Some Visual Basic .NET topics

A few of the topics in Visual Basic .NET. One on hosting an IE browser window in a Windows form. Another on how to add a tab page to a tab control and creating a custom UserControl.

SQL Server and XML

SQL Server has support for XML. You can use the SQLXML add-on to do things like export and import tables from MSSQL and XML files and bulk load using SQLXML.

The new SELECT ... FOR XML syntax is very useful once you understand it. There is a discussion here about FOR XML.

Windows forms

There is a whole group just for .NET windows forms discussion. Some guys are talking about how Form.ShowDialog() works, and another thread is covering rewriting a windows application from scratch.

That sounds like a big job but could be a chance to fix a badly designed application. A .NET code generator can help to get a project like this rolling by providing an architecture and data access layer.

Lets talk xml

Whats happening in the .NET XML group?

Theres a bit on creating dynamic elements in XSL and another thread on outputting HTML spaces from XSL. This is always a bit of a hack. You can use &#160; or <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&amp;nbsp;</xsl:text> which will spit out a &nbsp;

This discussion of XML and decimal numbers also covers some multiple-language issues.

FrontPage discussions

Just having a look at the Frontpage programming group. There is some discussion on the use of thumbnails and also on sending email from frontpage. The problem here is that he is using the .NET SmtpMail object which does not support SMTP authentication very well. In .NET 1.0 there is no way to set the username and password for the SMTP server but in .NET 1.1 you can use the Fields property of the Message object to set it. See here for more detail.

Html DocTypes are a confusing subject. I stick with HTML 4.0 Transitional as I think it is the most widely used.

A few interesting topics

I have been looking at some of the topics on www.devnewsgroups.net

In microsoft.public.dotnet.framework the issue of ASPNET can't write in event log on win XP has come up. I have run into this myself and generally it is caused by the ASPNET user not having enough permission to update the registry. Creating an event source, which only needs to be done once causes an exception. If this is done by the developer before running the application there usually are no problems.

There is a discussion of Application Server Design for .Net which looks at server requirements for running .NET applications. The mini-article on the SoapSuds tool is interesting, the other option is to use interfaces to define the contract between server and client.

Others are talking about Accessing SQL Server with Forms on an Intranet. It seems to be coming down to a choice between a windows or web application.