CLINQ v1.1 has been released. Some of you may have already downloaded some of the new builds, but here's a rundown of what the new release includes: Support for Continuous Aggregation. Now, in addition to being able to have your result sets automatically update themselves in response to changes in the source set as well as changes to items in the source set, you can have aggregate scalar values that continuously update in the same fashion. The following is a list of the supported aggregation types that can now be done continuously:

As soon as ASP.NET systems grow to the point that more than a single Web server needs to be deployed, decisions need to be mode about where the session state will be held. By default, ASP.NET session state lives in the memory of the server hosting the application. The problem with this is that a user who connects to one of our Web servers will not have the same session if their next request is sent to another one of our Web servers, yet this is exactly what we want to achieve to improve the robustness of our systems.

I am sure that most of you have heard about or have had a chance to use Google Maps. It's a great service and I was really impressed by the responsiveness of the application and the ease with which users could drag and zoom maps from a Web browser. It has in many ways heralded the arrival of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which I am sure will revitalize Web development in the days to come.

One of the big buzzwords that rose to fame in 2005 was 'Ajax.' The term 'Ajax' was first coined by Jesse James Garrett in his essay 'Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications' (www.adapti vepath.com/publications/e ssays/archives/000385.php ), and it refers to the use of asynchronous JavaScript and XML to drive Web applications. Rather than reloading the entire Web page every time data needs to be transmitted, only small, necessary chunks are sent and received, with JavaScript manipulating the UI in response to the data received. This gives the look and feel of a regular client application while still being hosted inside of your Web browser. While Ajax methodologies have been used for years - most notably in Microsoft's Outlook Web Access - they have just recently become incredibly popular via services such Google's Gmail and Google Maps.

In the past few months, the design pattern of combining Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to develop highly interactive Web applications has been growing in popularity. High-profile Web applications such as Google Maps and A9 are currently leveraging the combination of these technologies to produce rich client-side user experiences. The individual technologies that compose AJAX are not recent developments; they have been around for some time and have been continuously updated and improved. However, it is the recent confluence of these technologies that is leading to interesting possibilities.

The new family of bound controls lets developers build data-driven applications almost without writing a line of code at page level, but there's more work to do to build really robust, fully featured controls. With the new version of .NET Framework, developers can extend base controls to build 'powered' ones that satisfy particular needs that base controls can't.

You already know the sheer productivity advantages of developing applications that run on the .NET framework using the Visual Studio.NET IDE, and have likely developed and deployed one or more of these in the years since they became generally available. But did you know that you can double your market reach for .NET Web and server applications by rehosting them, without major modifications, to run on Java-enabled platforms such as WebSphere running on Linux? According to Forrester Research, J2EE is used by 56 percent of financial services and insurance companies, and by 44 percent of the overall market.

ComponentArt has released version 2006.1 of its next-generation 3D charting line: ComponentArt Charting for .NET. The release consists of WebChart for ASP.NET for web-based solutions, and WinChart for .NET for Windows Forms development, and the controls are available individually or together as a bundle. With the release of version 2006.1 the ComponentArt Charting line now supports the advanced features of .NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

Web sites are based on a client-server model. While the client (usually a browser) can use client-side script such as JavaScript to do simple tweaking of existing data, getting new data requires a request to the server. The server does the heavy processing and makes a response back, which redraws the entire Web page. Most development required these interactions to be atomic so that each request to the server returns a completely new page.

On the eve of the official release of .NET 2.0, developers around the world were anxiously waiting and priming their PCs for a speedy download from MSDN. And who could blame them? Microsoft's .NET development platform has been a hit with the developer community ever since the first betas came out years ago.

