I am in love! Of all the products I have had the pleasure to review as editor-in-chief of .NET Developers Journal, InstallShield Developer has gone the furthest toward reaffirming my faith in the software development industry.

Perhaps the most important, yet most overlooked, area of application development is that of deployment. A flawed installation, or worse - one that corrupts other applications - does not instill faith in your software and makes for very unhappy clients. Having been in this situation myself, I took the time to investigate the various utilities available for creating Windows Installer-based setup applications.

Web developers are always on the lookout for great products to add dynamic effects to their Web pages. Dynamic pages, often called DHTML pages, make use of slide shows, random content rotation, and news scrollers, and are generally developed using languages such as Visual Basic, Java, JavaScript, and VBScript.

(August 13, 2003) - There are lots of things that you can’t start too early - saving for your kid’s college education, estate planning, planning your next vacation, to name a few. How about the performance of your distributed .NET applications? Do you know how your .NET applications will behave once they are deployed on the Wide Area Network (WAN) or are you like too many developers and managers who sit tight and hope all goes well?

Mono recently gained a couple of new corporate sponsors, so this is a good time to look at some of the project's commercial connections. The Mono implementation of SWF (System.Windows.Forms) continues to improve, and the Portable.NET implementation of SWF is taking off.

Parasoft's .TEST product aims to automate the creation and execution of testing for quality assurance of .NET code. Specifically, it can produce four kinds of tests: white box, black box, regression, and static analysis.

The Tablet PC SDK from Microsoft ships with a couple of high-level controls to help developers rapidly build ink-enabled applications. The three controls that I'll look at in this article are the InkEdit, InkPicture, and PenInputPanel.

It has been another good month for open-source .NET: .NET has become an ISO standard, and both DotGNU and Mono achieved milestones I mentioned last month.

The .NET Framework can be a pleasure to use, but there's so much to master that all too often we set out to do something basic only to realize we've forgotten exactly how it's done. For this very reason the concept of cookbooks exists ­ references whose purpose is to refresh the memory and suggest best practices.

The introduction of the Tablet PC has given developers and end users an entirely new way to interact with their computers: pen and ink. The concept of pen-and-ink input is not new ­ pen-based computing has been around for some time ­ but what the Tablet PC does is combine the latest in technology with ink support embedded right in the operating system, raising the bar on user experience to a new level.

The data access layer is a very important building block of data-centric applications. Any of today's well-designed architectures mandates having an abstraction layer over the data access library. In this article I will develop a class library that works like Microsoft Data Application Blocks to provide an easy-to-use and performant way to access MS SQL Server data sources.

Anyone who has created a Web project using Visual Studio .NET 2002 is aware that VS.NET ties the location of the Web project to a virtual directory on Internet Information Server (IIS). The name of the project folder must be identical to the name of this virtual directory so that the project can be accessed from http://localhost/.

In this day and age of cost-cutting layoffs and job insecurity, you've probably found yourself in some challenging situations. Recently, I found myself in the position of being the sole developer of a .NET application using SQL Server 2000. So I did my best to design a solid database using my limited knowledge of database design. It was around that time that I finally started to appreciate a good DBA!

Much has been made of .NET's language-neutral features and how programmers can choose from a wide variety of languages ranging from C# and VB.NET to niche languages such as Python and Eiffel. But there is one dialect that all language variants speak - and that is the language of regular expressions.

As I write this, .NET Framework 1.1 and Visual Studio 2003 have just been released; these will have little effect on the open-source implementations of .NET, but there is still much to talk about this month. Keep in mind that when I mention future release dates, these are often more wishes than plans. It's tough enough to predict software schedules as it is; imagine predicting a schedule when you do not even pay your workers (as is the case in open source).

Ms. Prince's goal in writing this book is to teach beginners how to develop simple but complete Windows applications. She shows users how to code, test, and debug their applications as well. The book is divided into five sections. The first section teaches you how to code and test object-oriented programs.

Have you ever needed to know the status of a user's computer, only to discover that the user had stepped away from his/her desk and locked the computer? Sometimes tracking down a user is difficult, and with today's tight schedules, we do not always have time to wait. Using the System.Management namespace and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, we can help eliminate the long waits by creating a screen saver that will display the information we are seeking.

There are many projects to move graphics libraries (WinForms, GTK#, and OpenGL) and Java compatibility (IKVM, DotGNU, and JANET) to .NET; this month, I will focus on these and a couple of other projects.

I was recently called in as a consultant on a project requiring .NET connectivity to a Sybase 12.0 database. I had no idea where to find a driver for this database, but was quickly referred to DataDirect Technologies as a potential source for 'this kind of thing.' Much to my delight, I was soon able to download an evaluation copy of DataDirect Connect for .NET. Put simply, I was blown away.

I came upon this book under very odd circumstances, to say the least. I am a developer first and foremost, so the suggestion by my employer that I sit through a half-day seminar on the art of making technical sales was greeted with less than enthusiasm.

This is the first installment of Dennis Hayes' Monkey Business column, which will supply news on open-source .NET implementations, including Rotor, sponsored by Microsoft; Mono, sponsored by Ximian (and headed up by Miguel de Icaza); and Rhys Weatherley's Portable.NET, from DotGNU.

The .NET Framework is an exciting and enabling technology, allowing developers using many different languages and platforms to share tools and components like never before. Open-source efforts to bring .NET to Linux and other platforms are starting to pay off, and I can't think of a better way to use an open-source version of .NET than to work with one of the best opensource databases, MySQL.

The Windows Forms namespace in .NET includes a number of classes for building Windows-based applications. One such class is the PictureBox control, which displays an image within a control window. This article shows how to extend the PictureBox control in a custom PhotoBox control that can preserve the aspect ratio of a displayed image, and discusses how to use this control in the Windows Forms Designer window of Visual Studio .NET.

Introductory books are always a challenge to create, especially when they attempt to cover a topic as large as developing on the .NET Framework. However, at 350 pages and $35, Microsoft .NET for Programmers does an admirable job of skimming the cream off the surface and presenting it in a way that's easy to comprehend and follow. Aimed at the experienced programmer who needs a quick reference to .NET and the new technologies and concepts surrounding it, Fergal Grimes' book is, for the most part, a must have.

I will always remember obtaining my advance copy of this manuscript, as it required a walk from my hotel room in lower Manhattan to the W Hotel in Times Square. The trip was well worth it, however!

(November 20, 2002) - It has often been said, 'You don't know what you've got until you lose it.' As I watched a recent demonstration of Infragistics' NetAdvantage Suite, it occurred to me that you also don't often realize what you're missing until you find it. Microsoft's ASP.NET technology is absolutely brilliant right out-of-the-box... but Infragistics' NetAdvantage Suite makes it even better!

(March 7, 2003) - Networking is one of the core tasks of enterprise-level programming, and for the programmer familiar with the C# language, Professional .NET Network Programming will provide the information to put network programming at the heart of their .NET applications. The following is an excerpt from this recent book from Wrox Press.