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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

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

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

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

A Compensating Resource Manager (CRM) is any COM+ object that uses the CRM facility provided by COM+, a set of tools that make it simple to create a custom resource manager for business scenarios that require handling some non-database operation (such as generating a file) as part of a transaction. This article provides an overview of transaction processing, distributed transactions, and the two-phase commit protocol for transactions. Also covered are the implementation and configuration of a CRM

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COM+: Create a Compensating Resource Manager to Extend Your App’s Transactional Features

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

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

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

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

The XML Wrapper template described in this article transforms XML documents into Visual Basic classes, hiding the more complex parts of using the Microsoft XML parser. Developers who have little knowledge of XML or the Microsoft XML parser can use classes created with the template, thus making it easier to use XML in their projects. This article describes the template, shows classes in a sample application based on the template, and explains how to customize those classes to support repeating child elements

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XML Wrapper Template: Transform XML Documents into Visual Basic Classes

Windows 2000 provides remote management tools running in the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), but if you’re running Windows NT 4.0 you can create your own remote management tools by writing an MMC snap-in. This article walks through the development of a distributed process management utility, TView, which is similar to Process Viewer or Task Manager. The tool consists of an MMC snap-in, a COM+ component, and a kernel-mode driver.

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MMC: Designing TView, a System Information Viewer MMC Snap-in

The first part of this two-part article explained how the garbage collection algorithm works, how resources can clean up properly when the garbage collector decides to free a resource’s memory, and how to force an object to clean up when it is freed. The conclusion of this series explains strong and weak object references that help to manage memory for large objects, as well as object generations and how they improve performance. In addition, the use of methods and properties for controlling garbage collection, resources for monitoring collection performance, and garbage collection for multithreaded applications are covered.

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Garbage Collection-Part 2: Automatic Memory Management in the Microsoft .NET Framework

There are many tricks to getting the most out of COM+, and this article offers the author’s top 10. The tips cover the importance of transaction processing, the use of the COM+ catalog, and the design of three-tier distributed systems. Writing components using the correct threading model, knowing when to use compensating transactions, and the importance of stress testing early in the process also make the list.

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COM+ and Windows 2000: Ten Tips and Tricks for Maximizing COM+ Performance

Building a C++ template library for developing distributed object-oriented applications using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) allows the programmer to design RPC applications that are composed of components that implement multiple interfaces. This article demonstrates the use of techniques such as assembly-level thunks to build machine code on the fly, and C++ features such as templates, conversion operators, virtual destructors and virtual function tables. Along the way, familiar C++ interfaces and classes are transformed into a distributed application

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RPC and C++: Build a Template Library for Distributed Objects Containing Multiple Interfaces

When developing high-performance applications for the Web, developers often must choose between performance and ease of development. With ATL Server, new with Visual Studio .NET, developers get the best of both worlds. ATL Server uses a tag replacement engine written in C++, provides a simple programming model, and promotes enhanced performance and easy debugging

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ATL Server and Visual Studio .NET: Developing High-Performance Web Applications Gets Easier

This article completes the .NET Framework overview begun in the September issue. The common language specification and ILDasm, the MSIL disassembler, are discussed-as well as how metadata, manifests, and assemblies simplify deployment and versioning. Security, which is integral to the design of .NET, is examined extensively, followed by a walk through the development of a single assembly containing multiple files

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.NET Framework-Part 2: Microsoft .NET Framework Delivers the Platform for an Integrated, Service-Oriented Web