Building a Simple Search Engine with C#

Everyone is talking about Search technology at the moment - how Google has risen to the top of the heap, how Yahoo is trying to regain its former number one spot, and how Microsoft is playing catch-up. But for the average ASP.NET developer, those sites are really about helping people find you on the Web. Once they've visited your website, how do you provide a cheap, fast, customised search to maximise the usability of your content?

Building an ASP.NET App: DVD Catalog

Here's the plan in a nutshell... to build as ASP.NET application to manage my DVD collection. Now let me back up and explain that I'm not crazy and why this is actually a good idea. I was surfing the site looking for typos, out of date info, etc. when it occurred to me that while we have tons of code and articles, we have very few complete applications for you to look at and the last one I remember writing is so old I can't remember when I wrote it! Most everything on the site can be covered

Application Layers in a Service-Based Architecture

By looking at service-based architecture at different scales, Steve Kirk examines the place of factoring an application into logical layers in the new conceptual application architecture of Microsoft .NET. (3 printed pages) In the July column, I introduced the .NET Architecture Center and some new content there, including the Application Architecture: Conceptual View. A colleague who had visited the Center and read this recently stopped by to discuss applications such as Duwamish 7 and IBuySp

Designing a .NET Application

An overview of the differences between typical physical architectures that have proven useful in .NET applications. Each architecture description includes basic guidelines on appropriate scenarios for use, implementation options, advantages, and disadvantages. Describes two-tier, three-tier, and n-tier applications. (14 printed pages). Objectives * Explore typical architectures for Microsoft® .NET applications. * Look at the pros and cons for development within each architecture.

Structuring a .NET Application For Easy Deployment

Summary: How to plan and design for application deployment options presented in the Microsoft .NET Framework. (11 printed pages) Objectives * Understand how assemblies affect deployment * Understand the importance of unique namespaces * Recognize the advantages of good use of attributes in classes * Recognize the advantages of good use of application domains Assumptions * You understand Microsoft® .NET development fairly well * You have a basic understanding of assembl

Building Secure ASP.NET Applications

This guide presents a practical, scenario driven approach to designing and building secure ASP.NET applications for Windows 2000 and version 1.0 of the .NET Framework. It focuses on the key elements of authentication, authorization, and secure communication within and across the tiers of distributed .NET Web applications. (This roadmap: 6 printed pages; the entire guide: 608 printed pages)

Application Overview

ASP.NET defines an application as the sum of all files, pages, handlers, modules, and executable code that can be invoked or run in the scope of a given virtual directory (and its subdirectories) on a Web application server. For example, an "order" application might be published in the "/order" virtual directory on a Web server computer. For IIS the virtual directory can be set up in the Internet Services Manager; it contains all subdirectories, unless the subdirectories are virtual directories

Localizing ASP.NET Applications

The easiest way to localize a Web page is usually to create a copy and translate it to the target language. This works well for static content that does not require a lot of maintenance. To support this model for ASP.NET pages, you can set the Culture attribute using the Page directive. All locale-dependent methods pick up the value of the Culture attribute. The following sample shows how to do this for three independent, localized versions of a page. The Culture property is set on each page

Managing Application State

Because an application and all the objects it stores can be concurrently accessed by different threads, it is better to store only infrequently modified data with application scope. Ideally an object is initialized in the Application_Start event and further access is read-only. In the following sample a file is read in Application_Start (defined in the Global.asax file) and the content is stored in a DataView object in the application state.

