.NET Archive

Microsoft is leaving Java in the dust, but the company still has room to grow in the developer arena, a key executive said. Speaking at the Microsoft FAM (Financial Analyst Meeting) on July 27 in Redmond, Wash., Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president of Server and Tools business, said Microsoft's .Net platform has outpaced Java, particularly the Java Enterprise Edition, over the past five years to become the development platform of choice for enterprise development.

Microsoft has shipped the release candidate for IronPython 1.0 on its CodePlex community source site. IronPython is a project that implements the dynamic object-oriented Python language on top of the Microsoft Common Language Infrastructure. IronPython is both well-integrated with the .Net Framework and is a true implementation of the Python language.

Open-source and .Net zealots can both take away positives from eWEEK Labs testing of various application stacks, but a mix-and-match approach wins the day. Bottom line: Open source and .Net better learn to play nice.

Microsoft .NET Compact Framework version 2.0 SP1 release has been completed and is in the process of being released. This service pack was driven customer feedback including improvements in stability, adds new debugging features, extended platform support, and new developer functionality.

When speaking to developers about WinFX one question that repeatedly comes up is, "WinFX sounds great, but what happens to .NET?" Vice President S. Somasegar describes the decision to rename WinFX to the .NET Framework 3.0. Now the WinFX technology you know has a name that identifies it for exactly what it is - the next version of Microsoft's developer framework.

"In the previous article in this series, you discovered a whole world of messages that the .NET Framework doesn't even capture. These messages can signal all kinds of events, request changes, and even can end your application. Unfortunately, the techniques described in that article only work for messages that the CLR passes to your application. Sometimes, you want to track messages that the CLR doesn't support."

The multiple document interface (MDI) is handy when your program needs to open multiple documents of the same kind. Peter Aitken shows how to take advantage of the MDI support built right into the .NET Framework.

"Microsoft's Monad provides a new command processor and a new way to create batch tasks. They leave the antiquated batch file in the dust. Monad offers you the full power of the .NET Framework to create your batch files. Its depth of functionality makes it part batch file and part application environment. Theoretically, you can create a full-blown application using just this scripting environment."

After more than 5 million downloads, Microsoft has decided to extend its free Visual Studio Express downloads indefinitely. In related news, they are running a contest too.

Most of the time, your computer's CPU is sitting idle. Paul Kimmel shows how easy it is to use multithreading with the new BackgroundWorker component in .NET 2.0, so you can stop your bored gadgetry from wasting all that idle time.

On his blog, Mike Harsh of Microsoft writes that the support of WPF/E on the Macintosh platform will not be limited to a JavaScript engine: "WPF/E supports programmability through JavaScript for tight browser integration. The WPF/E package also contains a small, cross platform subset of the CLR and .NET Framework that can run C# or VB.NET code. Yes, we are bringing C# programming to the Mac."

Chris Muench is a mobile and embedded MVP. Here he shows how to write a managed Direct3D application for Windows Mobile devices.

C# 2.0 is just out and Microsoft is already working hard on the next version of C#, version 3.0. In this post, Niek describes a few of the new language features that will be introduced in this version. Please note that the resulting binaries will be backwards compatible with .NET 2.0, so C# 3.0 is only new on the compiler side.

In .NET 1.0, the DataGrid control was the primary Windows Forms control for presenting tabular data. Even though that control had a lot of capability and could present basic tabular data well, it was fairly difficult to customize many aspects of the control. Additionally, the DataGrid control didn’t expose enough information to the programmer about the user interactions with the grid and changes occurring in the grid due to programmatic modifications of the data or formatting. Due to these factors and a large number of new features that customers requested, the Windows Client team at Microsoft decided to introduce a replacement control for the DataGrid in .NET 2.0. That new control, the DataGridView control, is the focus of this chapter.