Recently, a number of Web sites have begun to raise some eyebrows within the developer community. What's unique about these sites is that they behave more like a desktop application than a Web application. As you interact with them, they quickly display an endless amount of information to your browser without reloading the page. At the Google Maps site for example (ht tp://maps.google.com/), you can click on the map, zoom in, zoom out, and move around as much as you like. Your browser continues to be fed with data from the server, yet your browser doesn't have to refresh. They're not using applets, or anything like Flash, so how are they doing it? Introducing Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, also known as Ajax. To properly describe what Ajax is, it's easiest to contrast it with what it's not. For most Web sites, interaction with a Web server is simplex communication - like talking to your buddy on a walkie-talkie. You speak while he receives, and vice versa, but never at the same time. For a Web user, when he or she fills out an online form and then clicks the submit button, the entire page is posted to the Web server and the user must wait for the server to receive the request. When the server finishes processing the request, it sends the processed content back. Only then does the user's page finally refresh (see Figure 1). Ajax is an attempt to alleviate this choppy sequence of events. When the user is at an Ajax Web site the browser can call the Web server asynchronously, behind the scenes - without posting the entire page.

Before there were Web parts, DotNetNuke created installable private assemblies nicknamed modules to encapsulate the functionality desired within a modular environment. It doesn't take much experience developing modules for DotNetNuke before you start asking the age-old questions: I know that it's powerful, but where do I start? I know this is handled in DNN, but how? How do I structure the module and create the installable package? At this point you are most likely starting to think instinctively about how to utilize a combination of existing tools and reusable code or templates to streamline development time.

Did you know that the terminology known as skinning has been around for quite some time, but never in the hands of mainstream designers and Web developers in the content management space? Simple skinning or skin themes, which are more familiar, started back in the days of Windows when you could change the color/background of your desktop.

One underutilized technique for maximizing code reuse and increasing developer productivity is the creation and utilization of ASP.NET Server controls. Even when the problem domain is well known and understood, each new project has many developers starting at square one, dragging and dropping the common Visual Studio.NET controls onto a blank form and having to manually repeat the same processes that other developers in the company have had to perform in the past.

I'm working on an application where I built a custom membership provider because of custom database scheme requirement. My custom membership provider is using the hashed format for passwords and user answers. I've got that working and now want to deploy the new application including the new provider. Due to the encryption in ASP.NET being based on the MachineKey and wanting to share the data in development and early testing (ie. different web servers), I needed a MachineKey at the application level.

In December 2004 it was decided that DotNetNuke would break out its existing core modules into separate Projects so that they could be enhanced, released, and supported independently from the core Web Application Framework. It was further decided that some additional modules would also be added as official Projects to provide an increased level of richness to the platform. The first modules that we determined were going to be added were the TTT Forum and TTT Gallery, authored by Tam Tran Minh of TTT Corporation. I was already working closely with Tam on these modules, and I volunteered to co-lead the development of these Projects and to help morph them into modules that take full advantage of the DotNetNuke Web Application Framework.

Over the past few years, a paradigm shift of monumental proportions has been quietly occurring on the World Wide Web. The traditional 'brand-builder' Web site whose sole purpose was the delivery of static marketing information to potential customers has finally lost its appeal. Fuelled by the demands of Web-savvy business owners and consumers, a new breed of highly functional Web applications has emerged; these applications deliver dynamic content, community collaboration, interactive behavior, and real-time communication.

RSS is the technology driving the blogging craze that's sweeping the Internet, but it's far more than a blogging technology. It's a prime foundation on which to build 'service-oriented' applications.

Since the introduction of CGI in 1993, the Web has become an increasingly popular medium for interactive content and application development. The evolution of Web programming has come a long way in 12 years, and new technologies are being introduced on an almost daily basis. As a developer, it can be difficult to determine which new technologies are worth implementing and which should just be left alone.

While meeting with the development staff of a local company we began discussing a project that the CIO had assigned them earlier that morning. The project was actually the first in a series of about 15 planned Web sites scheduled over the next year. Each site was designed to expose sales and marketing collateral to their international reseller community. Their lead developer explained that the first site would contain about a hundred pages, but when complete they expected each site to have several thousand distinct pages. He said, 'Layout control and reusability are key for this project to have any chance of success.'

This article is the third part of the series of articles in this journal to describe our Aspect.NET project an aspect-oriented programming (AOP) framework for Microsoft.NET based on a number of new ideas (for the first two articles, see #4 and 5 in the References section).

Since their conception, Web services have evolved into a core component of software architectures worldwide. The ability to easily distribute processing, allow access via the Internet, and componentize architectures makes Web services a compelling choice for interoperability among systems.

