Issue dtd. - 11th October, 2004
DirectInput – Walking the Bear - III
Let's move ahead.

Issue dtd. - 04th October, 2004
DirectInput – Walking the Bear - II
Last week we had created the surfaces and initialised the structure elements.

Issue dtd. - 20th September, 2004
DirectInput – Walking the Bear - I
One cannot imagine game programming without devices such as keyboard, mouse and joystick. The user input comes in the form of events like KeyDown and MouseMove.

Issue dtd. - 13th September, 2004
Assemblies Background
Dynamic Link Libraries was a significant step in the quest for code reuse. COM technology used the good things in DLLs to take the reuse to its next logical conclusion — language independent reuse.

Issue dtd. - 06th September, 2004
Of Gold Coins
In this article we will create an application that displays three coins at different positions on the screen in such a manner that we get an effect of rotation. To create the application, select ‘DirectX 9 Visual C# Wizard’ from the Templates list. Then select ‘DirectDraw’ application type.

Issue dtd. - 23rd August, 2004
Animation using Direct Draw - II
(Continued from last week…)
In the last week, we were planning to see the InitializeDirectDraw( ) and CreateSurfaces( ) methods. Here they are:

Issue dtd. - 16th August, 2004
Animation using Direct Draw - I
We will explore the DirectX architecture before starting with an application. In this application we will display a parrot on the display surface using DirectDraw and animate the parrot from one end of screen to another.

Issue dtd. - 9th August, 2004
DirectX 3D Basics - II
Let us now see how Direct3D uses these facts to generate realistic shapes. Instead of using a cone Direct3D uses a close approximation of it — a pyramid — to represent the viewing volume.

Issue dtd. - 2nd August, 2004
DirectX 3D Basics - I
DirectX is an immensely powerful library that supports multimedia programming. The new version of this library, known as DirectX 9.0 provides multimedia functionality for managed applications.

Issue dtd. - 26th July, 2004
Remoting Basics - II
In the previous article we had built the remotable class and the server application. Let us now build the client application.

Issue dtd. - 19th July, 2004
Remoting Basics - I
Unless you have spent the last two years in hibernation, you must already be aware of XML Web Services and its powers.

Issue dtd. - 5th July, 2004
Binary Large Objects
“How do we store an image in a database, and how do we read it back?” is a frequently asked question. This article gives the answer. In this article we will see how ADO.NET is used to store BLOBs (images) in a database and read them back.

Issue dtd. - 21st June, 2004
Performance optimisations in the .NET world
This article discusses various ways for improving performance of managed applications running under the .NET platform.

Issue dtd. - 7th June, 2004
Using the Splitter control
In earlier versions of Visual Studio, we used to create splitter windows by calling methods of an MFC class. The main application window actually used to get split in panes. Each pane represented a separate view window.

Issue dtd. - 31st May, 2004
Using the FileSystemWatcher Component
In this article we will walk through the process of using the FileSystemWatcher component and watching the changes made to a subfolder/files of a selected folder.

Issue dtd. - 24th May, 2004
Email-enabled Windows application
Want to send email from a .NET Framework application? You could do it the hard way by using sockets to establish a connection to a mail server and then transmit a mail message using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Or you could do it the easy way and rely on classes in the System.Web.Mail namespace.

Issue dtd. - 17th May, 2004
The Timezone application - II
In the last article we had declared the location class containing data members to hold hours, minutes, city name and x-y coordinates of the city on the map, and then populated the array in the Form1 class.

Issue dtd. - 3rd May, 2004
The Timezone application - I
We had started the timezone application in the last article. Just to revise, we had drawn two lines, intersecting each other at the cursor position.

Issue dtd. - 26th April, 2004
Handling keyboard & mouse messages
WinForms process keyboard messages by overriding virtual methods inherited from the Form class. The following table lists the virtual methods corresponding to the keyboard events.

Issue dtd. - 19th April, 2004
Transformation in GDI+ - II
In the last article we discussed various forms of transformations. We will now see how to perform these transformations programmatically.

Issue dtd. - 12th April, 2004
Transformation in GDI+ - 1
As compared to GDI, GDI+ provides greater support for graphics, images and transformation. GDI+ allows following the operations to be performed.

Issue dtd. - 5th April, 2004
Grooming the DataGrid Control - II
Last week we customised the DataGrid control by rearranging the order of columns and applying styles to them. We will now see how to change the background and foreground colours of the cells.

Issue dtd. - 22nd March, 2004
Grooming the DataGrid control
Programmers are never satisfied with what is shipped with a development environment. They always require something more than what is available to create an application using that environment.

Issue dtd. - 15th March, 2004
Application Domains
Under Windows it is not possible to access data of one application from another application. This is because Windows creates process boundaries for each application.

Issue dtd. - 8th March, 2004
Binding data with WinForm controls
Gone are the days when we required to read records from a data source, separate the values of a record in a set of variables and display the values in controls by writing pages full of code. .NET provides an ability that binds a control with a field in the data source.

