I've always been puzzled by the ability of some traders to consistently make money. A cynic would say that anyone who is able to profit in all adverse economic environments (recessions, depressions, etc.) is most likely able to do so because they are getting information that is not gen...

In our premier issue, back in October 2002, we ran a full-length interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft responsible for the creation of the C# programming language. Then, in March 2005, we presented a follow-up interview conducted by .NETDJ's editor-in...

In this interview with the editor-in-chief of .NET Developer's Journal, Microsoft's Anders Hejlsberg discusses the origins and the future of C#. The interview appeared in .NET Developer's Journal, Vol 1 issue 1 - in October 2002.

One of my key tasks at Wine.com (the Magenic project for which we were awarded Microsoft's 2005 Worldwide Partner of the Year Award for a Custom Development Solution) was architecting a sales tax calculation Web service capable of supporting the tremendous volumes of traffic encountere...

When I was a kid, I remember someone saying, 'If you like where you're sitting, you had better stay there!' They were referring to a prediction that the Earth's population was going to increase to the point that there wouldn't be enough room for everyone to sit, so we'd all have to sta...

I've been doing a lot of coding lately. This has been a bit of a departure from my usual work as a technology evangelist or a development manager, but - as you might imagine - it has been quite a lot of fun! Having said this, the process of actually sitting down and coding for 12 hours...

What would it take for your organization to move to all the latest-and-greatest Microsoft tools - Visual Studio 2005, Team System, etc.? This is a question that I have been more interested in since my move from being principal consultant at Magenic Technologies, a premier provider of M...

I am writing this on the morning of the day on which Microsoft will officially launch Visual Studio 2005, along with SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006. I think that it is fair to say that this is the most important technology launch in the history of Microsoft - and I'll tell you why!

I differentiate what I like to call 'pragmatic unit testing' from the two alternate approaches to unit testing that I have seen at organizations. The first 'alternate approach,' which I have seen at 95 percent of .NET organizations, is best referred to as 'no time for quality.' The oth...

Mono is the leading non-Microsoft implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specification. The CLI is the foundation of .NET. Because Mono runs on a number of platforms, it is the main choice today for people who want to run .NET applications on non-Microsoft platforms...

I have been redoing our 'family computer' this week, as I am changing jobs and have needed to use a computer in between the end of my work at Magenic and the start of my work at my soon-to-be employer (more details on that shortly). As a part of overhauling our family computer, I moved...

From time to time, I find myself lassoing a sacred cow in this Editorial space, dragging it over to the slaughterhouse of rhetoric, and ultimately barbecuing its falsehood over the stainless-steel, six-burner, propane-powered grill of real-world experience. To wit, the current industry...

As I write this, I am simultaneously preparing to present on ASP.NET 2.0 at three local MSDN Events (www.msdnevents.com), building an advanced ASP.NET 2.0 Web site for my client at Magenic, and pulling together the last bits of the magazine that you now hold in your hands - our ASP.NET...

Recently, a client asked me to create a new .NET Web Service that would let them do sales tax calculations from any computer on their network. The product they had been using was an old-fashioned C program meant for a single computer.

Derek Ferguson has recently interviewed Rocky Lhotka, the creator of CSLA. In this interview, Derek discusses some of the things that originally led to the creation of CSLA, as well as where Rocky sees object-oriented development heading in the future. A lot of the inspiration came bec...

Web applications suck! Well, perhaps that is a bit of an overstatement. Let me rephrase: Web applications are not appropriate for all situations. In my case, I have spent the last few months working on a series of ASP.NET applications that should really have been done as Smart Client a...

I'm constantly impressed by the imaginative uses to which people put Microsoft's .NET technology. As I reviewed the articles for this month's issue of .NET Developer's Journal, it occurred to me that the microcosm of applications presented in our magazine this time around are just abou...

My first big assignment for Magenic was described to me by one of our salespeople over a rather expensive dinner involving a copious amount of alcohol. For these reasons (reason #1: salesperson, reason #2: alcohol), by the end of the conversation all I really knew about what I'd be wal...

My first exposure to Delphi came during my interview with Anders Hejlsberg at Tech Ed 2004 in San Diego. 'Whatever happened to Turbo Pascal,' I asked him? God bless Mr. Hejlsberg for the patience with which he responded to this rather foolish question. 'Well,' he said, 'that would be D...

I have, in the past, worked on a few software products that were years ahead of their time. As it turns out, being years ahead of your time in the world of Information Technology is not necessarily a good thing. You wind of spending a lot of your time convincing prospective customers t...

