March 20, 2003

A Preview of Visual C++ .NET 2003

y the time you are reading this Microsoft will be very close to shipping Visual Studio .NET 2003 and its associated language products?including Visual C++. February 2003 marks an exciting anniversary for this mainstay developer tool: it is now 10 years since the product’s original launch as Visual C++ 1.0

Shaped .NET Windows Forms

ince the earliest versions of the Windows operating system, all Windows have been rectangular. However, the number of applications that break out of this boring mold is rising. Even Microsoft, the king of rectangularity, is starting to create applications that use shaped windows, such as Media Player. Unfortunately, creating shaped

Make Bluetooth Work for You: Build a Sample Chat Application

luetooth is one of today’s most exciting technologies. It is a short-range radio wave wireless technology operating in the 2.4 GHz frequency spectrum. With an operating range of 30 feet (10 meters) and a maximum transmission rate of a mere 1Mbps, Bluetooth is widely touted as the “cable replacement” solution.

Scripting SQL Server 2000 Indexes

dding indexes to tables is the most effective way to optimize your SQL Server query performance. Tables that you query often may require several indexes in order to handle the various search arguments you send. There is one particular situation where indexes on large tables are a hindrance, though. When

Using Remote Object Models in .NET

odern applications are no longer isolated, stand-alone applications, limited to a single process or machine. Distributed applications allow you to put components in close proximity to the resources they use, allow multiple users to access the application, enable scalability and throughput, and increase overall availability and fault isolation. Component-oriented programming

Casting Reference Types in Visual Basic .NET

asting, or converting the value of a token from one type of data to another is common to most (if not all) programming languages. Visual Basic has long had a series of casting functions, such as CStr, CInt, CLong, etc. to allow conversion of one type of variable to another.