Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) 2005 is a server based application that provides a platform for organizations to use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor business performance against their defined business goals. In this article, Alex Lim explains the architecture of Business Scorecard Manager, and works through steps required to create a data source, scorecard, and KPIs, associate a report with the scorecard, and publish the scorecard and report to Sharepoint, thus enabling you to create a basic BSM project that can allow your users to monitor the progress of their organization against their goals. The article assumes no prior knowledge of BSM.

NET components leveraging the Enterprise Library 1.1 tend to behave poorly with ASP.NET 2.0. Most of the misbehavior arises from configuration information management changes in the library. In this article Tom Fischer explores how you can by-pass these and other frustrations by adapting how the Enterprise Library 1.1 obtains and acts upon configuration information.

A relational database offers more or less a static structure to store data. Often several tables and relations are needed to reach a minimum of flexibility. Nevertheless a relational database is still often the first choice for storing data. In some cases it may be better to store the data in a directory service like Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM), which can also provide user authentication for an application.

In this article Jörg Wegener describes how to implement ADAM within a web application and also takes advantage of the new security features in ASP.NET 2.0 to provide authentication.

With the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) wave catching up in the industry, Microsoft has over the last few years developed several technologies for implementing SOA. There was a need to unify the existing technologies into a single unified model. With the introduction of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Microsoft has now come up with a new framework that unifies several existing models into a single coherent programming model to develop applications based on SOA. WCF is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems. In this article Poornachandra Sarang will provide an overview of this new framework and walk through the construction of a service and a client. He will also discuss several of the benefits offered by WCF.

Following Morgan Skinner's introduction to Workflow Foundation, Tom Fischer delves more deeply under the hood of WF, explaining some of the issues you'll need to think about when using WF with ASP.NET 2.0, in particular focusing on using the WorkflowInstance and WorkflowRuntime objects in an ASP.NET environment. Tom also touches on service configuration, the design of activities and architectural issues for an enterprise workflow.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) provides an elegant method of adding extensibility to applications, whether those applications are rich client or web based. It consists of a runtime engine that executes workflows, a set of building blocks known as activities that are used to compose a workflow, and a set of services which are used at runtime which are used to support the workflow as it executes.

Workflows are perfect for exposing business logic as graphical flow-chart like models, and for providing hooks where custom code can be executed. This article will provide an introduction to how you can use Windows Workflow within your own applications, and show how common business scenarios can be accomplished.

In this article Sahil Malik will explain some of the significant changes that have taken place for ADO.NET version 2.0. The article will cover improvements to serialization, the better streaming support and - in some cases - lower memory requirements associated with the DataTable, as well as new support for asynchronous command execution and better support for transactions via System.Transaction classes.

Analysis Management Object (AMO) is a new object model for managing and administering Analysis Services 2005. AMO enables developers to automate the creation and processing of Analysis Services objects, such as Dimension, Cube, and Partition. In this article, you'll learn the basics of the AMO object model, classes in the object model, and common properties and methods in the AMO class. You'll also learn how to automate the creation of Analysis Services objects using AMO programming within .NET. Throughout the article, you'll build a sample application that allows for the generation and processing of Analysis Services OLAP objects.

In this article, Brian Myers demonstrates how to build a database structure auditing solution with DDL triggers. This allows DBAs and developers to keep track of all changes to the structure of a database including when a table is added or when a column is changed, and is most useful during development and testing. Instead of developers or DBAs keeping a log of database changes, DDL triggers, new to SQL Server 2005, can be used to automatically collect the necessary information. This article includes SQL Server 2005 scripts to create a database to hold the audit information as well as scripts to create the DDL triggers. After reading this article you will be able to deploy a database structure auditing solution within SQL Server 2005.

Since its invention in 1918, Soundex has become the de facto standard for phonetic searching. Microsoft SQL Server even has built-in support for phonetic matching via the SOUNDEX() and DIFFERENCE() functions. It comes as no surprise that modern users take advantage of Soundex functionality in a wide variety of applications including genealogy, customer relationship management, law enforcement and the growing field of anti-terrorism. In this article, Michael Coles demonstrates how to take advantage of Soundex in your own applications. He'll introduce you to the Microsoft-supplied Soundex function, discuss the differences between this and the NARA standard, and then work through a SQLCLR UDF that implements the NARA standard, thus allowing you to perform NARA-compliant queries directly from SQL Server 2005. The article also demonstrates how to use this feature from a web service or web application.

In this article Cristian Lefter will provide a closer look at SQL Server 2005 Dynamic Management Views (DMVs). The article takes a brief tour of some of the categories of DMV that are available, showing you the kind of information you can get fro them, and how to access them both through SQL queries and through summary reports. Then Cristian works through several samples that show how you can use DMVs to identify possible bottlenecks in your MS SQL Server 2005 server.

In this article Klaus Aschenbrenner will show you how you can use a combination of managed stored procedures, managed triggers and a Service Broker to develop an asynchronous, scalable database solution that can process data asynchronously allowing the database to be available for mission critical applications.

