.NET Archive

"Four short years ago, Microsoft unveiled its new framework/engine for programming and running applications in a virtual environment, and the world was stunned. Microsoft had introduced a run-time environment that was for the first time a true 'write once, run everywhere' implementation, but that was far from being the end. With .NET 3.0 on the loom, NeoSmart Technologies takes a look at how far .NET has come and just how long it can keep going."

Microsoft is working on a phased approach to enhancing its support for dynamic languages on the company's .Net platform. Jim Hugunin, creator of the IronPython language and a development leader on Microsoft's CLR (Common Language Runtime) team, told eWEEK that Microsoft is working to help usher in support for dynamic languages on top of the CLR in a variety of levels or phases.

NeoSmart Technologies reports on what the upcoming RTM of the Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework means, both for developers and those seeking a look at what's coming from Microsoft's direction. It includes the positive implications this has on Microsoft's laggy development process and the benefits it'll provide to developers and system programmers too.

Regardless of what type of data you're working with or what kind of application you're creating, you will undoubtedly need to work with strings. No matter how the data is stored, the end user always deals in human-readable text. As such, knowing how to work with strings is part of the essential knowledge that any .NET developer needs to make rich and compelling applications. In addition to showing you how to work with strings in the .NET Framework, this chapter will also introduce you to regular expressions. Also, Jeff Cogswell explains how to use regular expressions to simplify and enhance the power of your programmatic string searching, matching, and replacing.

Microsoft has shipped the release candidate for IronPython 1.0 on its CodePlex community source site. IronPython is a project that implements the dynamic object-oriented Python language on top of the Microsoft Common Language Infrastructure. IronPython is both well-integrated with the .Net Framework and is a true implementation of the Python language.

Jeff Cogswell writes: "I'm about to make a confession. Even though I've written several books and articles about C++, I have a secret: C++ isn't my favorite language. I have lots of languages that I use, each one for different purposes. But the language I consider my all-time favorite is Python."

Microsoft .NET Compact Framework version 2.0 SP1 release has been completed and is in the process of being released. This service pack was driven customer feedback including improvements in stability, adds new debugging features, extended platform support, and new developer functionality.

Applications have special support in Windows Forms. This book chapter focuses on this topics in depth, and starts by defining what an application actually is.

"In the previous article in this series, you discovered a whole world of messages that the .NET Framework doesn't even capture. These messages can signal all kinds of events, request changes, and even can end your application. Unfortunately, the techniques described in that article only work for messages that the CLR passes to your application. Sometimes, you want to track messages that the CLR doesn't support."

Peter Aitken points out that text is just a graphic image and therefore can be manipulated like any other graphic. .NET provides some built-in tools for manipulating the size, shape, and orientation of text. Just be sure it remains readable!

"Microsoft's Monad provides a new command processor and a new way to create batch tasks. They leave the antiquated batch file in the dust. Monad offers you the full power of the .NET Framework to create your batch files. Its depth of functionality makes it part batch file and part application environment. Theoretically, you can create a full-blown application using just this scripting environment."

"You might not be familiar with messages, but they're extremely important, especially when you need to perform tasks outside of the range of tasks that Microsoft programmed into the .NET Framework. All communication in Windows relies on messages. This article reveals Windows messages to you, shows you how to capture messages that a .NET application doesn't normally capture, and demonstrates how to generate messages that .NET applications don't normally generate. In short, by the time you finish this article, you'll know about an entirely different world: the one that the .NET Framework hides from view."

Most of the time, your computer's CPU is sitting idle. Paul Kimmel shows how easy it is to use multithreading with the new BackgroundWorker component in .NET 2.0, so you can stop your bored gadgetry from wasting all that idle time.

"Karmencita is a high level object query language for .NET. It's purpose is to allow easy querying from in memory structured data. Features: easy, SQL like language; common, slim API used for querying data; supports any IEnumerable data source, DataTables and XmlDataDocuments; extensible implementation; and much more."