New Stuff

Resources for Your Developer Toolbox

Theresa W. Carey

Contents

Stress Test Your .NET-centric Apps
Plug In the Date
Connecting Data to .NET
Dynamic Menus and More
Generate .NET Reports
Declare Your Business Objects' Structure
Connect Excel Docs
The Bookshelf

Stress Test Your .NET-centric Apps

Red Gate Software has released ANTS Enterprise Edition, which enables you to load, scale, and stress test Microsoft® .NET-based Web applications and XML Web Services for large commercial enterprises. The company also released a new version of ANTS, ANTS 1.5, aimed at individual developers and small teams developing Web applications for fewer than 100 concurrent users.

ANTS Enterprise Edition is designed to test apps for hundreds of thousands of users under the same conditions that will be faced in the real world. It lets you test for Web sites and services early in the development cycle, providing data for decisions on architecture, platforms, and software needed to meet user requirements. It also allows testing to be conducted simultaneously with other processes in the dev cycle.

ANTS 1.5 and ANTS Enterprise Edition support testing based on SOAP. Both products can test for custom classes in Web Services, secure socket support for recording and playing back scripts that access HTTP Web sites, support for HTTP 1.1, and scalability that allows users to run high-volume tests without expensive hardware.

Plug In the Date

DBI recently published the dbiCalendaring Bundle for .NET, written in C#. The dbiCalendaring Bundle, a group of four native controls for .NET, supports the iCalendar standards of the Internet Engineering Task Force. dbiCalendar and dbiMonth build on the native support for iCalendar standards, allowing users to schedule events in a format that is shared across the Internet. dbiDate and dbiDropDate are controls for selecting and entering date information for corporate and personal-based information application development. Built-in print functionality found in dbiCalendar, dbiDate, and dbiMonth saves development time, adding reporting capabilities and extending user functionality.

The dbiCalendar control is a scrolling virtual calendar component that presents an interactive interface and a user-defined range of dates. This component provides the developer with control over calendar presentation.

The dbiMonth control is a customizable month view component that can be configured to support a large set of month-view presentations and user interactions. The component provides control over graphical presentation including unique colors, text, and graphics for each date.

The dbiDate object is a customizable month-view component that provides sophisticated visual flexibility. It can display any number of months at a time in multiple dimensions. Display options include all of the colors, fonts, and borders in use in the control.

The dbiDropDate object is an enhanced date-edit object with a built-in dropdown calendar and smart data entry features.

Connecting Data to .NET

DataDirect Technologies Inc. has announced the introduction of DataDirect Connect for .NET, data connectivity components that enable developers to access enterprise data using .NET. DataDirect for .NET does not require database client libraries, which eliminates the need to install and keep up with the various versions of the library software.

The toolset bypasses network calls and eliminates administration and management of database client libraries. The connectivity technology is designed with a common architecture, implementing the same features and functionality across databases.

Tightly integrated with Visual Studio® .NET, DataDirect for .NET provides consistent functionality and performance across databases as well as built-in debugging tools. The product enables programming with Visual Studio .NET tools that still use the traditional ADO interface (via bundled ADO providers). An optional development license of the ADO providers is available for embedded technology customers.

Dynamic Menus and More

Mimsware is now shipping mc:Menu, which provides dynamic menu functionality for ASP.NET applications targeting Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and above. The product consists of fully managed .NET components written in C#. It includes XML configuration files for customizable attributes, vertical main menu items with one level deep pop-up submenu items, and a submenu indicator. You'll find clickable and informational menu items, menu item groupings, menu item dividers, and menu item tooltips.

There's also support for menu item states of Enabled, Disabled, and Hot. Enabled menu items can be selected and acted upon, while Disabled menu items cannot. When the mouse is hovering over an active menu item, the menu item is considered Hot.

The product includes configurable color schemes, such as setting the default background color, default border color, highlighted background color, and highlighted border color. Types of menu items supported include hyperlink, divider, and grouping. You can find a live demo of mc:Menu's capabilities at the company Web site.

Generate .NET Reports

Combit is now shipping List & Label 8.0, which allows you to create reports, lists, charts, forms, and labels. Offering Web reporting as well as desktop publishing, List & Label is redistributable to users royalty-free. Since it's database-independent, List & Label can be integrated via .DLL, ActiveX®/OCX, VCL, and .NET Assembly. New features include XML and MHTML export and a new HTML object.

List & Label can also create the charts and graphs for reports. Charts can be exported in any of the available formats and are then available for use in other applications. The package includes comprehensive online help, programmer's reference, and designer documentation.

Declare Your Business Objects' Structure

DeKlarit has announced its new release of DeKlarit 1.1, a RAD tool that integrates into Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. DeKlarit 1.1 provides a declarative way to describe your business objects' structure and behavior. Based on this information, DeKlarit creates and maintains a normalized database schema and generates ADO.NET DataSets and DataAdapters. When there are changes to the Business Components structure, DeKlarit creates a new database schema, migrates the data from the old schema to the new one automatically, and regenerates the .NET DataSets and DataAdapters.

DeKlarit's set of metadata-based tools helps developers build the user interface layer of the application by generating Windows® Forms or Web Forms applications that use the ADO.NET components that DeKlarit generates. A key feature of this new version is a Web Services Generator that allows developers to expose their business framework as Web Services with no coding.

Connect Excel Docs

KnowNow Inc. has announced the KnowNow Application Connector for Excel. This program allows customers to connect Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to other spreadsheets and aggregates information from disparate sources.

KnowNow's connector works through firewalls and across platforms, enabling collaboration regardless of location or organization. The Application Connector uses two-way publish and subscribe technology to update data to or from any spreadsheet attached to the product across the Internet. This two-way capability differs from other solutions on the market that simply pull data into Excel.

For users in the field, the Connector has full functionality in detached mode and will automatically synchronize all subscriptions and publications when reconnected to a network.

IT departments can expose data between spreadsheets using a toolbar or a simple Visual Basic® API for programmatic integration.

The Bookshelf

ASP.NET in a Nutshell by Matthew MacDonald and G. Andrew Duthie (O'Reilly, 2002) is a technical reference for serious users to consult when working through everyday development tasks. The book is for developers with classic ASP experience or at least some exposure to .NET. Complete with a tutorial, two reference sections, and plenty of sample code, this 800-page volume goes beyond the ASP.NET published documentation by highlighting little-known details and using real-world examples to show how new features can be used in a working application. ASP.NET in a Nutshell guides developers through the many new features (custom controls, data access, improved security, application deployment, error handling, and more) and offers information on migrating ASP applications to ASP.NET.

For the most part, .NET-centric developers use a high-level language, such as C# or Visual Basic .NET, to develop their systems. However, the core language of .NET is the Common Intermediate Language (CIL). In CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET (Apress, 2002), author Jason Bock covers the essentials of programming in CIL. Bock discusses the basics of .NET assemblies and how manifests fit into the picture. He then shows how to create assemblies in .NET—including the ildasm directives and CIL opcodes, and shows how these are used to define assemblies, classes, field, methods, and method definitions. Bock also covers how C#, Visual Basic .NET, and other languages emit CIL and how they differ from one another. Finally, he reveals how developers can create dynamic assemblies at run time via the Emitter classes.

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

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