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How to serialize to XML, any generic, derived, or other complex type, which XMLSerializer cannot serialize

The Microsoft Chart controls are a series of classes in the System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting namespace that allow web developers to ability to add charts to their ASP.NET applications. The most pertinent charting-related class is the Chart class, which contains information about the chart's appearance, series, charting areas, and so forth. In most of the demos and code samples we've explored thus far, we've used the Chart class as a Web control, adding the <asp:Chart> declarative markup to our ASP.NET page, setting a few properties and, occasionally, writing a few lines of code. When used as a Web control, the Chart class both creates the chart (as an image) and then renders an <img> element that points to the generated chart image.

Using the Chart Web control is a standard practice in a WebForms application, but it is not suggested when building an ASP.NET MVC application. (While it is possible to add Web controls - including the Chat Web control - to the views of an ASP.NET MVC application, it is generally frowned upon.) So, if we can't use the Chart Web control in an ASP.NET MVC application, how do we display a chart? In addition to being used as a Web control, the Chart class can also be used programmatically. It is quite possible to create a new Chart object, set some properties, plot the data points, and then generate the chart image. In fact, we looked at using this technique in an earlier installment, Programmatically Generating Chart Images, in which we saw (among other things) how to generate chart images programmatically and add them as attachments in an email message.

This article explores how to display charts in an ASP.NET MVC application.

After spending a lot of time focusing on Client-Side Web 2.0 Performance Problems it is time to focus on specific Server-Side Performance Problems. Last week I worked with a client that runs a custom application on Microsoft CRM 4.0 and experienced performance problems in their test environment. Individual web requests to query or update data took several minutes, with some of them eventually timing out. We analyzed some of these long running and failing transactions and in this article I present my analysis and hope it will be beneficial for other MS CRM Developers.

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Read content of paradox database in pure .NET code without using BDE or other libraries; index support included

A skilled database developer might find it difficult to accept that other tools can increase productivity. When Microsoft released SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS 2005), I did not think that any tool could possibly make me more productive than the C# and T-SQL code I was writing by hand. After some reconsideration (and subtle persuasion from peers), I discovered that SSIS 2005 contained many features that indeed reduced my development time - WITHOUT sacrificing flexibility. Microsoft added new functionality in SSIS 2008 to make a strong product even better. In this article, I’ll present 13 different examples that demonstrate the power of Integration Services.

Scans for installed serial ports, queries the supported baud rates and start listening to the port in a separate thread.

A digital oscilloscope with serial analyzer for the parallel port

This article demonstrates a quick and easy-to-use implementation for cross-AppDomain communication in .NET by leveraging Windows native messaging. The XDMessaging library is based on code developed to aid rapid development for a recent Vista project that required a lot of cross-AppDomain communication in a locked-down environment. It proved to be extremely useful in a number of scenarios where .NET Remoting would have been impractical, if not impossible, and actually solved more problems than I could have imagined due to its simplicity. The library is intended to send messages between multiple applications in a same-box scenario. For example, a task-tray application might want to communicate with or monitor a separate desktop application. The library does not implement cross-domain communication across a network, for which case .NET Remoting is sufficient.

The article describes how a computer-being can be trained to write text articles, poems, compose music, or paint contemporary paintings.

This is a bit of a strange article, and may not be that useful, but I think its a very interesting subject, that some will probably not even be aware of. This article will cover some of the less known namespaces within .NET. Such as System.CodeDom and System.CodeDom.Compiler. What I will be demonstrating in this article, is just how neat these namespaces are and what can be done with them. Specifically I will be demonstrating that we are able to build entirely new source code files at runtime using the System.CodeDom namespace and the use the System.CodeDom.Compiler namespace classes to even compile this newly created source code into a runnable application. This will all be created at runtime.