This is the first of three articles in which Robin Dewson surveys SQL Server 2005, covering the changes and new features that have been added since SQL Server 2000. This article gives an overview of the new installation procedures as well as some of the tools that replace those found in previous versions of SQL Server. Additionally, it takes a look at the changes with Snapshot Isolation and how this can help batch processing, and it also covers the new Database Tuning Advisor.

This article is the second in a series that introduces the changes and improvements to SQL Server 2005, focusing on what drives SQL Server and T-SQL. As far as coding is concerned, although the inclusion of .NET has attracted the greatest publicity, there have been many T-SQL changes as well. Data joining, data pivoting, and exception handling have all gained new functionality, and the new capability of ranking rows of data with built-in functionality is a great asset for running a search engine. Finally, to cater for the new XML data type, support for XQuery has been introduced, and there are improvements in FOR XML. This article will review these changes with code snippets and show you how to take advantage of the new features.

In the final article of the series introducing SQL Server 2005 Robin Dewson examines the new support for .NET and the ability to write stored procedures and other items using managed code. The article also covers a couple of other related topics, including new ADO.NET notification support, multiple active results sets (MARS) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).

Team Build is a new built-in build lab that automates compiling, testing, and deploying .NET 2005 solutions created using the .NET 2005 Team System. While Team Build offers a lot of powerful functionality, getting many of the features to work requires some complicated and less then intuitive workarounds. In this article Aaron Engel describes how to use Team Build to implement a powerful automated build process that pulls code from source control, builds multiple projects, executes unit tests, performs code analysis, and sends a build status report when the build completes.

In this article, Brian Myers provides an introduction to the ClickOnce deployment technology introduced in Visual Studio 2005. This introduction includes an overview of ClickOnce deployment as well as its advantages and disadvantages, and a comparison between ClickOnce and Windows Installer is presented. Finally, this article includes an example of a ClickOnce deployment as well as a discussion of some issues Brian encountered while building a real world ClickOnce deployment.

In this article Saurabh Nandu takes a look at the new debugging features in Visual Studio 2005. Specifically he will cover Edit and Continue which save time by letting you edit your code while in debug mode, Debugging Visualizers which help you visualize complex objects like DataSets, Data Tips which let you quickly look at values of your object, the Exception Assistant that provides detailed information on runtime exceptions caught in the debugger and gives prescriptive guidance to fix the exception condition.

In this article, Brian Myers explains how and why he upgraded an existing real-world Visual Basic .NET (VB .NET) project created with Visual Studio 2003 (VS2003) and SQL Server 2000 to a new Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005) project along with SQL Server 2005. The first part of this article explores in general terms the reasons behind the decision to upgrade an existing production application. Brian also describes the main issues he encountered while upgrading both the VB .NET project and the database, and he identifies features of the new project structure within VS2005.

The second part of this article looks in more detail at two of the features that contributed to the motivation to upgrade this project: the new GridView control and support for encryption of configuration files.

This third and final article of a series by Christophe Nasarre which shows how to use reflection to examine what's changed in version 2 of the CLR. This article focuses on dissecting the members of each type, from the constructor to the P/Invoke signatures using the unmanaged COM-based Reflection API. New features related to Generics are also covered.

This is the second article in Christophe Nasarre's series about using managed and unmanaged reflection to very precisely discover the contents and changes between CLRs. This article focuses on listing the contents of assemblies from attached attributes to the different types, showing namespaces in between. A specific coverage of generics is also provided with the details of the reflection methods to use in order to get the constraints attached to a type.

At this point, VS .NET 2005 Beta 2 is supposed to be feature-complete. Therefore, this is a good time to check on the features that will be available when it goes public. In this three-part series, Christophe Nasarre explores some of the problems encountered when comparing the previous versions of the CLR to the new version 2.0. He also demonstrates how to use managed and unmanaged reflection to precisely discover the contents and updates, and includes specific coverage of generics. Additionally, the article details the changes in the reflection APIs for version 2.0 to support generics.

The first part of the series specifically explores the locations in which the different versions of the CLR are stored on your system, and also digs into the possible ways to load an assembly in memory. The second and third parts explain how to dissect and dump the contents of an assembly in detail—from the namespace to each kind of type member.

Many discussions of the new Membership and Personalization services describe how to register someone as a member on your site, set up personalized profiles for your visitors, and assign roles. Very little has been written about how to keep track of members for separate sites on the same server or what to do if the profile information and roles vary among your websites. In this article Geoffrey Pennington describes how to segregate users and roles by application in the aspnetdb database when using the Membership and Role services.

ASP.NET's new functionalities, like Membership, Personalization, and Profile, are based on the provider model. The provider model defines an easy plug-and-play architecture. You can use custom providers or write your own providers and use them without rewriting and recompiling the entire solution. In this article, Kamran M Qamar will explain what the provider model is, when it should be used, which functionalities in ASP.NET are using it, how you can create your own providers, and finally how you can architect your own solution to reap the benefits of the provider model.