One of the most basic ways to navigate within an application is by use of a tab control. Tabs are easy to use and users are very familiar with them. There have been many implementations of tab controls for Web applications, but they had often required advanced client-side script that was only supported in a few browsers, or they required extensive and confusing server-side include files. ASP.NET 2.0 provides a few things that make this easier to do with no dependency on functional code.

Security is a very broad field. Even if you have been reading all sorts of security books, monitoring all SecurityFocus mailing lists, subscribing to various RSS feeds, and reading new security whitepapers, virus writers can still exploit the latest vulnerability and successfully carry out zero-day attacks. These attacks spread so quickly that professionals have no time to react, which leaves you, the system architect or solution developer, the responsibility to employ security strategies and technologies to defend against attack and minimize damage.

Rapid application development can be greatly enhanced by using third-party toolsets. These toolsets let a developer add controls or classes whose capabilities represent months of development time in a matter of seconds. Infragistics, a market leader in user interface tools, enhances its toolset three times a year.

Since the advent of Web development, Web developers have sought a way to provide a consistent look and feel across the Web application. This pursuit has resulted in different custom solutions. With the introduction of master pages in ASP.NET 2.0, Microsoft has finally brought the support to the framework level and has given the developers what they have been asking for.

The introduction of ASP.NET in 2002 signified a big change in Microsoft server-side technologies for building Web sites. It represented a shift from the interpreted Active Server pages (ASP) to compiled ASP.NET pages. The compiled ASP.NET Web applications were much faster than the interpreted ASP applications and presented the developer with a variety of advantages, one of them being dynamic compilation.

Programmatically posting data to a traditional ASP page is an extremely useful and well-known technique. However, I recently discovered that posting data to an ASP .NET Web application from another program is not well understood and requires several new programming tricks.

ASP.NET has done an exceptional job of evolving the 3 and n-tier web model, in particular the business logic layer. .NET server controls such as DataGrids, DataLists, and Calendar controls provide adequate presentation- tier elements, but their reliance on outdated Web technologies limits their potential.

ASP.NET version 1.0 and 1.1 were giant leaps forward in making data-driven Web sites easier to create. With only a few lines of code you can create Web sites that dynamically query and update databases, XML files, and more.

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 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.

In the early days of .NET Web services, using a Web service to accept binary data required converting the data to something that could be represented in XML. Surely you remember those days - back before December 2002. With the release of Web Service Enhancements (WSE) 1.0, followed shortly by WSE 1.0 SP1 in March 2003, and now with WSE 2.0 on the horizon, we can at last quickly and easily send binary attachments via Web services by utilizing WSAttachments.

You have probably not escaped seeing the latest commercials for Microsoft Windows Server 2003, which urge listeners to 'do more with less'; this has been an aim of software engineering since the very beginning.

Web Parts are building blocks for creating modular Web sites. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services utilize Web Parts as the key component to add modular functionality and provide configurable user interfaces. As a developer, you know it's impossible to create a single interface that satisfies all users; however, Web Parts enable end users to assemble and arrange a complete Web page out of premade Web Parts.

Like many features available in Microsoft's products, page ViewState in ASP.NET works behind the scenes by default. However, unlike most other features, ViewState can impact the pages we develop dramatically. The impact may not only be in page size but also in server-side performance. Pages with large ViewState can throw unexpected errors.

In large Web sites, there are generally just a couple of unique page layouts. In the past, developers had to duplicate large chunks of code on each page. Doing so made the site hard to maintain and difficult to change on a global scale. This tended to be an issue even when using include files, as it was difficult to pass page-specific information down the chain. To the rescue are the .NET Web User Controls and their ability to interact with a parent page's exposed custom properties.

One of the biggest advantages of ASP.NET Server Controls is that you can package a lot of functionality into a Server Control and reuse it in the UI layer. The .NET Framework ships with a wide range of .NET Server Controls that come in handy for almost everything that you usually do in a typical Web implementation scenario. In this article we're going to build a text box Server Control that works like a Word document and can be used to format the text without knowing any HTML!