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Using Microsoft technologies, you can insert, edit, query, and delete database entries using any e-mail client such as Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo, or even WAP phone. While e-mail is certainly a powerful and widely used tool, it is usually not integrated with an application for performing any tasks other than sending reminders. The application scenario described here, an e-mail-based SQL update program, uses a simple data model; however, this solution will apply to any data model that you are working with.

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SQL and Outlook: Enable Database Access and Updates Through Exchange and Any E-mail Client

Media distributors have been looking for a way to prevent users from getting saleable content for free ever since independent distributors and peer-to-peer systems began distributing files without licensing them. Windows Media Services addresses these concerns by providing encryption, licensing, and management capabilities. One of its components, Windows Media Rights Manager, allows companies to issue licenses that consumers must pay for before their media files will play

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Windows Media Technologies: Using Windows Media Rights Manager to Protect and Distribute Digital Media

Handheld devices are becoming increasingly important nodes on wireless networks, allowing their users to connect to data stores and other central server applications over the network. But wireless network connections can be unreliable, requiring the use of store-and-forward messaging that does not need to maintain a continuous connection. Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) has supplied these features to desktop machines, and there is now a version for handheld devices

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Pocket PC: MSMQ for Windows CE Brings Advanced Windows Messaging to Embedded Devices

Windows XP includes both improvements to the operating system and several new features that enhance the user experience. The most noticeable change in Windows XP is the user interface, which includes a revised Start menu and updated Task Bar. The new look is possible because Windows XP can be skinned, which lets the interface be changed dramatically with a new facility called themes

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Windows XP Overview: Take Advantage of New Windows XP Features in Your Apps Today

In this article the author modifies an industry standard middle-tier application server benchmark called Nile. The goal was to get it to build and run correctly on the 64-bit edition of the Microsoft .NET Advanced Server running on computers with Intel Itanium processors and still build as a 32-bit version to run on Pentium class x86 processors. While modifying Nile, the author discovered some of the tips he presents here

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Beyond Windows XP: Get Ready Now for the Upcoming 64-Bit Version of Windows

Because the value of good software planning and design should never be underestimated, it can be beneficial to use one of the many existing design patterns as a foundation for solving some of your toughest architecture problems. This article describes several traditional design patterns including the Observer pattern and the Dispatcher pattern, elaborates on their structures, what they’re used for, and how they can help you build a BizTalk-based solution. Following this is a discussion on using the BizTalk Orchestration Designer to build designs and integrate existing business processes.

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BizTalk: Implement Design Patterns for Business Rules with Orchestration Designer

Very soon, the development of Microsoft .NET applications will require interaction between those apps and existing COM components on both the client and the server. The .NET Framework has made provisions for this interaction by implementing various wrappers for COM objects to allow exposure of their properties and methods to .NET components. These wrappers will make it easy to make the connection between COM and .NET.

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.NET Interop: Get Ready for Microsoft .NET by Using Wrappers to Interact with COM-based Applications

The next version of COM+, COM+ 1.5, offers many improvements over COM+ 1.0. A comprehensive user interface that displays more data for each application as well as complete support for legacy components make the management of existing applications easier and more efficient. Enhanced queueing support provides more flexibility for managing queued calls, and pooling and recycling means better application lifetime management.

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Windows XP: Make Your Components More Robust with COM+ 1.5 Innovations

Programmers using Visual Basic have always had an advantage over C++ programmers when it comes to component and window sizing. There are many third-party Visual Basic-based solutions to this age-old problem, but unfortunately, there are few elegant alternatives for the C++ crowd, short of using a full-fledged windowing toolkit. This article explains how to circumvent the tedious task of hardcoded pixel arithmetic.

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Windows UI: Our WinMgr Sample Makes Custom Window Sizing Simple

Cell phones, PDAs, and other wireless devices that connect with the Internet enjoy growing popularity, making wireless applications more important and especially useful to companies with remote employees. This article presents an overview of the .NET Mobile Web SDK for building wireless apps. The technologies and design decisions that influence the development of mobile Web applications are discussed along with specific strategies for setting up a development environment using an emulator and building a real-world mobile Web application.

