Dr. Dobb's | From the Editor | January 01, 2003

From the Editor

January 01, 2003
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/from-the-editor/184416618

From the Editor

With new developer tools and OS support on the horizon, the .NET Framework will continue to grow in importance over the next year. So to kick off our first issue of 2003, we're launching a new column, "Inside .NET," by Dino Esposito. Dino is probably a familiar name for many of you — he's a frequent conference speaker, prolific writer of books and magazine articles on a wide variety of Windows development issues, and an expert .NET programmer. Few programmers have delved into .NET as much as Dino, as witnessed by his recent books Applied XML Processing for Microsoft .NET and Building Web Solutions with ASP.NET and ADO.NET.

"Inside .NET" looks into aspects of the Framework that aren't well documented. Dino will focus on underused and underestimated classes and interfaces as well as classes with design issues (using the CLI source or decompilers as a reference). In doing so, Dino will help provide an understanding of the design rationale behind each class so you can build lean, mean apps. In short, "Inside .NET" will cover the entire platform, rather than focusing on one language, and will provide practical examples along the way.

In this issue, Dino reviews the many collection classes now available in .NET, and discusses their interfaces. He addresses the complexity of each class and provides a handy set of guidelines for picking the right class to contain your data. In an upcoming column, he'll will review the security considerations of hosting Windows Forms controls within a web-based app.

Dino will also be writing a new biweekly newsletter for Windows Developer, "ASP.NET2theMax," which will provide timely, concise tips for getting the most out of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and XML. The newsletter will cover issues such as maintaining server-side control of all HTML tags using the Runat attribute and understanding the undocumented CodeBehind attribute in the ASP.NET's @Page directive for working with multilanguage projects using VS.NET. Sign up for ASP.NET2theMax at http://windevnet.com/newsletters/.

Visual Studio.NET Connections

Last October, I attended the Visual Studio.NET Connections conference in Orlando, Florida. The show ran concurrently with ASP.NET Connections and SQL Server Magazine LIVE!, which added up to a wealth of conference tracks. Carl Franklin's ".NET Rocks" webcast conducted interviews with several conference speakers, and they're available online at http://www.franklins.net/dnrvsconn2002.asp. During the conference, attendees also voted for their favorite tools and vendors for the Developers' Choice Awards. The winners were:

Best Consulting	    Unisys
Best Admin Tool	    Brinkster
Best Training	    Wintellect
Best Software Tool  Microsoft
Best Publisher	    CoDe Magazine

Well, four out of five isn't bad :-)

John Dorsey
Editor in Chief
[email protected]