Issue dtd. - 1st March, 2004
Deploying .NET applications - IV
Merge Modules are a feature of Windows Installer that provides a standard method for delivering components, ensuring that the correct version of a component is installed.

Issue dtd. - 23rd February, 2004
Deploying .NET Applications - III
Sometimes our application may require some pre-requisites before installation. For example, our application may demand that Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher must be installed on the target machine.

Issue dtd. - 16th February, 2004
Deploying .NET applications - II
Suppose we wish to add a key-value pair to Hkey_Current_User | Software | [Manufacturer]. For this we must right-click on it and select New | Key. We can rename the key as per our wish.

Issue dtd. - 16th February, 2004
Deploying .NET applications - I
Though distributing libraries in the form of DLLs was a major step forward, it suffered from the now infamous DLL hell. COM could avoid this but it had no versioning mechanism.

Issue dtd. - 2nd February, 2004
Creating UI for an XML document
There are two purposes of this article. The first is to show how to work with a tree control in .NET and the second, to create a user interface for an XML document.

Issue dtd. - 19th January, 2004
Creating owner-drawn menus
Most of the times menu items are strings, but sometimes pictures make more sense than text strings.

Issue dtd. - 12th January, 2004
Tapping processes using WMI – II
In the last article we created a small application wherein we could enter the machine name, user name and password and click the ‘Refresh’ button to view the processes of that machine.

Issue dtd. - 5th January, 2004
Tapping processes using WMI - I
MIn the last article we saw how to list the processes currently running on the local machine. In this article we will see a similar application that displays the processes currently running on the machine, but with additional functionality.

Issue dtd. - 22th December, 2003
Viewing processes using WMI
Microsoft had invented Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), to develop a standardised technology for accessing management information.

Issue dtd. - 8th December, 2003
Visual Inheritance
In Visual Studio 6.0, to display a dialog box, we derive a class from a pre-defined MFC class. The event handlers and variables associated with controls get added to this user-defined class.

Issue dtd. - 1st December, 2003
Miscellaneous .NET features
In this article we shall discuss a few .NET topics that are too small to warrant a separate article devoted to each topic. However, these topics provide certain useful programming features and could prove to be of immense help in certain programming strategies..

Issue dtd. - 17th November, 2003
COM Interoperability
COM components and .NET components are not compatible since they have different internal architectures. However, there are tools available in the .NET SDK for generating COM proxies for .NET components and .NET proxies for COM components.

Issue dtd. - 10th November, 2003
Adding events to custom controls
We can also add properties and events to a custom control. In the last two articles we saw how to create and use a clock control. In this article we will add properties and an event to it.

Issue dtd. - 20th October, 2003
Custom Controls - II
In the last article we had added the Tick event handler for the mytimer control. Let us see what we have done in this handler.

Issue dtd. - 6th October, 2003
Custom Controls - I
Prior to .NET the controls that were popularly used as language-independent reusable user-defined controls were ActiveX controls.

Issue dtd. - 22nd September, 2003
Common dialog boxes for printing
In this article we will see how to print a multi-page document using common dialog boxes of printing such as PrintPreview, Print and PageSetup.

Issue dtd. - 15th September, 2003
A tryst with the printer
Even in an increasingly digital age, there remains great power in the printed word.

Issue dtd. - 8th September, 2003
Creating an ASP.NET client for WebService
In the last article we had created a temperature Web service with two methods ctof() and ftoc().

Issue dtd. - 1st September, 2003
Creating & consuming Web services
Last time we had created a Web service project and executed it without adding our Web methods to it. In this article we will first complete the creation of the Web service.

Issue dtd. - 18th August, 2003
ASP.NET Web Services - II
In the last article we explored the distributed computing architecture, the different solutions for it, along with their pros and cons, and the reasons why Web services came into existence. In this article we will explore more issues regarding Web services.

Issue dtd. - 11th August, 2003
ASP.NET Web Services - I
A Web service is an application stored on a machine that can be accessible through another machine over the Internet or LAN.

Issue dtd. - 4th August, 2003
Form Authentication
ASP.NET incorporates a feature called ‘form authentication’. Form authentication involves asking the user his credentials and authenticating him to access the Web pages if his credentials are okay.

Issue dtd. - 21st July, 2003
ASP.NET security
ASP.NET security is mostly concerned with building secure sites that serve up pages only to authorised users.

Issue dtd. - 14th July, 2003
Code Access Security
Code Access Security is a new concept brought in by the .NET framework.

Issue dtd. - 7th July, 2003
Creating Web applications - II
Last time we began creating a registration form for students and defined the required controls. Let us now look at changing the properties of the validation controls.

Issue dtd. - 23rd June, 2003
Creating Web applications - I
The ASP.NET technology is used to create Web applications and dynamic websites. ASP.NET is compatible and is integrated with the .NET environment. It is rather different from ASP. First let’s take a look at what the differences are.

