trobbins - Channel 9

Virtual Earth Madness Screencast

trobbins — Tue, 23 May 2006 02:13:47 GMT

The folks at NetBlender have put together a short screencast that shows their winning entry. They highlight the use of Virtual Earth and how it is synchronized with the video. Definitely worth checking out!

Looking at the Mobile Controls

trobbins — Fri, 12 May 2006 03:29:36 GMT

Mobility is becoming an important part of application development. This falls into either connected or disconnected mobile applications. In this screencast, Thom takes a look at building connected mobile applications using the ASP.NET Mobile Controls with Visual Studio 2005.

The Openwave emulator shown during this screencast is available for download from here.

Setting up a Custom Membership Provider

trobbins — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:10:11 GMT

After a review of the three general situations that would cause you to create you own custom membership provider Patrick walks you through the creation of a very primitive membership provider and see it in action. Also featured in this screencast is a quick look at the membership database created to support the standard membership provider.

Looking at the Permissions Calculator

trobbins — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 12:36:55 GMT

Visual Studio 2005 has many new added security features to help you the developer create a secure applications with little effort. The permissions calculator coupled with the ability to emulate security zones found in code access security allow you to test your applications in a simulated environment before you deploy. In this screencast, Duane takes a look at how this can be done.

Looking at the System.Security.AccessControl Namespace

trobbins — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 02:49:55 GMT

System.Security.AccessControl is new to .Net 2.0. This wonderful namespace is the holy grail of namespaces when it comes to modifying Access Control Lists on objects. Are you tired of using that old p/invoke calls, tired of creating huge security holes by attempting to muck with windows API's to create your ACLs. Well no more! In this screencast Duane takes a look at using this brand new namespace and show how you can even apply ACLs to your objects too!

More About Web Parts with ASP 2.0

trobbins — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 04:24:14 GMT

In Part 1 we looked at the basics of Web Parts with Visual Studio 2005 and ASP 2.0. In this second installment Thom takes a look at some of the more advanced customization features. These include how to build a catalog and personalizing a Web Part Page.

Looking at the Word Object Model

trobbins — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 02:12:11 GMT

Microsoft Word is probably one of the most commonly used software packages. What many people don’t realize is that it exposes a very rich and fully featured object model. The object model is based around three basic objects. This is the top level Application object and the underlying Document and Selection objects. Each of these objects provides a unique set of features that are important to understand when starting to work with Microsoft Word. In this screencast Thom takes a look at these objects and some of the ways they can be used.

Looking at Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office

trobbins — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 01:58:09 GMT

The Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System brings significant enhancements to the development of business solutions that rely on solutions based on Office, Excel, InfoPath and Outlook 2003. Extending the previous versions, the integration of these tools into Visual Studio 2005 is designed to solve many different business challenges.

In this screencast, Thom takes a quick look at these tools and explores some of the core features they provide to developers. After viewing this Fast Tip we encourage you to review the following white paper for more information.

Looking at Themes and Skins

trobbins — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 03:34:03 GMT

In this screencast, Thom takes a look at one of the new features of ASP 2.0 called Themes and Skins. A theme is a collection of property settings that allow a Web page to define a common look and for pages and controls. Themes are made up of elements: skins, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), images and other defined resources.

Looking at Web Services with Visual Studio 2005

trobbins — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 00:44:43 GMT

The Web Services platforms represents the evolution of past distributed component technologies. They really were the result of developments and companies struggling with the various interoperability issues that were common with other technologies. Web Services aren’t the only distributed technology available but certainly the most prevalent.

In this screencast Thom takes a look at some of the more important changes within the Web Services infrastructure using Visual Studio 2005. These include the addition of the WS-I basic profile, and building typed datasets.

Looking at the Report Viewer Control

trobbins — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 20:30:37 GMT

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 includes a report designer functionality and a new set of ReportViewer controls that can be used to build and display reports within custom applications. Reports may contain tabular, aggregated, and even multidimensional data. The ReportViewer controls are used to process and display these reports within applications. There are two versions of the controls. The ReportViewer Web server control is used to host reports in ASP.NET projects. The ReportViewer Windows Forms control is used to host reports in Windows application processing.

Both controls can be configured to run in either local or remote processing mode. How you configure the processing mode effects everything about the reports from design to deployment.

Local processing mode refers to report processing that is performed by the ReportViewer control within the client application. All report processing is performed as a local process using data that your application provides. To create the reports used in local processing mode, you use the Report project template in Visual Studio
Remote processing mode refers to report processing that is performed by a SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services report server. In remote processing mode, the ReportViewer control is used as a viewer to display a predefined report that is already published on a Reporting Services report server. All processing from data retrieval to report rendering is performed on the report server.

