October 2002

Visual Studio .NET: Top Ten Cool Features of Visual Studio .NET Help You Go From Geek to Guru

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. Jon Flanders and Chris Sells

CLR Types: Use Reflection to Discover and Assess the Most Common Types in the .NET Framework

The .NET Framework Class Library and the common language runtime (CLR) serve as the foundation for all .NET-based applications. But how much do you know about any of the thousands of CLR classes in the library and where do you begin to learn about them?In this article, the author uses the number of relationships with other types to determine which types are going to affect your programming most frequently and how often you'll encounter them. He programmatically surveys the CLR library using reflection to make that determination. Following that, an in-depth examination of the nine most important CLR types is provided. Panos Kougiouris

.NET Remoting: Design and Develop Seamless Distributed Applications for the Common Language Runtime

Prior to the advent of .NET, DCOM was the underlying technology for remote communications between Windows-based applications. But DCOM is quirky to set up and configure and not as interoperable as it should be. In .NET, XML Web Services and .NET Remoting are a seamless and effective answer to the demand for tools to build distributed applications.This article provides a primer on .NET Remoting with insights into the internal plumbing. Important aspects of remoting, such as channels, object lifetime management, and clients for remote objects are discussed. In addition, some practical examples are provided. Dino Esposito

Serial Comm: Use P/Invoke to Develop a .NET Base Class Library for Serial Device Communications

Out-of-the-box, the only way of coding RS232 serial communications applications in the .NET environment is to import the outdated and somewhat limited MSComm ActiveX control. This article describes the development of a lean, multithreaded, and modern RS232 base class library in C# managed code. The library uses Platform Invocation Services to interact with the Win32 API directly. Application programmers can use the library from any .NET language through inheritance; the article explores examples written in C# and Visual Basic .NET. John Hind

Command Management: Use Design Patterns to Simplify the Relationship Between Menus and Form Elements in .NET

In Windows Forms applications, similar commands, such as those in a menu and their counterparts on a toolbar, are not automatically related. They don't fire the same event or run the same handler routine. Yet code that allows the same or similar user commands to fire the same code simplifies development.This article describes the principles of command management and why it's important to have functional commands that are not exclusive to any one UI element. In order to provide an MFC-like command management infrastructure, a design pattern is developed and applied as a series of C# classes. Michael Foster and Gilberto Araya

Spider in .NET: Crawl Web Sites and Catalog Info to Any Data Store with ADO.NET and Visual Basic .NET

Visual Basic .NET comes loaded with features not available in previous versions, including a new threading model, custom class creation, and data streaming. Learn how to take advantage of these features with an application that is designed to extract information from Web pages for indexing purposes. This article also discusses basic database access, file I/O, extending classes for objects, and the use of opacity and transparency in forms. Mark Gerlach

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