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Microsoft's .NET will enable enterprise developers to create programs that transcend device boundaries and harness the connectivity of the Internet as never before. Corporations worldwide are seeking to understand .NET, factor it into their strategies, and learn how to use it to build new software and extend legacy applications. In this video course, Bertrand Meyer -- one of the world's leading experts in object technology, and a consultant that has been deeply involved with .NET from the outset -- delivers the first complete overview of .NET technology for decision-makers and technical professionals alike. One component and technology at a time, he offers detailed insight into .NET's advantages, the challenges associated with deploying it, and the best available approaches for migration. He covers objects, the C# language, ASP+, and SOAP; shows how to write new applications that take full advantage of the .NET framework, and demonstrates techniques for extending legacy code and applications into the .NET environment. The CD-ROM includes 6 hours of digital video lectures covering all key aspects of the .NET platform, plus .NET beta software, white papers, code samples, and more. The package also includes a bonus workbook with all lecture slides, detailed background material, and a .NET glossary.

The global reach of contemporary media has greatly influenced social, political, and physical space. Indeed, we are becoming inhabitants of information space. net_condition investigates the consequences of this phenomenon that is radically altering the public sphere, the private sphere, and the possibilities of creativity in the networked sphere.
In studying the movement from photography to film, video, and now online art, art historians and theorists have held that each new medium introduces characteristics and conditions that are in some respects superior to those of previous media. The net is changing not only other media, but society itself, transforming social communication, art, and politics. The contributors view the net as a universal tool that is altering the local structures—from ethics to economics—of the historical world into nonlocal structures. In a world of distributed virtual realities, shared cyberspace, multilocal net-games, and online multiuser environments, millions of users interact in virtual info-spheres. In this global information world, net.art has become a means of expressing, as well as testing, social and political utopian ideas.
net_condition is published in conjunction with an international exhibition that took place simultaneously in Germany, Austria, Spain, and Japan. It includes the work of such critical writers as Pierre Bourdieu, Manuel Castells, Claudia Gianetti, Edward S. Hermann, Armand Mattelart, and Siegfried Zielinski.
Copublished with ZKM/Center for Art and Media and with steirischer herbst.

VB Programmers: Get in Step with .NET

With the introduction of Visual Basic .NET, VB transcends its traditional second-class status to become a full-fledged citizen of the object-oriented programming, letting you access the full power of the Windows platform for the first time. Written bythe author of the best-selling Mastering Visual Basic 6 this all-new edition is the resource you need to make a successful transition to .NET. Comprising in-depth explanations, practical examples, and handy reference information, its coverage includes:

• Mastering the new Windows Forms Designer and controls
• Building dynamic forms
• Using powerful Framework classes such as ArrayLists and HashTables
• Persisting objects to disk files
• Handling graphics and printing
• Achieving robustness via structured exception handling and debugging
• Developing your own classes and extending existing ones via inheritance
• Building custom Windows controls
• Building menus and list controls with custom-drawn items
• Using ADO.NET to build disconnected, distributed applications
• Using SQL queries and stored procedures with ADO.NET
• Facilitating database programming with the visual database tools
• Building web applications with ASP.NET and the rich web controls
• Designing web applications to access databases
• Using the DataGrid and DataList web controls
• Building XML web services to use with Windows and web applications
• Special topics like the Multiple Document Interface and powerful recursive programming techniques

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

This digital document is an article from Language, Learning & Technology, published by University of Hawaii, National Foreign Language Resource Center on January 1, 2002. The length of the article is 1201 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: ON THE NET -- MERLOT: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching.
Author: Jean W. LeLoup
Publication: Language, Learning & Technology (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2002
Publisher: University of Hawaii, National Foreign Language Resource Center
Volume: 6 Issue: 1 Page: 3
Distributed by Thomson Gale

Net Workprovides adetailed study of the work of web designers.It drawson empirical research carried out from the birth of web design as an area of work in the 1990s to its professionalization in the twenty-first century and addresses the politics of building an inclusive WWW for people of diverse abilities.

Our overarching goal in writing this book was to give ASP.NET developers the power to quickly and easily create visually stunning Internet applications, coupled with rich interactivity to fully immerse the user in a new online experience. Silverlight gives you everything you need to do just this, and in serious style!

As well as taking you through each feature that ships with Silverlight, this book will make sure you’re able to debug, troubleshoot, and performance-tune your Silverlight applications, as well as seamlessly hook into your existing ASP.NET architecture and code base.

This book is aimed at .NET developers and architects who want to quickly get up to speed with all that Silverlight 2 has to offer.