In this Screencast Thom takes a look at how this control can be used to host both server reports and local reports

Examining Master Pages

trobbins — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:51:50 GMT

Over the years Web developers have struggled with a variety of techniques to try and create template based sites. Unfortunately, none of these have been generic and easy to maintain. The introduction of Master pages is designed to solve this problem.

Conceptually master pages consist of two elements: Master Page and Content Page. Master pages act as the templates for the Content Pages, and Content Pages provide content to populate pieces of Master Pages. A Master Page is essentially a standard ASP.NET page except that it used the extension of .master and a <%@ master %> directive instead of <%@ page %>. This Master Page file serves as the template for other pages, so typically it will contain the top-level HTML elements, the main form, headers, footers, and such. Within the Master Page you add instances of the ContentPlaceHolder control at locations where you want Content Pages to supply page-specific content.

The Content Pages are just ordinary .aspx files that specify an associated Master Page in their page directive using the masterpagefile attribute. These pages contain only instances of the Content control as they are used to to supply content for the inherited Master Page template. Each Content control must map to a specific ContentPlaceHolder control defined in the referenced Master Page, the contents of which is inserted into the Master Page's placeholder at rendering time.

In this screencast, Thom examines some of the uses for Master Pages.

Managed Code and SQL Server 2005

trobbins — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 21:50:54 GMT

The hosting of the .NET Framework within SQL Server 2005 allows the development of managed code within the database. This becomes an important addition to TSQL as a way to extend SQL Server. It is important to remember that the ability to write managed code doesn’t mean that you should forget about using TSQL. In this screencast, Thom takes a look at how to use managed code and when it may make sense within your applications.

Looking at Visualizers

trobbins — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 04:06:22 GMT

In this screencast Thom take a look at a new feature within debugging using Visual Studio 2005 called visualizers. Debugging is just one of those necessary evils that we just can’t seem to escape. The Visual Studio debugger has always provided some great features to help solve this problem. However, the debugger always has been limited to a text only hierarchy view of application code. Which wasn’t a problem for some things but objects, for example, a dataset could be a challenge to debug. Visual Studio 2005 introduces a new concept called visualizers that are designed to solve this problem. Debugger visualizers enable advanced, customized data display while you are running your applications with the Visual Studio Debugger.

Looking at the FileSystemWatcher Control

trobbins — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 20:27:29 GMT

The FileSystemWatcher control is an extension of the System.IO namespace that allows the Windows operating system to notify application of any file changes that have occurred. In this video Thom Robbins takes a look at how it can be used to within an application.

Using XQuery to Process a Stored Procedure

trobbins — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 13:41:27 GMT

Rob Daigneau takes a look at how you can process a stored procedure using XQuery, one of the new features available within SQL Server 2005.

Looking at Code Coverage

trobbins — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 02:09:07 GMT

In this video, Thom Robbins takes a look at the new Code Coverage features. In case you don’t know code coverage is used to measure test effectiveness on a line by line basis within an application. Code Coverage information is gathered when application artifacts have been instrumented and during a test run are loaded into memory.

Introducing the SQL Server 2005 Service Broker

trobbins — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 19:20:17 GMT

Andy Babiec takes a quick look at the SQL Server 2005 Service Broker. This is one of the new features of SQL Server 2005 that which adds reliable, scaleable, distributed, asynchronous functionality to database applications. In this example, he shows how you can set up a database and take advantage of the messaging infrastructure.

Exploring Mobile GDI with Visual Studio 2003 and the Compact Framework

trobbins — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 15:33:50 GMT

In this video Duane LaFlotte explores how the GDI can be manipulated with Visual Studio 2003 and the Compact Framework.

Exploring the Crypto API

trobbins — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 02:45:02 GMT

In this video Duane LaFlotte explores the Crypto API and how it can be used within a .NET application.

Developing Speech Enabled Applications

trobbins — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:28:11 GMT

In this video Duane LaFlotte takes a look at how he used speech server to author an extension to his blog.

Looking at Server Controls with ASP 2.0

trobbins — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:24:45 GMT

In this video Patrick Hynds takes a look at the new server control features available within Visual Studio 2005 and how it can be used to develop AJAX style controls

Introducing the Login Controls

trobbins — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 02:44:19 GMT

One of the new features of Visual Studio 2005 and ASP 2.0 is the login controls. Thom Robbins takes a look at how they can be used to build a simple authentication mechanism for Web applications.

Building a Quick Lookup Screen

trobbins — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 01:35:47 GMT

Ever tried to build a quick lookup form? And use no code? Well Visual Studio 2005 provides a way to do this easily using the new features of the data source wizard. Thom Robbins shows how you can use this feature to build a database lookup screen.

Importing/Exporting Settings with Visual Studio 2005

trobbins — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 02:18:29 GMT

Visual Studio 2005 provides an easy way to manage the development environment through an XML schema structure. Thom Robbins shows how you can import and export settings using Visual Studio 2005.