This article shows how you can use the Research Services of Microsoft Office to provide value added services to users using Office applications.

(May 15th, 2004)

COM Interop is the process wherein a .NET assembly calls into the methods of a COM component. .NET enables this mechanism through the usage of a runtime callable wrapper. This article shows how this interop mechanism works.

(May 9th, 2004)

The data set object in .NET allows data from disparate data sources to be fetched and linked in a master-child relationship. This article shows the programming discipline that needs to be followed to create this relationship.

(March 7th, 2004)

.NET applications when loaded, provide evidence to the loader which is then used by the policy evaluator to provide a set of permissions to the assembly. In this article we will see what the evidence is and how to display it for our reference.

(February 1st, 2004)

.NET applications can determine which poartions of an application logic to execute based on the identity (or user) executing the application and what permissions (or roles) that the identity has. This concept is called role-based security and this article will show you how to use this concept.

(February 1st, 2004)

.NET applications can determine at runtime whether they have the appropriate security contexts to run and based on this take intelligent decisions in code. This article explores one such concept with an example.

(January 17th, 2004)

This article explores how the Code Access Security model of .NET works with a simple example.

(January 12th, 2004)

With the advent of .NET, a new kind of security model called Code Access Security has been introduced. This article demistifies this model and looks at some of the important concepts.

(January 12th, 2004)

Microsoft Word 2003 allows the association of multiple stylesheets to a schema so that you can view an XML document in various forms. This article explores how to associate stylesheets to a schema and then view the XML document through the XSL.

(December 14th, 2003)

Microsoft Excel 2003 allows the same level of flexibility (and more) as Microsoft Word 2003 in terms of working with XML. This article explores how to use Microsoft Excel to work with XML.

(December 14th, 2003)

Microsoft Word 2003 allows the saving of documents to an XML format (or a custom format as defined by a schema). Sometimes it might be required to transform the XML into another format to cater to differing formats. This article shows you how you can attach an XSL to a Word document.

(November 26th, 2003)

With the advent of Mircosoft Office 2003, Microsoft has integrated XML strongly into almost all the Office applications. This puts a tremendous amount of flexibility and power into the hands of application developers and enables the usage of Office as a development platform. In this article, we will see the XML features of Microsoft Word 2003 and how to work with some of them. More specifically we will see how to use customer defined XML schemas with Microsoft Word.

(November 24th, 2003)

This article shows you how to develop reusable login screens using Windows forms and the SQLDMO library.

(November 10th, 2003)

Any smart device application needs access to enterprise data. One of the ways in which this data can be reached is by using web services. A smart device application reaches a web service in much the same way as any other .NET application. In this article, we will see how to integrate a web service with a smart device application and how to execute the same.

(August 26, 2003)

This article looks at a workaround for making the emulator connect to enterprise sources like web services.

(August 18, 2003)

In this article, we will see how to write a simple .NET Compact Framework application and deploy it onto a device. This article provides a step-by-step instruction on how to write the application.

(August 5, 2003)

This article looks at how you can implement a simple linked list using VB.NET.

(July 6, 2003)

This article looks at how you can access the command line arguments in a console .NET application

(June 19, 2003)

Often, we browse through various sites to see if new content has been posted. RSS Feeds is an XML format used by web-sites to aggregate content that has been posted so that applications (called feed readers) can download the same and use it internally. This tool (developed in .NET and ASP.NET) is a feed reader that reads the RSS Feeds from Microsoft, and displays them in an ASP.NET web page. The feeds are downloaded as XML files by a console application (which can also be scheduled), which are then cached and used. The tool is implemented as 2 projects, "RSSFeed", which is the ASP.NET application and "RSSFeedManager" which is the download component. The "Using MSDN Feeds.zip" is the article about the application and the "RssApp.zip" is the actual application source code.

(June 17, 2003)

Sharing transient state in distributed applications running in COM+ has always been a problem. There have been many solutions, but the COM+ Shared Property Manager (SPM) provides a structured way for an application to create and share properties between components. This article looks at how .NET enables an application to use the SPM to create and manage properties that can be shared by COM+ components.

(April 15, 2003)

One of the advantages of an environment like VS.NET is to promote Rapid Application Development (RAD). In this paradigm, developers drag and drop various objects onto a design surface and the IDE automatically writes the necessary code behind the scenes. Visual Studio 6.0 supported this paradigm. VS.NET also supports the same paradigm wherein .NET components can be registered with the toolbox which developers can then drag and drop onto their projects. This article describes how to write .NET types that can be registered with VS.NET to promote the RAD paradigm.

(March 25, 2003)

The System.Collections namespace contains some very interesting collections that can be used to model applications and represent data. This article talks about the "Stack" collection and how it can be used to solve some typical problems.

(March 03, 2003)

The concept of web services is taking the world by storm and the .NET Framework promises to ease the development and deployment of web services. This article looks at developing web services using the SOAP Toolkit from Microsoft which provides an alternative way for developing and consuming web services without using .NET while allowing companies to evaluate and adopt .NET. The SOAP Toolkit provides a convenient way to expose COM components as web services and to also consume external web services by applications.

(February 24, 2003)