MSDN Magazine September 2005

ASP.NET provides a number of ways to maintain user state, the most powerful of which is session state. This article takes an in-depth look at designing and deploying high-performance, scalable, secure session solutions, and presents best practices for both existing and new ASP.NET session state features straight from the ASP.NET feature team.

ASP.NET 2.0 introduces a Web Part control that is designed to deal with the serialization, storage, and retrieval of customization and personalization data behind the scenes. In this article, the authors explain how you can put the WebPart control to work in your ASP.NET 2.0 applications.

The current version of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) satisfies many current and future manageability requirements. In this article Michael Jurek demonstrates how WMI provides important system management capabilities and develops a WMI-aware monitoring solution you can use to instrument your ASP.NET applications. He then introduces the capabilities of MOM 2005 that allow you to monitor these instrumented applications.

SQL Server 2005 offers a completely redesigned SQL Server Integration Services engine, formerly known as Data Transformation Services. It includes many new features such as built-in support for Fuzzy Lookups and Fuzzy Groupings, which help you build powerful data-cleansing solutions. This article provides an overview of fuzzy searching techniques and a dissection of the underlying fuzzy search technology implemented in SQL Server 2005.

With the .NET Framework and GDI+, you can easily add elements of style to your applications. You can use transparency, irregularly shaped windows, notification icons, toast pop-ups, different color schemes, and lots more. Designed well, these techniques can create much more compelling interactions between your application and your users. This article explains how.

Here in the pages ofMSDN Magazine, we cover a lot of topics that developers can use every day to further their careers. This month, however, we'll look at a more basic question: how does an average developer win fame and recognition as a guru on the programming scene?.

From my first look at VG. net V2. 4b by Prodige Software Corporation, it seemed like just another typical graphics add-on, but as I discovered what a potent tool it is for Visual Studio® . NET graphical interface development, I became more and more impressed.

Edited by Nancy Michell Cutting Edge: ASP.NET Forms

Forms are an essential piece of ASP. NET—the ASP. NET Web programming model itself wouldn't be possible without forms. The use of forms is not constrained in pure HTML, but it is subject to some restrictions in ASP.

On the conference circuit recently, I was speaking about some of my favorite new features in the Microsoft® . NET Framework 2. 0, using the content of three recent columns in this series as fodder. In my talk I sped through generics, operator overloading, and the BackgroundWorker component, all in the space of an hour (for the columns, see Advanced Basics: Being Generic Ain't So Bad, Advanced Basics: Calling All Operators, and Advanced Basics: Doing Async the Easy Way).

There are several ways to test a Windows®-based application through its user interface. For example, in the January 2005 issue of MSDN®Magazine (Test Run: Lightweight UI Test Automation with . NET) I described a lightweight technique for testing .

Today there is a greater focus than ever on reusing existing components and wiring together disparate components to form a cohesive architecture. But this wiring can quickly become a daunting task because as application size and complexity increase, so do dependencies.

I get loads of security questions from friends and former students, and recently I've gotten a number of questions about building secure data-driven Web sites for internal enterprise systems. I've decided to answer them here to hopefully save you some headaches in your own projects.

Stephen Toub C++ at Work: Copy Constructors, Assignment Operators, and More

Paul DiLascia { End Bracket }: Hacking the Immune System

HIV is a major global health problem, with over 40 million people infected worldwide. Biomedical researchers are working to create a vaccine that would be effective against many different strains, taking into account all the individual differences in people's immune systems.