New Stuff
Resources for Your Developer Toolbox
Theresa W. Carey
Contents
Windows Installer Enhancement
Web-Based Issue Tracking
Drag and Drop in XML
Visualizing Data
Auto-Pilot Your ADO.NET Data
Advanced Data Navigation Bar Control
Make Dynamic Links Searchable
The Bookshelf
Windows Installer Enhancement
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MimarSinan International has released InstallAware Professional Edition, which generates script-driven, Web-based Windows® Installer setups with customized user interfaces. Installations run on all existing Win32® platforms and do not require the .NET Framework.
InstallAware extends Windows Installer, providing native scripting and branching code flow in setups. Moreover, each action that modifies the target system executes solely through Windows Installer—no custom actions, DLLs, scripting languages, or any third-party technologies are involved.
InstallAware Professional is capable of building installations that download some setup portions from the Web (such as application prerequisites and runtime components), while others are included with the main setup program (such as core application features). The Web portions of the setup are downloaded only if required, and may be obtained from any URL specified by the setup author.
The package ships with six pre-built dialog themes; a dialog editor for customizing existing themes, or building new ones from scratch, is also included. A range of dialog controls is available—from interactive HTML containers that are suitable for progress dialogs to file/folder browsers that resemble Windows Explorer.
Web-Based Issue Tracking
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RMTrack recently released Issue Tracking Solutions 2.0, a Web-based issue tracking application for software development teams. The application provides advanced configuration options that allow users to customize issue fields, data entry forms, workflows, issue numbering, and e-mail notification rules.
Through the use of graphical workflow models, customers can configure how the system assigns issues to users and what fields are required. Each project can have its own workflow or several projects can share the same workflow. The combination of configurable workflow rules and configurable data entry forms allows customers to define separate projects for helpdesk logs, software bugs, and feature requests. Reporting is available through the use of custom filters. Reports can be displayed in printer-friendly or e-mail-ready formats, or as a comma-separated file.
The application's security features, including Secure Sockets Layer support, control access to sensitive data. User access to information is controlled by a combination of user IDs, passwords, group membership, and project team assignments. All users are automatically restricted to projects that they belong to. Access can be further restricted to allow viewing only issues that a user created or was assigned. Field-level security further restricts the viewing and updating of individual issue fields.
The application can be accessed by any version of Internet Explorer and the server components can run on a variety of platforms.
Drag and Drop in XML
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Snapbridge Software has released Snapbridge XStudio 2.5, a drag and drop development environment for building information processing solutions based on XML. XStudio supports the creation of XSLT to choreograph the integration and publication of data and content. It creates XSL based on source data visually mapped to target outputs. Stylesheets are generated by example using the drag and drop interface. Users can iteratively import source and target instances of data, and then graphically define transformations between them. There's no need for Document Type Definitions or hand-coding of XSL. XStudio also incorporates XPath visualization, syntax help, and integrated browser preview.
With visual XML processing, users can generate XML runtime federations for getting external data, choreographing transformations, federations, and publication. XML runtime federations can be executed against an instance of Snapbridge FDX Information Server for integrating large amounts of heterogeneous data and content in real time.
Visualizing Data
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Dundas Chart version 4.0 for .NET, recently released by Dundas Software, offers easy to implement, advanced charting to effectively manage and analyze data. The package features advanced animation, flash rendering, template support, and a new series of financial chart types. To Add animation effects to a Dundas Chart you set a single property, and you get control over how the animation sequences play.
Version 4.0 is available in ASP.NET and Windows Forms versions, in both Professional and Enterprise Editions. The ASP.NET Enterprise Edition includes the ability to add Flash and SVG animation to charts. The package ships with a variety of built-in animation themes. The Enterprise Edition includes financial chart types such as Renko, Kagi, Point and Figure, and three-line break charts. Renko charts isolate the underlying price trend by filtering out the minor price changes. They can be useful for determining major trend lines or support and resistance levels.
Kagi charts display a series of connecting vertical lines where the thickness and direction of the lines are dependent on the price action. These charts ignore the passage of time but can be used to illustrate the forces of supply and demand on a security.
Point and Figure Charts also ignore the passage of time. They use a series of Xs and Os to represent price trends by eliminating minor price trends and time and focusing on long-term indicators. Three-line break charts display a series of vertical boxes that are based on changes in prices.
Auto-Pilot Your ADO.NET Data
Red Brook Software Inc. has released WiredNav 2.0, a self-wiring .NET control for filling, navigating, searching, updating, and reporting ADO.NET data tables. The control can be used in database applications without the developer making any initial property settings or having to write any code.
There are no DataAdapter, DataSet, DataSource, or DataTable properties for the control. At run time, the navigator automatically wires itself to every data object found on the Windows form to which it is added. With this technique, only one navigator is required per form instead of one per data table and without additional coding.
WiredNav includes a number of features to improve data binding, currency management, and disconnected data handling. For reporting, WiredNav can print and view reports created using Crystal Reports for Visual Studio® .NET and SQL Server™ Reporting Services. WiredNav can be used with SQL, Oracle, OLE DB, and ODBC data adapters.
https://www.redbrooksoftware.com
Advanced Data Navigation Bar Control
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dtrt ag has announced the release of dtrt.NavBarWin, a Windows Forms data navigation control built to work with DataSets, views, collections, and every object that implements the IList interface. It can be used with all the languages compatible with Visual Studio .NET and enables a user to navigate in a data collection. This can be achieved either by clicking on buttons, using shortcut keys, entering navigation commands in the display window, or by selecting commands from the context menu.
For additional purposes, developer-defined buttons can be activated. One such set of buttons is defined for incremental navigation, which enables the user to navigate a predefined number of record items (for example, jumping forward or backward five records).
An integrated designer allows you to build horizontal, vertical, and custom layouts which can be further tailored to your needs. Samples in Visual Basic® .NET and C# are provided to show possible implementations. Dtrt.NavBarWin will run under the .NET Framework 1.0 and higher.
Make Dynamic Links Searchable
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Helicon Tech has published LinkFreeze 1.1, which allows Web developers to attain higher search engine rankings by converting dynamic links to static ones. Dynamic links are used for forums, e-catalogs, news, and other frequently updated Web site sections. However, search engines either completely ignore these pages or grant them low page rank, which results in little or no search engine visibility. LinkFreeze takes characters that the search engines don't like, such as ?, &, and =, and substitutes other characters, producing links that search engines can use.
You can choose between several conversion schemes. In addition, you can continue to use dynamic links without losing any search engine traffic. LinkFreeze modifies links before a server sends a response to the client and rewrites URLs back to the dynamic form when they go to the server. Link optimization is accomplished without scripting or text configuration, and may be applied only to specified parts of a Web site.
The Bookshelf
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In Hackers and Painters (O'Reilly), Paul Graham offers a collection of essays on subjects of interest to programmers, IT professionals, and geeks at large. From the importance of beauty in software design to the necessity of thinking forbidden thoughts, Graham presents ideas that explore and challenge the social and aesthetic notions we hold about the world of technology and ourselves.
The book examines issues such as the rightness of Web applications, the programming language renaissance, spam filtering, the open source movement, Internet startups, and more. In each essay, Graham moves beyond widely held beliefs about the way programmers work as he tells important stories about the kinds of people behind tech innovations, revealing distinctions about their characters and their craft.
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Speaking of hackers, Syngress Publishing Inc. has published Hacking the Code: ASP.NET Web Application Security by Mark Burnett. Burnett walks readers through the many threats to their Web application code. For every defined threat, the book provides a menu of countermeasures and coding considerations. It then offers coding examples and a set of security policies for each of the corresponding threats.
You'll learn how to develop secure password policies and how to securely manage user passwords in your Web application. You'll also learn how to establish a secure procedure for resetting lost or forgotten passwords and discover how to properly use secret questions in that process.
The book will help you securely authenticate and authorize users, taking advantage of the capabilities in ASP.NET, and limit exposure to credential harvesting and brute-force password attacks.
Send your New Stuff to Theresa at newstuff@microsoft.com.
Theresa W. Carey is a freelance writer who lives in California. Her byline has appeared in Barron's and PC World.