As well as covering the breadth of features that Silverlight 2 provides, this book makes a point of demonstrating where necessary how the particular feature can be integrated tightly with the ASP.NET host application. An example is in Chapter 7, where the ASP.NET Profile service is utilized directly from within Silverlight to obtain user-specific data.

It’s fair to say that although this book is aimed at ASP.NET developers, it covers all of the salient features of Silverlight 2 to the degree that it’s a useful programming resource for developers not using ASP.NET also.

If you’re fresh to .NET development, however, you might want to check out a beginning .NET book first, to help you overcome the syntax and set-up queries when learning a new language. Otherwise, take a deep breath and dive in!

This book covers the full feature set of Silverlight 2, diving into each of the subject areas to give depth and breadth coverage. As well as teaching you about the component parts of the Silverlight API, the book also covers debugging, troubleshooting, and performance-tuning your Silverlight applications, arming you with all the skills and knowledge you’ll need to create advanced Silverlight-based applications in record time.

Importantly, this book covers the integration points between ASP.NET and Silverlight, taking you through the different techniques you can use to seamlessly augment your existing or new ASP.NET web sites with the power of Silverlight.

If you want to program in Silverlight and potentially use ASP.NET as the host, then this book covers it all.

The book is split into two distinct parts. Part I is titled “Silverlight Fundamentals for ASP.NET Developers,” and Part II is titled “Developing ASP.NET Applications with Silverlight.” Part I is intended to give you grounding in what Silverlight is as a technology and how it fits into the Web-based landscape. The component pieces of a Silverlight application are also laid out at a high level, and any knowledge required before putting an application together is explained.

Part II is written to give you depth of knowledge across the Silverlight feature-set and show you how to leverage the power of both Silverlight and ASP.NET to create compelling applications.

A brief synopsis of the content follows:

• “Silverlight in a Nutshell”—This will teach you at a high level what Silverlight is and how it can help you deliver engaging, immersive web applications. Differentiating Silverlight from other Web-based technologies is also covered here, and a description of the required development environment is provided. In short, after reading this, you’ll be able to describe Silverlight and explain why you’d want to use it and what gives it the edge over the competition.

• “Silverlight Architecture”—Silverlight allows you to rapidly build a well-rounded application with a great user interface, but if you encounter any problems during development, it is going to be important for you to understand the underlying architecture upon which you are developing. This outlines the core features of Silverlight 2 and guides you around the building blocks of this highly flexible framework, paying particular attention throughout to your ASP.NET heritage.

• “XAML Condensed”—Quickly getting up to speed with XAML is what this is all about, helping you brush aside the syntax queries and get to grips with the basics of this multi-purpose declarative language. Hooking the XAML files up to .NET code is also shown here, helping you inject dynamic event-driven actions into your Silverlight UI. Finally, one technique for the dynamic creation of XAML is shown, followed by a tour of Expression Blend.

• “Programming Silverlight”—By the time you get here, you’ll be itching to start coding, and code you will as the feature-agnostic programming constructs that make up a Silverlight application are covered in detail. The composition of a Silverlight application is laid bare and its constituent parts explained at length, as well as detailing the Silverlight application lifetime and how to hook into it. The different options for embedding the Silverlight plug-in within your application are covered, followed by a brief overview of JavaScript and its associated DOM. This then leads onto a discussion of the Silverlight Object Model, explaining how the visual tree is constructed to form the UI. Another technique for dynamically creating XAML and adding it to the visual tree is also shown here. Finally, the Silverlight event model, browser interaction, and threading model are covered for you.

• “Creating the User Interface”—You now know how to program Silverlight and how to write XAML. This shows you how to put it all together to start laying out the user interface of your Silverlight application. Each of the layout controls that ship with Silverlight is covered here—Canvas, Grid, StackPanel, and TabControl—including information on when to use which one. Information on how to create a scalable UI is also provided, followed finally by a section that details how to localize your application, thereby making it available to other languages and cultures.

• “Silverlight Controls”—Silverlight 2 provides an assortment of controls that can be used to display and capture data. In this, you’ll learn to work with user input controls, items controls, and media controls and see how they can be put to use to build interactive and rich user interfaces. You’ll also learn how to use controls such as the MultiScaleImage control to work with Silverlight’s Deep Zoom technology.

• “Styles and Templates”—Altering the look and feel of your application is the crux here, with the different techniques for applying styling information to the controls that comprise it demonstrated here. As well as this, integrating with the ASP.NET Profile service via WCF is detailed, giving you the ability to personalize your Silverlight application on a per-user basis.

• “User Interaction”—What’s the point of having a great technology like Silverlight 2 if we can’t interact with it? We review the different ways that you can interact with your application, understanding how the UIElements work with input devices like the keyboard, mouse, and stylus. We also explore the different ways to navigate around the application and present the different options that we have and in which scenarios each one is preferred.

