December 6, 2002

Four Ways to Use Excel as an Internet Reporting Tool

harting and reporting can involve a lot of work. Numerous vendors have made a business out of selling their third party charting and reporting tools. High-end vendors such as Microstrategy, SoftArtisan, or Crystal Reports carry both a hefty price tag and a hefty learning curve. Other vendors offer VBA, ActiveX

Coordinate User Interface Development with VB.NET and the MVC Pattern

hen building complex desktop applications, different individuals or groups of developers often need to collaborate. On some projects, you can separate the layers of the system and assign different individuals to develop each layer. For example, programmer A builds the user interface, programmer B and C build the business logic

Abstract classes as interfaces

In software design, you should plan ahead the interface of a class hierarchy to make sure that all related concrete classes share a common interface. This can be achieved by using abstract classes. An abstract class is one having at least one pure virtual member function, i.e., a non-implemented placeholder,

Use RTTI for Dynamic Type Identification

++ creators introduced Runtime Type Information (RTTI) more than a decade ago. Yet even today many programmers arent fully aware of its benefits and perils. In the following sections, I will show when and how you should use RTTI. Object-oriented pundits claim that with a proper design and judicious use

Developing Web Services in C++

omewhere north of a million. That, last time you counted, is the number of lines of C and C++ code keeping your organization running. And that is the number that runs through your head as you examine the literature surrounding Web services. The reason, of course, is that the bulk