The following editorial will have little or nothing to do with the content of this issue. Admittedly, it will be about development and, in fact, it will be about development using .NET. However, I will leave it to Patrick Hynds, this issue's Guest Editor, to focus your attention on sec...

Shortly before this magazine was launched, I was sent a product announcement for something known as WebZinc. The first thing I noticed about it was that the company producing it, White Cliff Computing Ltd., was in Yorkshire, England. 'That can't be a very common place for software comp...

Speaking at the Microsoft Mobile & Embedded DevCon 2005 (MEDC) in Las Vegas, Bill Gates today unveiled details of Windows Mobile 5.0 reports .NET Developer's Journal editor-in-chief Derek Ferguson. Gates also talked about Visual Studio 2005, which he said will Release to Manufacturing ...

Welcome to the 2005 Mobility Focus issue of the .NET Developer's Journal. Long-time readers know that mobility is an area of special interest to me. In 2001, I wrote the first book about .NET mobility - Mobile .NET. From 2001 to 2004, I was chief technology evangelist for the world's f...

There has never been an operating system release more important to .NET developers than the release of Windows Mobile Version 5.0. With this release, Microsoft is poised to take your productivity in writing mobile applications higher than it has ever gone before. Rich multimedia capabi...

Last week, I was happy to spend a few days serving as .NET track chair for the Web Services Edge 2005 conference in Boston. It was the fourth time I had served in this capacity, and the conference continued its proud tradition of improving on itself year-after-year.

Fate likes to urinate in my breakfast cereal! Just days after submitting my previous editorial for publication - wherein, you may remember, I had extolled the virtues of local software expertise over those of off-shore development - I was asked to extend my consulting engagement in San...

I am new to consulting. For the past eight years, I have worked as a full-time software developer with a couple of startups here in Chicago. Joining Magenic Technologies - a Microsoft-platform consulting company - has been a change of pace for me, both in terms of no longer working for...

SPOT is a new Microsoft technology intended to dramatically increase the usefulness of everyday objects by bringing them firmly into the era of high technology.

And so, we come to the end of 2004. This is the end of this magazine's second year in print, and we have made substantial progress over the past year in pursuing our goal of becoming the premier source for information of interest to .NET software developers!

.NET Developer's Journal editor-in-chief Derek Ferguson and Don Box, a leading authority on COM and architect in the Microsoft .NET Developer and Platform Evangelism Group, recently sat down to talk with Brad Abrams, Lead Program Manager for the .NET Framework, about that framework.

By the time you read this, the election here in America will (hopefully) have been decided. I inserted 'hopefully' in there because, as I write this, both candidates are tied at exactly 48% of the vote - indicating a very high likelihood of another extremely close election like we had...

I develop mobile software for a living. I also train developers to create their own mobile applications using the Compact Framework. This issue is focused on mobile development. However, because this issue was largely put together by our Mobility Editor, Jon Box, I will leave it to his...

I recently wrote an editorial as editor-in-chief of .NET Developer's Journal in which I openly questioned the value of re-architecting existing systems to use the latest and greatest technologies. Specifically, I illustrated my argument with the case of a local ISV (independent softwar...

The Compact Framework is not perfect. In particular, its class library represents an abbreviation from the Framework with which we are all familiar on the desktop. This means that in many cases, the classes and namespaces that one wants to use based on one's knowledge of the desktop Fr...

Maintainability and extensibility are over-rated. If you work in a start-up environment, at least, you should focus primarily on bringing your products to market in the fastest, most bug-free manner possible. The market never gives a second chance to make a great first impression, so -...

.NETDJ: How did you come to work for Microsoft on the ASP.NET team? RH: I was originally on what was then known as the Developer Relations group at Microsoft. I was a technical evangelist. I was part of a team of folks that Microsoft would send to the top 100 'media metrics,' which was...

A few months ago, you might recall, I publicly declared that Microsoft's new Partner Points system had dissuaded me from renewing my long-since lapsed MCSD certification. For only slightly more than 1% of the total points my company, Expand Beyond, would need in order to remain a Gold ...

I am an architect in the Distributed Systems Group. I am responsible for the protocols and the plumbing that we do in that group. I'm on an architecture team, so the responsibility is distributed, but basically five other architects and I work on the WS-* protocols, Indigo, and the st...

I took the 70-315 exam at Tech Ed 2004, which was held just two months ago in San Diego, California. I hadn't been planning to take it for several more weeks. However, I was encouraged to take it earlier on the basis of two key facts: