Pre-built custom controls make application design easier and faster and allow you to maintain UI consistency. However, prepackaged controls can be big and slow, and are OS-specific. For those who don't want to use prepackaged controls, Visual Studio .NET provides controls for Web Forms similar to those found in Windows Forms, including label and textbox, and new additions such as the DataGrid, all of which you can customize. If you want to design your own controls, the .NET Framework provides inheritable classes that take care of all the nasty stuff you want to avoid, including page lifecycle, maintaining state across invocations, and browser detection. This article discusses these concepts, as well as eventing, rendering, and client-side scripting. David S. Platt

DLL conflict problems can be tough to solve, but a large number of tools are available to help. There are also many Windows APIs that you can use to build custom debugging tools. Three such tools are discussed here and provided as samples. DllSpy lists all the DLLs loaded in the system and the processes that are using them. ProcessSpy enumerates the running processes and exposes the DLLs they are using, and ProcessXP displays the list of concurrent running sessions for Windows XP. Christophe Nasarre

The .NET Framework includes a set of cryptographic services that extend the services provided by Windows through the Crypto API. In this article, the author explores the System.Security.Cryptography namespace and the programming model used to apply cryptographic transformations. He discusses reasons why cryptography is easier in .NET than it was before, including the easy programmatic acccess developers have to the cryptography APIs and the difference between symmetric and asymmetric algorithms. Along the way, a brief discussion of the most widely used algorithms, including RSA, DSA, Rijndael, SHA, and other hash algorithms, is provided. Dan Fox

How would an English speaker feel if his car's owner's manual was written in German or if the dash board markings were written in Japanese because the car was manufactured in that country? This is an experience common to computer users all over the world who don't speak English as their primary language, and it's becomming more important. The Microsoft .NET Framework not only makes it possible to build international applications, but many of the tools such as Visual Studio .NET make it quite easy. This article looks at internationalization with .NET and presents real tools you can use to make all of your Windows Forms applications global-ready. Jason R. Bell

C# allows developers to embed XML comments into their source files-a useful facility, especially when more than one programmer is working on the same code. The C# parser can expand these XML tags to provide additional information and export them to an external document for further processing. This article shows how to use XML comments and explains the relevant tags. The author demonstrates how to set up your project to export your XML comments into convenient documentation for the benefit of other developers. He also shows how to use comments to generate help files. J. Andrew Schafer

Rich clients employ many of the features and conveniences of the operating system they run on, and the list of these features has been growing since the dawn of the PC. But as apps have migrated to the Web, the trend towards increasing client-side functionality has ground to a virtual halt. There are several reasons for this; chief among them are security and deployment problems. But that's all about to change. With the .NET Framework, you can participate in building the distributable rich client of the future. In this article, the author enumerates the pertinent features of .NET that will allow you to build safe, easily deployable controls. The features discussed include managed code, code access security, versioning control, Windows Forms classes, and isolation. Jason Clark

New Stuff: Resources for Your Developer Toolbox Web Q&A: XML Security Questions The XML Files: WS-I, Exposing Stored Procedures as Web Services, and More Cutting Edge: Building a Data Navigator Control, Part III Advanced Basics: How to Use Objects Bugslayer: Symbols and Crash Dumps Basic Instincts: Objects and Values, Part I C++ Q&A: Commas, Pseudocode, Operator =, and More Resource File: Skills Development