, a richer immediate window, custom environment programming with macros, and more.

In the past, the Microsoft Active Scripting architecture has allowed you to make your applications extensible. But it came with some drawbacks. You couldn't call into DLLs; you had to use COM interfaces. The scripts were not compiled, so they ran more slowly than they otherwise might, and a number of objects had to ride along with the script. To solve these problems and make extensibility easier to attain, Visual Studio for Applications was introduced. Presented here is an introduction to VSA that covers language support, types, events, and much more.

Windows Forms applications solve many of the problems inherent in building Web applications the old fashioned way?with HTML. To demonstrate the use of Windows Forms over the Web, the author takes his existing app, Wahoo!, and ports it to Windows Forms. In doing so, he discusses versioning, linked files, security, storage isolation, the deployment model, and everything else you need to get started building your own Windows Forms apps for the Web.

Aspect-oriented Programming (AOP), a paradigm invented at Xerox PARC in the 1990s, lets the developer better separate tasks that should not be inextricably tangled, such as mathematical operations and exception handling. The AOP approach has a number of benefits. First, it improves performance because the operations are more succinct. Second, it allows programmers to spend less time rewriting the same code. Overall, AOP enables better encapsulation of distinct procedures and promotes future interoperation.

Even when developers have recurring computer-readable metadata to process and a clear idea of how code should be structured, they can still find themselves in need of a technique to automatically generate the code to avoid the drudge work of repeatedly writing and tweaking it. Generative programming is a technique that addresses this problem. Using generative programming techniques, you can solve software engineering problems in families, rather than individually, saving time and coding effort. This article describes these techniques, and builds a sample template-driven code generator. The article also lists existing utilities that have been built with generative programming techniques, as well as actual code generators.

If you're a longtime C++ programmer, the thought of migrating to Visual Studio .NET might make you wary at first. However, a new feature of Visual C++, the managed extensions for C++, allows you to build apps with the .NET Framework. When you use managed C++, your code is handled by the common language runtime (CLR). This provides advanced features like garbage collection, interoperability, and more. This article explains why you'd want to use the managed extensions, how to use them, how to mix managed and unmanaged code, and how your managed code can interoperate with programs written in other languages.