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When you read about history, the stories are mostly about the people involved, and not as often about the tools and technologies people used. In software engineering, the stories about the people involved are known as “human factors” - and it is often the human factors in the life of a software project that make life interesting for software developers.

SSWI is a Microsoft Visual Source Safe 6 Web Interface. It provides remote access to all the features of Visual Source Safe without the need to install software on the end user PC. SSWI is a fully web based system, that will work on any PC or MAC (OSX). SSWI works with VSS 6 and 2005, and includes IDE intergration for VB6, Visual Studio 2002, 2003 and 2005 plus many more popular IDE's

The CODE Framework provides a set of tools for developing n-tier, service-oriented applications. In addition, there is a set of recommended patterns and practices that provide guidance in enabling developers to achieve Rapid Application Development, Contract-First implementation, and a system that allows you to change a contract without breaking an implementation. However, one question which has been repeatedly asked throughout our trainings and seminars is, “How do I Unit Test when I’m using the CODE Framework?” This article will examine the question and attempt to answer it.

As the attacks in which hackers use become more and more sophisticated, and the programs in which they attack become increasingly complex, encryption is becoming the last line of defense in database management system (DBMS) security.

In this article we will look at how, specifically, to encrypt the data in a SQL Server 2005 database using symmetric encryption techniques. We'll start with examining the facilities for managing keys in SQL Server and then explore symmetric encryption in SQL Server 2005.

In prior articles, I have shown how to create WPF-based client applications using the CODE Framework and the default themes it ships with. This is a great way to create applications quickly yet make them very reusable and maintainable. However, using the default themes is just the tip of the iceberg. CODE Framework’s theming system is completely open and the default options are just that: defaults. And it turns out to be surprisingly straightforward to create your own themes.

When Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition appeared in 2002, developers were sometimes confused about whether to write code on a Tablet PC or if it were possible to develop Tablet PC applications on existing desktop computers.The solution turned out to be fairly straightforward, if less than intuitive. However, with the addition of Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPCs), multiple releases of the Tablet and Touch Technology API, and now the Windows Vista operating system, this question arises again: What do you need to do to set up your developer environment and create applications for these form factors?

Discover how easy it can be to build browser-friendly HTML from your datasources with WebGrid. Maintaining a datasource is plug and play with WebGrid. Set a few properties and WebGrid will generate a browser friendly data form, and handle all database interaction for insert, update, and datasource delete using safe parameterized queries generated by the grid. A user friendly system message is generated if user input is not valid.

The Tablet PC SDK makes it easy to incorporate digital ink and handwriting analysis into applications; and now the InkAnalysis API (available in Windows Vista as well as downlevel to the Microsoft Windows XP operating system through a redistributable) takes it one step further. Actually, the InkAnalysis API exposes some of the lower-level functions that make handwriting recognition possible. It also exposes some functionality that can improve recognition results, support shapes, alternative recognition results, and spatial analysis. In this article, I will take a deeper look into what goes on behind the scenes and how to take advantage of the tablet team's hard work.

Software developers are good at writing applications. Testers are good at testing applications. In the software development world where separation of concerns is a never-ending quest, it seems logical to apply the rule to the software development cycle. “Let the developers code; QA can be responsible for making sure it works.” It provides an object-oriented management approach where each team is responsible only for what they are best at, and the two teams interface through one simple property, each: the result of their logic and expertise. The system is of logical design. It appears to be a logical pattern. Or so it seems.

You can create reports in many ways, with or without Excel. If you look only at reporting solutions that use Excel, the list roughly gets narrowed down to three:

• SQL Reporting Services
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (VSTO)
• Server-side Excel Automation

Of course you can imagine more solutions, but in essence they will not deviate much from the above list. In this article, I'll first look at SQL Reporting Services and VSTO to examine their plusses and minuses, and then I'll take a detailed look at why and how you would build a server-side solution.