New Stuff: Resources for Your Developer Toolbox

Resources for Your Developer Toolbox

Theresa W. Carey

Distributed Application Analyzer

      Compuware Corporation has begun shipping new functionality for analyzing distributed applications built on Microsoft technology. Compuware DevPartner Studio 6.7 has a distributed analyzer that provides information on application readiness by locating problems and performance issues early in the development lifecycle. This functionality traces the transactions of an application as it executes across multiple systems.
      Designed for developers and testers who are building multitiered Web-based distributed applications, the distributed analyzer makes recommendations for taking corrective action on errors, performance issues, and design problems.
      Distributed analysis capabilities can reduce the time required to understand the critical events and transactions that are at the core of distributed, Web-based apps. Development and testing teams use the distributed analyzer primarily during the system integration, debugging, and testing phases of an application's lifecycle. One of the product's features is its ability to collect and present results without requiring instrumentation, recompilation, or source code.
      DevPartner Studio's distributed analyzer supports Windows® XP, Windows 2000, and Windows NT® as well as COM, Microsoft® Internet Explorer, MTS and COM+, Internet Information Services (IIS), ASP, client- and server-side scripting, ISAPI, and ADO. The DevPartner Studio architecture has been designed with drop-in support for Microsoft .NET and other technologies.

Create and Maintain .NET and Visual Basic Documentation

      Document! X, published by Innovasys, automates the process of creating and maintaining documentation for Microsoft .NET assemblies, code written in Visual Basic® and Visual Basic for Applications, databases, compiled COM components, and type libraries. The product allows you to create documentation with one tool and produce a single consolidated documentation set for code, components, and databases.
      You can use existing C# comment files when documenting .NET assemblies, and existing descriptions for members inherited from the .NET Framework assemblies. Full hierarchical graphical relationship diagrams can be generated for each module, and cross-project relationships are recognized. In addition, you can customize the depth to which the relationships will be analyzed.
      Document! X can be specified for individual modules if required. For .NET assemblies, the program uses comment files produced by the C# compiler from source code comments, while for Visual Basic source code, you can identify which comments to extract.
      Two add-in programs are available—Commentator! X assists with the creation and maintenance of tagged comments in Visual Basic source code, and Document! X Commenter allows you to create Document! X Comment Files.

Improve Page Response

      XCache Technologies has announced the availability of XCompress 1.0, which compresses outgoing text between the Web server and the client. IIS administrators using the XCompress Smart Compression Technology can see page response times improve while overall bandwidth use drops.
      XCompress complements the company's flagship product, XCache, and utilizes existing relationships. XCompress runs on Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 and is integrated with IIS, MMC, and COM interfaces. XCache allows Web sites to deliver more pages with greater speed while ensuring page freshness and security, without any additional hardware.

Real-time Web-based Analysis

      The Business Intelligence Division at SPSS Inc. recently announced the SPSS WebApp Framework 1.3, which enables the building of customized, Web-based, real-time applications for historical and predictive analysis. The framework provides users with greater flexibility in controlling the appearance of a page, including authority over content, fonts, icons, and layout. Users can also define their own filters based on selected variables, and reorganize the position of objects on the page. New personalization features enable site administrators to simplify delegation of responsibilities in updating applications.
      Version 1.3 features improvements for handling large data sets and faster processing of intermediate data including support for server load balancing and security capabilities that can be applied at the individual and data level. Businesses can implement multiple security schemas (for example, offering Windows NT authentication for internal users and native security for external users).
      Site administrators can permit users to create new categories that can be made publicly available; they also have the ability to grant publishing rights to a group or user without granting rights to the parent category.
      For reports, users can drill down into any month, quarter, week, or alternative hierarchies, including projected future values. They can also view multiple items in a graph to see a total of selected items.

Test and Measurement Toolkit

      Agilent Technologies Inc. has released its T&M (Test and Measurement) Programmers Toolkit, a new software suite that extends Visual Studio® .NET to engineers creating test and measurement applications.
      The toolkit includes an instrument explorer where users can drag and drop items from the instrument list to their code, automatically generating the correct code to connect their program to their instrument. The instrument explorer handles all the details, using existing VXIplug&play drivers, IVI-COM drivers, or direct connections to the instruments. You'll also find an I/O monitor that tracks transactions between the software and the instrument. This includes all levels of input and output to the instrument, and built-in test and measurement project wizards that automatically generate fully functional skeleton applications, including operational instrument connections.
      The toolkit includes data visualization and analysis components that reduce program development time, and an Agilent Visual Engineering Environment (VEE) connection wizard to allow users to run Agilent VEE code within new Visual Studio .NET projects.

A Toolkit for Ch

      SoftIntegration Inc. recently announced the release of Ch Windows Toolkit, which supports the embeddable C interpreter. The toolkit includes ISO 1990 C standard (C90) support, major features in C99, C++ classes, POSIX, X/Motif, OpenGL, ODBC, GTK+, CGI, 2D/3D graphical plotting, numerical computing, and shell programming.
      The Ch Windows Toolkit is a version of Ch that binds to the Windows API in C for creating a GUI in Windows. The toolkit allows Windows-based applications to run in Ch without lengthy compile/link/execute/debug cycles. Ch for Windows has extensive collections of Unix emulation utilities including vi, awk, sed, grep, find, and more. The Ch Toolkit can automate tasks and regression tests.
      Ch has built-in 2D and 3D graphical support, generic mathematical functions, and computational arrays for linear algebra and matrix computations. Ch is also an effective interactive environment for teaching and learning programming in C, right up to the latest features of the C99 standard. Ch runs on Windows 95 and later.

Currency-enabling Component

      Cloanto Corporation has released version 3.6 of its Currency Server software, featuring a second generation XML Web Service based on the .NET Framework. New functionalities include automatic support for past and future European Monetary Union currencies and plug-ins for new data formats and for additional providers of exchange rate data. Version 3.6 is available in a Universal Edition (which includes .NET, COM, and SOAP components and support for high-end servers), a Commerce Edition (COM-only, for single-CPU systems), and as part of custom solutions.
      The collection of exchange rate data can be invoked manually, via script or batch file, or through built-in or system scheduling. The program notifies site administrators when problems arise relating to the connection or to the contents of the remote data and includes one-click disaster recovery, which changes the provider of exchange rate data while retaining settings, code, and all other work. It supports different types of data download and upload protocols (HTTP, FTP, file, and so on), firewalls, proxy servers, and network authentication systems (Windows NT challenge/response, for example).

The Bookshelf

      Manning Publications announces the release of Windows Forms Programming with C#, written by Erik Brown. The book covers fundamentals such as labels, menus, and buttons, as well as advanced concepts like owner-drawn lists, Explorer-style interfaces, and customized data binding. The author shows how to implement reusable libraries, auto-filled comboboxes, keyboard and mouse processing, printing and print previewing, and embedded Web browsers. The book is intended for beginner and intermediate programmers eager to get their hands dirty.
      Appendices include a 30-page reference to the C# language and a handy visual index of the Windows Forms classes. For access to Manning Publication's authors and to their .NET materials, check out https://www.manning.com/dotnetbooks/.

Send your New Stuff to Theresa at newstuff@microsoft.com.

Theresa W. Carey is a freelance writer who lives in California. Her byline has appeared in Barron's and PC World.

From the August 2002 issue of MSDN Magazine.