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.NET Mobile Web SDK: Build and Test Wireless Web Applications for Phones and PDAs

The Web Storage System (WSS) in Exchange 2000 is a Web-accessible database that stores any type of data such as e-mail, contacts, appointments, threaded discussions, and multimedia files, and renders the data in HTML in any browser. WSS is based on Internet standards, therefore data can be accessed through URLs, an Exchange OLE DB provider, drive mapping, XML, and Web Documenting and Versioning (WebDAV)

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Exchange 2000 WSS: Web Storage System Improves Exchange Data Accessibility

Web Forms have the potential to change Web programming by introducing a new programming model built around server-side controls-a model in which controls render their own UIs by generating HTML to return to clients and firing events that are handled by server-side scripts. Since all the action takes place on the Web server, virtually any browser can run a Web Forms app. And thanks to Visual Studio .NET, building a Web Forms app is a lot like using Visual Basic: just drop a control onto a form then write an event handler

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ASP.NET: Web Forms Let You Drag And Drop Your Way To Powerful Web Apps

Application Center 2000 simplifies the deployment of a Microsoft .NET-based application to clusters, which are shared-nothing, loosely coupled computers that appear as one virtual computer. This allows all the computers in Application Center 2000 clusters to provide the same service or Web application at the same time. This article explains network load balancing and component load balancing for COM+ components with Application Center 2000.

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Server Farms: Application Center 2000 Offers World-Class Scalability

The success of a database-driven international Web site depends on how well the code and localized content work together with the software on the client and server. Localizing a dynamic Web site is more complicated than localizing a static one. The use of HTML and ASP code for static and dynamic content on IIS 4.0 or 5.0, coupled with Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) and SQL Server, enables Web sites to support as many languages as necessary.

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Go Global: Localizing Dynamic Web Apps with IIS 5.0 and SQL Server

SQL Server can be administered programmatically using system stored procedures, but Distributed Management Objects (DMO) offer a more modern, object-oriented alternative. This article introduces SQL-DMO in SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000 and describes the SQL-DMO object model, then focuses primarily on the Databases tree and the JobServer tree of the object model. The sample code and the article show how to use various objects such as the Registry object, the Configuration object, and the Database object to automate common administration tasks such as programmatically retrieving configuration settings, creating new databases, applying T-SQL scripts, and creating and scheduling backups

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SQL Server and DMO: Distributed Management Objects Enable Easy Task Automation

In SOAP Toolkit 2.0, the Services Description Language (SDL) has been replaced with the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and the Web Services Meta Language (WSML). WSDL and WSML files describe the interfaces to a service and expose COM objects to SOAP clients. This article describes a custom tool, IDL2SDL, which takes an IDL file and produces WSDL and WSML files without waiting for a DLL or TLB file to be generated

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SOAP Toolkit 2.0: New Definition Languages Expose Your COM Objects to SOAP Clients

Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 2.0 provides a host of exciting new features for MMC users and snap-in developers. The new MMC 2.0 automation object model allows much of the user interface of MMC 2.0 to be accessed through script, and exposes events so that many tasks can now easily be automated. The new view extension model uses HTML to enable extensions to seamlessly integrate new user interfaces with those of existing snap-ins

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Whistler: Build More Flexible Console Snap-ins with the MMC 2.0 Object Model

While most application developers may not need to write a custom host, understanding what is involved provides a great deal of insight into the architecture of the CLR. After covering how the CLR is started and loaded into a process, how to set the available configuration options, and how a host defines application domains, this article explains how to design a custom host. Important concepts include making the right decisions about the application domain boundaries for the host, configuring them correctly, loading and executing user code, and resolving references to assemblies.

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Microsoft .NET: Implement a Custom Common Language Runtime Host for Your Managed App

Since a Visual Basic client doesn’t handle events directly from late-bound COM objects, it needs some way to capture all the events and parameters launched by any COM object server instantiated at runtime and not known at design time. This article explains how to build a bridge component that does just that. The bridge component transmits the intercepted event data back to the Visual Basic client using another supporting COM object that is capable of holding event data and attributes

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COM: Handle Late-bound Events within Visual Basic Using an ATL Bridge

The Microsoft DirectX Transform is a Microsoft DirectX media API that can be used to create animated effects as well as to create and edit digital images for Windows-based applications. Scripting and HTML can be used to display an existing transform on a Web page, and improved transform support in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 makes it easy to use transforms. This article provides step-by-step instructions for writing a transform as an ATL project and shows an example of an image transform

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Graphics: Manipulate Digital Images in Internet Explorer with the DirectX Transform SDK