• “Communicating with the Server”—The ability to access data located at distributed sources is key in many Silverlight 2 applications. You learn different networking technologies that are available and see how they can be put to use. Several different topics are covered such as creating and calling ASMX and WCF services, calling REST APIs, working with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data, pushing data from a server to a client with sockets, and leveraging HTTP Polling Duplex functionality.

• “Working with Data”—It is all about data! One of my colleagues always says, “If you are not using data binding in Silverlight 2, you are doing something wrong!” This explains the data framework available within your applications and then deeps dive into the inner workings of data binding, showing you the different approaches that you may take. In order to understand how the data is retrieved, we explain the different technologies and techniques to get the most of Silverlight 2 data using the available data controls. Finally, this explains how you can manipulate the data using LINQ and LINQ to XML.

• “Creating Custom Controls”—This will take you on a journey in order to discover the different options that you have available to customize the Silverlight 2 controls. We start exploring the user control model that ASP.NET developers are used to, and then we dig into the internals of visual customization. You will be amazed by this powerful new model. Finally, for those who need to push the technology to the limit, this explains how to create a complete custom control from scratch.

• “Securing Your Silverlight Application”—Whether you’re an Enterprise developer or a Silverlight hobbyist, you are going to want to release your application out to the wild at some point. In doing so, you are providing a high level of exposure to your application, and therefore security should not be an afterthought. Thankfully, Silverlight 2 has a security framework built into the run time, which will give you the peace of mind of working within a secure environment. This introduces you to the Silverlight security framework, but also talks you through your security responsibilities as a Silverlight developer.

• “Audio and Video”—Embedding high-fidelity audio and video in your Silverlight application is sure to capture your users’ imaginations, and this shows you how you can do just this using the Silverlight-provided MediaElement...

A hands-on guide to Microsoft's latest rich application development technology: Silverlight 4

Silverlight 4 is the newest version of the rich Internet application toolkit that provides support for .NET capabilities over the Internet. With this latest release of Silverlight, Microsoft has revolutionized the way that Web applications can be created. This book uses the popular Problem – Design – Solution strategy to demonstrate how to harness the power and abilities of Silverlight 4 to add value to the overall user experience of a Web site.

Using a Web site created by the author as a reference point, you'll go through the steps of creating a live, fully functional application for the Web using Silverlight 4 and the Silverlight Control Toolkit. Along the way, the book addresses important design considerations, such as the use of Web Services and the SQL Server database.

• Uses the popular Problem – Design – Solution format show you how to harness the power of the latest version of Silverlight, Microsoft's rich Internet application toolkit
• Puts the author's own Web site to task as you learn to create rich user interfaces that integrate video, HTML, and social networking components
• Explains system linking and data flow, end user interface, system architecture based on Silverlight 4 and .NET 4, and more
• Includes coverage on integrating social networking and Facebook

With this book, you'll quickly get started using the new features of Silverlight 4 to enhance the user experience of a Web site.

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

What is this book about?

Virtually all applications need to present data to users, but any work beyond basic formatting — charts or conditional formatting, for example — can be very complex to program manually. Crystal Reports is one of the world's leading software packages for creating interactive reports, and it provides developers with an array of tools for creating rich reports that can be published on the Web or integrated within applications. Versions of Crystal Reports have been included with Visual Studio since 1993 but the latest version, Crystal Reports .NET, is now integrated more closely than ever before with Visual Studio .NET.

This book provides a detailed guide to the functionality provided with Crystal Reports .NET and shows you how to integrate reports into your .NET applications. The examples are in VB.NET, but Crystal Reports .NET itself is largely operated by a clear language-neutral user interface in the main, allowing reports to be created and manipulated in practically every .NET language supported by Visual Studio.

What does this book cover?

Here is just a sampling of what you'll find covered in this book:

• Crystal Reports .NET overview
  
• Report integration for Windows and Web-based applications
  
• Creating XML report web services
  
• Working with .NET data, formulas, and logic
  
• The reports engine
  
• Distributing your application
  

Who is this book for?

This book is aimed mainly at readers who have some experience with Crystal Reports and want a comprehensive guide to the functionality included with Crystal Reports .NET, but it will also be valuable to programmers who are getting their first taste of Crystal Reports through the Visual Studio .NET development environment.

The advent of Microsoft's .NET framework offers tremendous new opportunities for training developers. Inheritance, classes, encapsulation, properties, and methods are not terms normally associated with training, but in this book you'll learn how these terms and many more apply to creating world-class training with unprecedented productivity. This book shows all aspects of creating training with Jeff's preferred .NET language, Visual Basic .NET.