November 1, 2005

ONDotnet.com has published a fascinating two-part interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the chief architect of the C# language. Anders talks about the past, present, and future of C# and .NET.

June 16, 2005

The LAMP open source development stack is steadily winning marketshare against Microsoft's .NET and Sun's Java programming suites. LAMP includes the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database and the scripting languages PHP, Perl or Python. In recent months, the LAMP suite has been making big inroads into large companies, due to a growing number of third-party software and service providers that are helping to accelerate the push of LAMP into corporate IT. A number of open source and commercial web applications like SugarCRM and Journyx are also being built atop the LAMP stack instead of atop .NET or Java. Microsoft is now also viewing LAMP as serious threat and is focusing on reducing the cost and complexity of using the .NET framework. As a response, Microsoft is working on a series of low cost products to compete directly with LAMP.

June 8, 2005

Informit.com has published an article explaining how to use the Google Web API from your own .NET and Java applications. Using the Google Web API, your applications can access many of Google's services, including its immense index of the web. The API uses a combination of WDSL, XML, and SOAP to communicate with Google, but all of that complexity is hidden from developers thanks to the Google Web API. The article shows you how to put together sample Google Web API applications in C# using Visual Studio and in Java using the Sun JDK.

June 1, 2005

MSDN has published a lengthy article about the new System.Transactions framework in .NET 2.0. This new transactional programming model allows developers to write transactional code with low overhead, asynchronous capabilities, event tracking, enhanced security, concurrency management and interoperability.

April 22, 2005

MSDN has published a detailed and very informative sneak peak at Visual Basic 2005. The article provides an overview of new features like My Visual Basic, IntelliSense, Edit and Continue, AutoCorrect, Just My Code, Windows Forms enhancements, and more. Other benefits of the new version of Visual Basic include enhanced productivity and highly improved debugging functionality. The language itself has many enhancements including support for generics, unsigned types, operator overloading, and more.

April 19, 2005

An article over at ONDotNet.com explains how to use new XML DataSource Controls in Whidbey (.NET 2.0). These controls allow your application to bind to XML data just as you would to database tables. They are perfect for quickly developing XML-aware ASP.NET and Windows.Forms applications. In addition, the article explains how to use the XPathDocument class for even more development flexibility.

April 5, 2005

ONDotnet.com has published an article showing you how to create .NET add-ins in Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. These extensions can be written in any .NET language including VB.NET and C#.

April 3, 2005

An article at Informit.com shows you how to create .NET applications that use Microsoft's Speech Application SDK (SASDK). See what it takes to do speech synthesis and recognition in your own code, as well as take advantage of telephony server libraries.

March 21, 2005

ONDotnet.com has interviewed Miguel de Icaza, the lead developer of the Mono open source .NET framework. Half the interview is about the current state of Mono, and the other half is about upcoming new features like Windows.Forms, C# 2.1, 64 bit support, JScript and Visual Basic compilers, new garbage collectors, ahead-of-time compilation, Java support, GTK# improvements, Cocoa# integration, and more.

March 15, 2005

ONDotnet.com shows you how to use advanced text input handling in .NET 2.0 (Whidbey) with Visual Studio 2005.

March 5, 2005

According to various sources, Microsoft is porting their WinFS database file system to Windows XP. The WinFS file system lets users search and manage files based on content and metadata, and lets developers enhance the usefulness of their applications through the WinFS managed API.

February 10, 2005

MSDN has posted a lengthy article describing Indigo, Microsoft's unified programming model for service-oriented applications. Indigo uses SOAP and other technologies to create reliable and secure transactional services. Indigo will debut in Microsoft's forthcoming version of Windows, codenamed "Longhorn".