Lots of people have been asking about how to get started with Silverlight, and what they need to do to get up and running with Silverlight quickly. Inspired by blog posts such as Jesse Liberty's, I'm going to take this from first principles, with no prior knowledge assumed. So let's get started with the first and most simple application - a 'Hello World' in Silverlight. You need no special tools for this. Just notepad will do...

For more than 20 years the software development industry has regarded reuse as the Holy Grail of software development. Programming language-based object-oriented features promised to deliver the significant benefits of increased productivity and cost-effectiveness by creating reusable objects, but in industry-wide practice OO itself hasn't delivered the results we hoped for.

Have you ever been on a project where software development worked beautifully but developing and maintaining the database always caused unexpected problems and bugs? Do your changes constantly get overwritten by other developers, or is only one person at a time allowed to make changes? Do you find, after two or three major releases, that it's impossible to create upgrade scripts for existing production databases? After experiencing these frustrations and more, I decided to address them.

Developing custom applications using Microsoft's .NET Framework is a growing trend. According to Forrester Research, 56% of enterprises are choosing .NET versus 44% opting for J2EE, while IDC reports that 35.7% of large corporations use .NET for their most important applications compared to 25.3% for Java. While .NET lets your development team develop applications quickly and efficiently, it's still a challenge to make sure that:

In application development, one should consider an effective way of creating a standard rule for coding and debugging. For all the information provided in the application code, there's a better way for developers to track down a problem and find a solution.

As the World Wide Web's landscape has evolved from the days of multimedia-void static HMTL pages, the need for a dynamic interactive medium for Web applications has become apparent. Adobe Flash, as many developers know, is the most widely distributed, capable technology for achieving this new Internet medium.

This document describes an application currently being constructed with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Office SharePoint Server 2007 (OSS) that will enable collaboration between cancer researchers called the C-ME project (Collaborative Molecular Modeling Environment). Office 2007 with Visual Studio Tools for Office v3.0 (VSTO) will be used to generate reports from the information stored in OSS. The C-ME project is being built for cancer researchers. Curing cancer is a complex and lengthy process, and the collaborative tools researchers need don't exist. This document describes the problems of collaboration faced by cancer researchers and the technical approaches being taken to bridge the gap.

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.

Creative Modeler is a full-featured diagramming environment that can be extended to create any type of diagram. It includes a data translation engine that facilitates the editing and conversion of data in any structured file format into any other structured file format (XML or non-XML). The automation API is based on .NET and XML/XSL. This article will discuss how Creative Modeler can be used to edit arbitrary data in a visual format.

If you are developer who writes code to test software, you might want to consider using Spec Explorer. Spec Explorer is a model-based testing tool available for free through Microsoft Research that you use to model the software you're testing and create test harnesses and test case suites (http://research.m icrosoft.com/SpecExplorer /).

One of the most important and yet overlooked aspects of a software development project is the concept of regression testing during implementation. Regression testing is the practice of running tests for previously tested code following modification to ensure that faults have not been introduced or uncovered as a result of the changes made. In this article I will outline the need for continuous integration, automated builds, and testing, which support the tenets of regression testing and provide automation for the process. I will also introduce some of the free open source tools that can be used to effectively employ a continuous integration process, and we'll take a look at a scenario that demonstrates their use.

When open source software is mentioned, one of the first thoughts that comes to mind is the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python). While these products are not generally associated with Windows development, at least one of them is certainly well suited for Windows development, particularly when using .NET. The MySQL database server is an open source relational database developed by MySQL AB. MySQL is available for Windows, Linux, UNIX, and the Macintosh operating system. Using MySQL with Windows has never been easier with .NET and ADO.NET.

This article is the first in a three-part series on the use of CruiseControl.NET, a very popular and important tool for any development house interested in implementing continuous integration and other agile programming concepts. In this first installment we'll briefly cover the definition and use of continuous integration (CI), some of the other CI tools available, and the basic setup and operation of CruiseControl.NET. While these articles will cover the core elements of CruiseControl.NET, we will be covering only a small portion of its functionality and you are encouraged to read through the excellent online documentation.

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 other approach, which I have mainly seen at J2EE organizations, can be labeled 'quality, even if it puts us out of business.'

As software development teams and solutions become more distributed, visibility into systems has given way to isolated pockets of component knowledge. This 'silo' approach to application development, where different teams work in isolation from each other, means that developers may no longer have knowledge of, or access to, the code with which their component interacts. This results in duplication of efforts and incomplete solutions due to a lack of information sharing.

I have used Microsoft Visual Studio at various companies over the years, starting with Visual Basic 3 to create simple, stand-alone Windows applications, then later using Visual Basic 5 and 6 for multitiered development. More recently, I've used Visual C++ to create a commercial application, and have recently been doing extensive .NET development using C# for both WinForms and ASP.NET development.

Why are contract outsourcing and offshore development failing to deliver the expected benefit of lower costs and increased end-user satisfaction to enterprise software development users? It seems that lower rates per hour and better management of human resources are not enough to overcome the problems associated with the central issue of lack of engineering discipline. In most other industries, real cost savings matched with increased productivity that translate into fundamentally lower production costs have been the result of process and manufacturing reengineering, not simply of lowering labor input costs. The cost of building a car has actually declined in real dollars over the last 20 years, even as average hourly pay has increased.

If you've spent more than two months developing any form of software, chances are you've had to program against a database. Unfortunately, despite the rapid gains in software sophistication over the past decade, few well-recognized tools are available to deal with the problem of object-relational mapping, often referred to as the 'impedance mismatch.'

Microsoft's bundling of Crystal Reports dates to Visual Basic 3 and since then many developers have come to rely on it to build reporting solutions. Early on some developers found the programming API too complicated and there were the typical deployment problems that happen with any product that has many versions and upgrades.

When I first read that .NET assemblies could be 'redirected' at runtime, I was stunned and a little bit suspicious. After all, in the COM world the intricacies of component interaction had baffled me, but I knew enough to know that dynamic redirection just wasn't possible. To be honest, I relied on Visual Basic's Binary Compatibility mode to do the job and hoped for the best.

Since the first article ('Developing Web Parts') in this series appeared in July 2003 (Vol. 1, issue 7), Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS) and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) have been launched as part of the Microsoft Office System. After the successful launch and much adoption, SharePoint products and technologies have allowed collaboration to become a large part of distributed applications in a simplified way.

Data table displays are the workhorses of transaction- based Web applications. So why are they so hard to build, especially since .NET provides a built-in ASP.NET DataGrid control?