I have been looking at some live web chat programs lately and got the opportunity to review a very good one called .netLIVEHELP .  It’s priced per web site and not per operator and has a ton of features.  It can use Microsoft Access, which it does by default, or MS Sql Server, Oracle or MySql.  This allows you to scale well for larger enterprises or work cheaply for small ones. [read article...]

                Gurock Software has released version 2.0 of their SmartInspect product.  SmartInspect is a full logging utility for Dot Net.  I had the opportunity to review version 1.0 for DevCity.Net.  You can check out that review here.  In this review we’ll check out the new features that have been added to 2.0 and see what it offers.

                There are over one hundred new features in version 2 of SmartInspect.  I suggest you check out their what’s new page for a list of all of them.  I’m going to concentrate on several of the top ones, including the watches graph, memory and text protocols and the new view enhancements like markers and the new filters they added.

 

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I took a look at some cool Dot Net controls this past week that help you create a full featured explorer clone and make working with some of the shell functions in Windows much easier.  Sky Software's Shell MegaPack 8 is much easier to use than trying to do it yourself with the Windows API.  They have made it as simple as some drop on components!

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I recently had the opportunity to check out a software package that does logging for several platforms, .NET, Delphi and Java.  The software is called SmartInspect and it’s by Gurock Software (www.gurock.com).  SmartInspect adds a very flexible methodology to carry out logging in your software.  Being a full time .NET programmer, I examined their API for logging in this platform only.

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     I’ve been looking for a good 100% native Dot Net reporting tool for a while.Reports are key elements to most business software packages today, so finding a powerful and easy to use reporting package is a must.In reviewing packages, I was offered the chance to look at StimulReport by StimulSoft (http://www.stimulsoft.com).It’s a fully managed reporting package that works both in Windows Forms projects as well as the Web.

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     Multithreading, a very powerful technique, is essential for modern software development.Software users expect to work with a very responsive program that they don’t have to wait on, which is a very reasonable demand with the processor speeds that are currently available.Enter multithreading.Multithreading is the concept of having several different paths of code running at the same time.

     When you introduce multithreading in your applications, you immediately make programming more complicated and add design time.You must know exactly what your application and all its threads are doing at all times.You have to account for deadlocks, race conditions and corrupting variable values.In this article we will examine the different methods in Visual Basic.Net to accomplish thread synchronization.We will learn what deadlocks and race conditions are and how to avoid these common problems with multithreading.

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Every once and a while one comes across a great product that does some needed function very well. XHEO|Licensing is one such. It is a comprehensive set of tools that does program licensing, and it does it very well... [read article...]

John Spano reviews a new paradigm in development, new way to develop ASP.NET web sites from concept to full design and coding. [read article...]

If it wasn't enough that .NET was built on a totally new platform, Microsoft went and changed ADO to be totally new also. The new version of ADO called ADO.NET, is functionally very different from the old version. It is totally disconnected and built around object oriented coding concepts giving programmers a very powerful data access platform. Because of the many changes, I would like to suggest a good book - ADO.NET in a Nutshell - to help you get started with ADO.NET. Read more ... [read article...]

The SSCLI is HUGE with thousands of files and over three million lines of code. Imagine jumping into that without a map! Read review on the book that is the "map" for the SSCLI. [read article...]

As most of you know now that Visual Basic.NET is very different from Visual Basic 6, some help in bridging the gap between the two would be very useful. Visual Basic.Net offers a full range of object oriented programming (OOP) techniques that VB 6 doesn't even come close to. The book Object Oriented Programming in Visual Basic.NET by J.P. Hamilton tries to cover this large learning curve in VB.NET. [read article...]

The .NET platform adds many new features that programmers can take advantage of. As with any tool, the better it is understood, the more powerful it is. So how do you learn about something that is very different from conventional programming? Enter .NET Framework Essentials Second Edition. This books gives a very good overview of all major areas of the framework and shows the differences in the three main Microsoft languages that can target it, Visual Basic, C# and managed C++. Be sure to check out the entire review! [read article...]

Review of WebZinc.NET - the only component you'll ever need when working with the Internet that allows you extract website data, search the Web, fill out forms automatically. [read article...]

To get an IP address from a hostname you can use these functions [read article...]

Here are some useful file managing functions in .NET [read article...]

VB.NET has a cool feature that lets you catch any unhandled exception in your programs. To set up this functionality, you have to add 2 subs that handle the exceptions, and 2 event handler definitions [read article...]

Creating threads in VS.NET is much easier than in previous Visual Studio languages. Here is an introduction on how to create a thread and have it execute a function in C# [read article...]

Microsoft introduced a new way to manage memory in the .NET platform called Managed Memory. While much better than conventional methods of memory management, there are still several programming techniques that should be known to take full advantage of this new feature. This article will delve into the depths of this new concept and give several programming techniques on how to control the garbage collector and program for it. [read article...]