There may be times when you would like to give your users the opportunity to save various settings (and they would probably appreciate having the facility too!).   In the past, the SaveSettings and GetSettings methods were the usual avenue, but in VB 2005 you have some more flexible choices at your disposal.

  Ged Mead looks at these new tools.

Validation is pretty much necessary in almost all kind of applications. The simple fact is that humans are prone to make mistakes while entering data. In order to build a fully fledged application which is free from errors and not susceptable to crashes we should pay attention to input validation. Input validation is the process of making sure that the user provides the accurate type of data because “prevention is better than cure”. If an application requires certain specific data and we feed another type of data then definitely the result is an error. So care must be taken to enter data in a particular format. This can be better explained with the help of an example.

   In previous articles several variations of simple charts were created.   These could be viewed on screen but at some time or other you may need to print out hard copies.

   This article shows you how.

   Murach have been producing technical books for more than 20 years and have developed their own special style and a quite substantial, loyal readership .   Their latest offering is "Murach's Visual Basic 2005".

   Ged Mead offers an overview of this book.   

   The static line chart we created in Part 5 could be useful in lots of situations, but what happens when you want the chart to be continuously updated and the line redrawn in real time?

   This article looks at some ways of doing this.

Practical XML Usage

This article is a small step-by-step guide for .NET/XML beginners. The sample application was written in Visual Basic .NET, but main aspects in the code are shown also in C#. This article can be considered as a reference of XML, schemas or XML transformation. The code was written in Visual Studio 2005 for .NET Framework 2.0.

Part two of this series will look at managing your data by showing you how to update, add and delete records from the Contacts table. In this section we will look at the OleDbCommand object which we will utilise quite a bit when it comes to running "Action" queries against the database.

We will also look at how we can filter the data using the DataView object.

This series of articles aims to introduce you to the use of ADO.NET. However, unlike other tutorials, I will concentrate on showing you how to communicate with your database programmatically (i.e. no wizards). This article will make use of an Address Book program to take you through the various aspects of database programming and who knows, by the end of it, you may decide to make use of the program to store all of those hundreds of contacts that you have.

Part one will look at the basic outline of the user interface and will include the necessary code to connect to the database and retrieve all of your contacts for displaying on the form.

Part two will go further and show you how to filter the data and modify the data including saving new contact information and deleting existing contact information.

Part one and two will make use of an Access database. However, Part three will use an SQL Server database and show you how to use Stored Procedures to access and modify the data. The user interface and functionality will remain the same, only the database used will change.

   In previous articles, we have looked ways of creating various Pie Charts and Bar Charts.  In this Part of the series, we are going to take a first look at another common type of chart, the Line Graph.

   As is often the case in VB.NET, there are several ways of achieving the end result.   Although I haven't chosen the easiest route this time, the journey takes us into some interesting GDI+ territory.

    "Visual Web Developer 2005 Expression Edition For Dummies" by Alan Simpson is a recent publication in this ever-popular, long running series of books.

   Although not the usual 600+ page  coder's book, don't be too quick to write this one off as of no use, advises DevCity reviewer Ged Mead.  It may be more useful than you think.

 If you are a complete newcomer to programming, you should seriously consider getting a copy of this book.  It never loses sight of the fact that beginners don’t always “get it” first time, every time and it uses non-technical explanations and good learning reinforcement techniques to show you the skills in the easiest, least complicated way possible.

    In the Preface to the book, author Wallace Wang sets out his philosophy:

“This book is dedicated to everyone who didn’t have the “right” education, test scores or job skills, but wound up succeeding at their chosen goal anyway.   If you want to learn or do anything in your life, such as learn to program a computer, go ahead and do it and don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”

A review of Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Web Programming With C# tutorial and reference book, written by Scott Waletzko (Skystone Software).

In this article my aim is to guide a relative Visual Basic .NET "newbie" through the process of creating a simple Photo Browser application.  We will gradually build up the application, examining a number of the techniques available to you in Visual Basic .NET including creating a custom thumbnail control and creating instances of it at run-time. 

This article is written using Visual Studio .NET 2003 and .NET framework Version 1.1.