Articles by Mujtaba Syed

A Summary of T-SQL Enhancements in SQL Server 2005

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 00:00:00 EDT

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 notifications, and the Service Broker. Apart from these high-profile enhancements, SQL Server 2005 also comes with improved T-SQL support.

WinFS: The Windows Storage Platform of the Future

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

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 applications that take advantage of 'WinFS'.

Quick and Easy Custom Form-Based Authentication

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 00:00:00 EDT

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.

XML Support in Whidbey

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 00:00:00 EST

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.

Tracing the Life of an HTTP Request:

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 00:00:00 EST

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 lifetime of an HTTP request from its inception inside a Web browser to its interception by IIS 6.0, its processing by ASP.NET 1.1, and an HTTP response being sent back to the browser.

Finalizing Objects At Will

Tue, 07 Oct 2003 00:00:00 EDT

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.