AJAX is an acronym for a couple of technologies that make it possible for developers to update a web page content at the control level without having to do a complete page refresh. In this article Pieter Siegers takes a look at how far Ajax has evolved today with respect to .NET. He will take three current popular Ajax frameworks for .NET development – Atlas, Anthem.NET and Ajax.NET Professional -, and look at various aspects of their installation and use in ASP.NET applications. Then he will compare all three frameworks and look at their capacity to make Ajax-like development for .NET simpler. In part 2 of this article, he will continue the comparisons and produce a table that compares features for each of the frameworks.

Author:Pieter Siegers
Editor:David Schultz
Reviewers:James Greenwood, Saurabh Nandu

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)-based mapping applications are among the most powerful new tools on the Web. Mapping tools can be used in a variety of applications including real estate mapping, geographic tracking programs, educational tools and even games. In this article Michael Coles will introduce one of the hottest new custom mapping tools: the Google Maps API version 1.0. This article is designed to get you up and running with your own Google Maps quickly by creating several simple examples using the Google Maps API. The default example provided by Google will cover the basics of using the API, the second example will expand on that by adding a icon and an info window. The last example will combine the Google Maps API and AJAX to create an animated map.

Author:Michael Coles
Editor:
Reviewers:Neil Piggot, Teun Duynstee

In Part 1 of this series, Pieter Siegers explained how Ajax help you develop web applications that are more responsive, faster, and put less load on the network, and in particular took three .NET-based Ajax frameworks – Anthen.NET, Ajax.NET Professional, and Atlas, and showed how to obtain and install them. This article will continue with the examples. You’ll see a comparison between these frameworks with respect to their capacity to ease Ajax-like web development. Finally Pieter supplies a simple feature-comparing table where you can easily determine which framework suits you best.

In the second article of her series introducing site design in ASP.NET 2.0, Chris Hart introduces themes. She explains how to set up a theme, allowing greater separation of the visual design and the backend code for the site. The article also touches on techniques to apply different themes based on user preferences, thus allowing each users to some extent to customize his own visual appearance of the site.

Author:Chris Hart
Editor:Simon Robinson
Reviewers:Neil Piggot, Kunal Cheda

In November 2001, Marshall Rosenstein wrote How to Create a Zip Code Webservice. That zip application enabled you to find cities and zip code distances using a combination of a SQL Server 2000 and ASP.NET 1.x web services. The technologies at that time involved SQL Data Transformation Services, T-SQL user-defined functions and procedures, and ASP.NET web services. SQL Server 2005 contains new features that will allow you to create an improved solution architecture for this kind of scenario. In this article, Marshall will show how to use SQL Integration Services to import zip code data, SQL CLR to create stored procedures and user-defined functions, and SQL 2005 HTTP Endpoints to expose the zip code web service. You’ll create a zip code application that runs entirely in SQL Server 2005.

Author:Marshall Rosenstein
Editor:David Schultz
Reviewers:Alex Thissen, Saurabh Nandu

With the soon to be released version of ASP.NET v2.0, web developers will be introduced to various new web server and data source controls. In this article Stewart Way will provide an overview of the new controls that will be available. A sample is also developed using the Northwind database to show how easy and fast you can develop highly complex, data driven web pages using the new web controls.

Author:Stewart Way
Editor:David Schultz
Reviewers:Damien Foggon, Mark Horner

The GridView is a new and powerful control in ASP.NET 2.0. It is designed to replace the very familiar DataGrid control you probably used in many of your ASP.NET 1.x applications. Together with the new ObjectDataSource I will show you how to implement efficient sorting and paging using custom data objects while taking advantage of the new SQL Server 2005 row_count function.

Author:Benton Stark
Editor:David Schultz
Reviewers:Saurabh Nandu, Damien Foggon

ASP.NET 2.0 has introduced a series of new data source controls that simplify the life of developers. Developers can now connect to a database and perform CRUD operations with a minimal amount of code or in some cases no code at all. To enable developers to insert business logic into their applications the new ObjectDataSource control is provided in ASP.NET 2.0. In this article Kuldeep Deokule will use an example Employee listing application to show how to incorporate business logic in a 3 tier application using the new ObjectDataSource control.

Author:Kuldeep Deokule
Editor:David Schultz
Reviewers:Damien Foggon, Stewart Way

In this article, Chris Hart shows you how to use master pages to create a standard template for a site, and how to use the navigation controls that make it really simple to add page hierarchies, quick links and breadcrumbs. The article is pitched at an introductory level, explaining how the controls work and is aimed at developers who are migrating from ASP.NET 1.x and so encountering these new features for the first time. It forms part of a two part series on site design in ASP.NET 2.0; the follow-up article will cover skins and themes.

Author:Chris Hart
Editor:Simon Robinson
Reviewers:Neil Piggot, Kunal Cheda