Microsoft is releasing a new version of SQL Server after a gap of five years. This version (SQL Server 2005) introduces a horde of new attention-grabbing features like native XML storage and querying (using XQuery), CLR integration, SQL Web Services, query notif...

The next version of the Windows operating system (codenamed 'Longhorn') has a new storage subsystem (codenamed 'WinFS'). In this article, we will try to understand the need for 'WinFS'; define 'WinFS', its type system, and its data model; and learn how to write ap...

Building security into intranet Web applications was always easy: just turn on Windows authentication in IIS. But considering the size of the user base for Internet Web applications, custom form-based authentication is the only scalable solution.

The Internet is a large, heterogeneous collection of interconnected systems. To leverage the distributed computing opportunities that the Internet offers, developers had to agree upon a way to represent data that would be exchanged over the Internet. And that way is XML.

The deep permeation of the World Wide Web into the life of the common man has lent itself to a variety of uses, most notably as a backbone for business-to-consumer (B2C) communication, creating a new business model called e-commerce. This article traces the lifeti...

Unmanaged resources are expensive. Therefore, you can't afford to have managed objects that encapsulate unmanaged resources lying dormant in memory waiting for the garbage collector to finalize them.