2004 - March/April
The March/April issue of Component Developer Magazine (CODE) is focused on performance and online content management with ASP.NET, and contains several in-depth articles focused on that subject, as well as several general .NET articles.
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The Mind of an Angry Coder: Dances with Vacuums
As the pace of software development continues to accelerate, the way in which we approach it must change to keep up as well. What made sense before isn't as practical now.
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Give Your Forms a Base
Create a base form class to ensure that all of the forms in your application behave consistently. This technique minimizes the amount of repetitive code you need to write to manage the user's interaction with your forms.
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Publishing Performance Data From Your .NET Applications
You always want the software you write to have great performance.The reason isn't shocking?users look to software to quickly and efficiently handle their workload. Often times, meeting this performance requirement (whether it is explicit or implied), can be a difficult, even daunting task. Tuning an application to perform at its peak level involves a thorough understanding of the architecture and environment into which you will deploy your application. However, you can't truly begin to optimize an application's performance if you don't understand how to empirically measure that performance. From this perspective, your application must emit enough data to enable real time performance monitoring.
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Managing Processes in .NET
The Process class allows you to gain full control over system processes.You can start and stop processes and retrieve information about running processes such as the list of loaded modules and the characteristics of the memory occupied. The class also features handy methods to know whether a process is responding or has just exited and with which return code. Programmers also have full control over the style of the window the process runs in. After an overview of the capabilities of the Process class, this article demonstrates how to hide running console processes, monitor their execution, and capture any output. I'll use this strategy to create a sample Compression class to use with WinZip and gzip (popular tools for compressing data).
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Building a Internet Portal (for Free!) with DotNetNuke
Close your eyes and imagine a utopian world where client and/or department Web sites are easily deployed and the responsibility for content creation and modification is turned over to the administrators of the site. Imagine site administrators creating new content pages consisting of pre-built content types like announcements, contacts, discussions, events, FAQs, news feeds, feedback forms, and even custom-developed content types. Continue imagining them creating new menu options and even adding new users and administering the security rights of users. Sound good? Now imagine all this available for free as an open-source Visual Studio .NET project. Sounding even better? Welcome to the DotNetNuke content management portal!
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Asynchronous Windows Forms Programming
Windows Forms applications often require some sort of asynchronous invocation option.You rarely want to block the user interface while a lengthy operation executes in the background. Windows Forms pose a set of complicated design and implementation issues when it comes to asynchronous method invocation and multithreading due to the underlying Windows messages processing. Although .NET does provide a uniform asynchronous invocation mechanism (described in my article, "Asynchronous .NET Programming", CoDe Magazine, May 2003) you cannot apply it as-is in a Windows Forms application. To address this problem, the next version of .NET (version 2.0, code-name Whidbey) provides a new component designed to ease the task of developing asynchronous Windows Forms applications. This article starts by describing the current asynchronous programming model available to Windows Forms developers. Then, not only does this article describe the Whidbey solution, it also provides a .NET 1.1 implementation of the solution so that you can take advantage of this superior programming model today and ease the transition into Windows Forms 2.0 in the future.
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Building Wiki Web Sites with ASP.NET and SQL Server.
Wiki Web sites (Wikis) are great collaboration tools that you can easily create with ASP.NET. This article describes some of the advantages that Wiki Web sites provide and how you can use ASP.NET and SQL Server to create your own Wiki. You'll learn how to write powerful parsers using the .NET regular expressions class and you'll discover how to add sophisticated search functionality to your Web sites by using SQL Server's Full-Text Search service.
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Integrating the Google Web Service Into ASP.NET
Google now offers the functionality of its search engine through a Web service.Over the past couple years, Google has become the most popular search engine used on the Web. Building upon its popularity, Google has developed additional search accessories and interfaces for both personal and commercial use. The most powerful interface offered by Google is exposure of its database and search capabilities through the use of a Web service.
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.Finalize() - How Many Programmers Does it Take (or, the Bike Ride that Wasn't)?
March/April .Finalize() column.