Issue dtd. - 16th June, 2003
The role-based security model
Role-based security is an elegant way to provide user authorisation and user access checks for our application. We must first understand what ‘role’ means in the security vocabulary.

Issue dtd. - 9th June, 2003
The evolution of security on the Windows platform
Security in the field of computers is similar to that in real life. We install security systems in our homes, banks and work places.

Issue dtd. - 2nd June, 2003
Going international with Locale - II
In the last episode we had designed the greeting form and added code to change the culture. Let us now add localisation support to it.

Issue dtd. - 19th May, 2003
Going international with Locale - I
As the number of Internet users grew worldwide, the need to create software supporting multiple languages was felt intensely because only ten percent of people use English as the primary language.

Issue dtd. - 12th May, 2003
Of solutions, projects and items
The .NET architecture has provided a systematic organisation of files, folders, data connections and references used in a program.

Issue dtd. - 5th May, 2003
Using MS Agents
The characters provided by Microsoft Agent technology are something we often use in MS-Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications.

Issue dtd. - 21st April, 2003
XML and ADO.NET
A powerful feature of ADO.NET is its ability to convert the data stored in a data source in XML and vice-versa.

Issue dtd. - 14th April, 2003
Extensible Markup Language
Extensible Markup Language is more popularly known by its acronym, XML. Unlike HTML, which was designed to display data and to focus on how data looks, XML has been designed to describe data and to focus on what data is.

Issue dtd. - 7th April, 2003
Adding resources to an assembly
An assembly can contain resource files. An assembly containing resources is known as a satellite assembly.

Issue dtd. - 24th March, 2003
Introduction to assemblies
The assembly is an important element of .NET programming. On the .NET platform, an assembly is a unit of reuse, versioning, security and deployment.

Issue dtd. - 17th March, 2003
Implementing UDP: Let’s get quizzical
Unlike the TCP protocol, the UDP protocol is connectionless. Here there is no setting up of connections needed, instead the data is sent in packets.

Issue dtd. - 10th March, 2003
File transfer using network I/O — II
Taking up from where we left off last week, let us now write the code that should get executed when a client clicks the ‘Connect As Client’ button.

Issue dtd. - 3rd March, 2003
File transfer using network I/O - I
Though on the face of it the Internet and World Wide Web appear fairly simple, if you scratch the surface you would appreciate that it is built upon complex protocols, networking technologies and programs.

Issue dtd. - 24th Feb, 2003
Executing file IO with serialisation
Serialisation is the process of writing objects on a persistent storage media such as a file on the disk.

Issue dtd. - 17th Feb, 2003
Effective synchronisation of threads
Synchronisation plays an important role in multithreaded applications where the threads are not independent of each other and share common resources.

Issue dtd. - 10th Feb, 2003
Creating multithreaded applications
In a broad sense, multithreading can be thought of as the ability to perform several jobs simultaneously.

Issue dtd. - 3rd Feb, 2003
Accessing the Windows registry
The Windows registry is used to store all the configuration information relating to Windows setup, user preferences, software installed and the devices.

Issue dtd. - 20th Jan, 2003
Working with Attributes
Attributes are used to specify additional information about an entity. This information gets written in metadata at compile time.

Issue dtd. - 13th Jan, 2003
Reading metadata using reflection
Every managed application in .NET is deployed as an assembly and every assembly defines certain types.

Issue dtd. - 6th Jan, 2003
GDI+ — An extension to GDI
If you have programmed under Windows, you would definitely be familiar with the term GDI (Graphical Device Interface).

Issue dtd. - 23rd Dec. 2002
Event-driven programming with WinForm
Windows applications that we create fall under two major categories—managed and unmanaged.

Issue dtd. - 16th Dec. 2002
Understanding Delegates
A delegate is an important element of C# and is extensively used in every type of .NET application. A delegate is a class whose object (delegate object) can store a set of references to methods.

Issue dtd. - 9th Dec. 2002
Creating Collection Classes
Creating efficient data structures has always been a nightmare for programmers. But while writing a C# program, how to build a data structure is the last thing on one’s mind.

Issue dtd. - 2nd Dec. 2002
Properties and Indexers
All the object-oriented languages support encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism.

Issue dtd. - 25th Nov. 2002
Setting up arrays in C#
An array is a collection of similar data types stored in adjacent memory locations.

Issue dtd. - 18th Nov. 2002
Inheritance and Polymorphism
In this article, we will discuss two important concepts of object-oriented programming — inheritance and polymorphism.

Issue dtd. - 11th Nov. 2002
Data Types in C#
Data types are the most basic elements of any computer language. C# offers the usual data types (built-in as well as user-defined) that one expects in a modern language. In this article, we will discuss user-defined data types like classes and structures, and a few other important topics related to data types in C#.

Issue dtd. - 4th Nov. 2002
Getting started with C# in the .NET framework
In the not-too-distant past we used different programming models for developing Windows desktop applications and Web-based applications.