Working With Business Objects

Encapsulating logic in business components is an essential part of any real-world application, Web-based or otherwise. In ASP.NET, business objects are the building blocks for multi-tiered Web applications, such as those with a layer for data access or common application rules. This section demonstrates how to write some simple components and include them in your application's Web Forms pages. The Application /Bin Directory A problem with using the COM model for Web application components

Basics of Building .NET Applications

.NET runtime or more precisely Common Language Runtime (CLR) runs the code written for .NET platform. .NET compilers target the .NET runtime and generate intermediate binary code. The code generated by .NET compilers cannot be run directly on the processor because the generated code is not in machine language. The code is generated in Microsoft Intermediate Language (IL) and is called Managed Code. During runtime, .NET JIT (Just in Time) compilers convert this intermediate code to native machine

Building Application Framework with C#

Frameworks are generalized and customized application, which can be built upon into a complete and fully functional software programs. In recent years frameworks have been successfully implemented for some specific application domains, most notably user interfaces and data processing. A successful framework is a breakthrough because it means that developers no longer have to start from scratch: if a framework can successfully generate one user interface, it can generate any user interface.

Visual Studio .NET: Build Web Applications Faster and Easier Using Web Services

Visual Studio .NET includes exciting features, some of which are enhancements to previous versions and some of which are brand new. A few of the most significant additions are the new Microsoft programming language called C#; a new, smarter integrated development environment; new object-oriented features in Visual Basic .NET; and development lifecycle tools. This article provides an overview of these features, as well as a look at Web Services, Web Forms, and new versions of ADO and ASP. It tak

Developing A Newsletter Subscription Web Service

Web services offer their functionality over the web via standards like HTTP and XML. There are many models suggested for implementing the business functionality via web services. One of them is subscription based services. Such services allow the users to subscribe or unsubscribe to the service as per their requirement. This sample application shows you how to develop a newsletter subscription service in ASP.NET. The development language used is C# but you can easily port it on VB.NET. All the f

Hello World - the COBOL Way

One of the excellent feature of .NET is multiple language support. If you already have skills in one of the supported languages the learning curve will be much less. There are more than 20 languages (including C#, VB.NET, Managed C++ and JScript.NET) that can be used to develop applications targeted at .NET framework. Fujitsu has developed a dialect of COBOL called NetCOBOL for .NET. You can download the compiler from their web site. This simple application is Hello World application developed i

Executing External Applications From Your .NET Application

In some cases you need to execute some external application from your own application. The common candidates for such task * Running BCP in SQL Server * Running batch scripts that automate some tasks * Start some add-in application like text editor * Opening read me kind of files at the end of installation .NET provides an easy way to execute a process external to your application. In this small article we will see how to do that.

Handling Assertions in ASP .NET Web Apps

Recently I was moving along with my ASP .NET Web site de-sign and was quite pleased to see just how much easier ASP .NET made the whole process. Being a good boy, I went through the design process and was about to start development when I noticed a small problem. A prototype I developed to test a theory would hang when I used the standard Debug.Assert. If you hearken back to the February 2001 Bugslayer column, you'll remember that I talked about the TraceListeners, which do the actual output fo

Your First .NET Application

We've spent a lot of time talking about what .NET is, and what some of the various .NET technologies can do, but we haven't yet shown you what it really takes to develop a .NET application. In this episode of the .NET Show, we meet with Jason Roos and Ean Hernandez. They are both developers from Saltmine, and they've brought with them a simplified example of what it takes to both write a Web service, as well as use it within a Web application.

Using the .NET Framework to Create Windows-based Applications

With all of the current talk about the Web, it may appear that the Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET development system has de-emphasized support for building traditional Microsoft Windows®-based applications. Actually, Microsoft is investing heavily in Windows-based application development. Windows Forms is a new forms package that enables developers building Windows-based applications to take full advantage of the rich user interface features available in the Microsoft Windows operating sys

MVC for ASP.NET

Most programmers familiar with JSP's Model II architecture and others generally familiar with Model View Controller (MVC) architectures, immediately wonder how the MVC pattern can be applied in an ASP.NET world. This article will demonstrate how the MVC pattern can be applied to an ASP.NET web application and still maintain the basic Microsoft supplied architecture. Historical Background For those unfamiliar with MVC, MVC stands for Model, View, Controller. The Model is the representation