MSDN Magazine February 2005

Often, IM conversations contain important information you'd like to keep and reuse. Fortunately, MSN Messenger 6.2 has a feature to keep a conversation history permanently in XML format. This article shows you how to leverage that conversation history by consolidating IM exchanges so they are indexed, searchable, and ultimately reusable using the Microsoft Office 2003 Research and Reference task pane.

Excel 2003 lets you dynamically integrate the data provided by different Web services. It also lets you take advantage of the latest capabilities in Office 2003 to customize list views, graphs, and charts, and to catalog bulk items online or offline. Find out how you can makle the most of the data returned from your Web services with the Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit API.

Windows SharePoint Services helps improve collaboration and workflow while protecting documents and intellectual property. But one feature is conspicuously missing - an easy way to back up and restore deleted files from document libraries. In this article, the authors take advantage of the extensibility of WSS and its server-side and client-side object models to build a restore feature that works like the Recycle Bin in Windows Explorer.

While you may well be excited about the prospect of building managed smart tags, there is little information available to help you create them using .NET. In this article the author fills in the blanks. Along the way he discusses the Microsoft Office Smart Tag List XML schema, advanced managed smart tags for Office 2003 and Office XP, and deploying these features in an organization.

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Servicesis a great tool that offers a centralized approach to storing and rendering reports. It also lets users view and download reports without installing additional software. Plus, reports can be saved in any number of different formats using custom report renderers. In this article, the author will develop one such report renderer that outputs HTML reports, but the skills you'll learn can easily be used to create a renderer for Microsoft Word documents or any other format of your choosing.

For specification documents to be truly valuable, they need to give an accurate picture of all the requirements of a project. This article describes how the communication value of specification documents can be improved by permitting users to test the code under construction using the Framework for Integrated Test (FIT), an open-source tool. It also explains how you can build a Windows Forms application in C# (WinFITRunnerLite) that converts functional tests, as written by your customers using Excel, into a form that allows you to run them with FIT against the code you're developing.

How long have you been reading MSDN Magazine? Did you start picking it up five years ago? Ten years ago when we were Microsoft Systems Journal? Even longer? If you've been reading our publication for a decade or more, you've seen a lot of changes in what's considered "cutting edge" development.

Registry Medic 3.0, released by Iomatic, allows you to clean up your registry, improves PC performance, protects your machine from Trojans, and gets rid of those annoying start-up program artifacts that can be so hard to remove.

Edited by Nancy Michell Inside MSDN: Designing URLs for MSDN2

This is the first installment of a new column about MSDN® projects: what we're doing, how we're doing it, and what we're learning along the way. It will be written by MSDN staff with the goal of sharing the team's experiences in solving the real-world business problems MSDN faces.

In several installments over the past year I have written about multithreading programming techniques in Visual Basic® . NET. In the September 2004 issue of MSDN®Magazine, I discussed the need for thread synchronization and how to write thread-safe code using monitors.

The Microsoft® . NET Framework versions 1. 0 and 1. 1 represented major changes in software development. However, one important thing that did not change much was support for distributed transactions.

Although the context menu is a common element of most desktop applications, it is still fairly uncommon in Web application names because it doesn't map well to a server-based technology like ASP. NET.

By now, developers everywhere have had the opportunity to download the first beta of the Microsoft® . NET Framework 2. 0. ASP. NET developers who have played with it are no doubt salivating at all the cool new features.

Since the focus of this column is service-oriented architecture (SOA), I thought now might be a good time to step back and take a wide-angle look at the general concept and what it means to developers.

Stephen Toub Pure C++: Hello, C++/CLI

Welcome to my first column for MSDN®Magazine. I had actually written a completely different first column—one on the new generic programming support in Visual Studio® 2005. Reviewing it, though, I realized that it left far too many unanswered questions.

This month marks the 11th anniversary of my column and the inauguration of a new title: C++ At Work. We're also adding a new bimonthly column, "Pure C++," by my pal Stan Lippman, one of the great C++ Masters.

Some things just don't mix as well as you would like. Take C# and Microsoft® Excel 2003 or Word 2003, for example. Not only are these applications huge productivity tools, but they both also provide access to large object models that you can program against from your own applications.