Effective Forms Authentication, Part 1  ASP.NET offers several possibilities for authenticating users, but when you come right down to it, there's only one reasonable alternative for most applications: forms authentication. Mike Gunderloy takes you step-by-step through creating a forms authentication project and helps you avoid the potholes.   [ONDotnet.com]

Serialization in .NET, Part 1  Serialization of data using built-in .NET support makes persistence easy and reusable. Dan Frumin reviews the support available for serialization and look at a couple of scenarios for using it.   [ONDotnet.com]

WinFX in Detail
Inside XAML  One of Longhornツ痴 most interesting technologies for developers is its new XML-based markup language, codenamed XAML (short for eXtensible Application Markup Language, and pronounced "Zammel"). User interfaces in Longhorn applications are typically built using XAML. Ian Griffiths looks at how XAML relates to the underlying support provided by WinFX.   [ONDotnet.com]

Cooking with ADO.NET, Part 2  In O'Reilly's ADO.NET Cookbook, you'll find more than 150 solutions and best practices for everyday dilemmas. This week, we're offering two more recipes from the book that show how to create and then synchronize a master-detail pair of DataGrid controls, as well as how to improve performance when a user pages through a large result set in a data grid.   [ONDotnet.com]

New Data Controls in ASP.NET Whidbey  One of the design goals of the next release of ASP.NET, codenamed ASP.NET Whidbey, is to reduce the amount of code you write for common tasks such as data access. Wei-Meng Lee discusses two new controls that drastically reduce the amount of code you typically need to write in ASP.NET.   [ONDotnet.com]

Using the Security Controls in ASP.NET Whidbey  Forms authentication in .NET has been a godsend, making general authentication a whole lot easier. But Microsoft is not stopping there. Wei-Meng Lee shows how the new Whidbey Security Controls makes simple authentication even easier.   [ONDotnet.com]

Cooking with ADO.NET  O'Reilly's recently released ADO.NET Cookbook contains over 150 solutions and best practices for everyday dilemmas. This week, we're excerpting three recipes from the book that show how to asynchronously update data in a database, how to protect login credentials during network transmissions, and how to enforce a business rule with column expressions.   [ONDotnet.com]

Master and Content Pages in Whidbey  Most web sites have a consistent look and feel, containing a company logo and perhaps a navigational menu. In ASP.NET 1.0, there was no a good way to handle this; luckily, Microsoft now has a solution. Wei-Meng Lee shows you the Master and Content Pages feature in ASP.NET 2.0.   [ONDotnet.com]

Java vs. .NET Security, Part 2  Java and .NET address similar code security issues, but which offers the best security implementation? Denis Piliptchouk's series continues with a look at cryptography support.   [ONJava.com]

Creating Your Own Code Snippets with Whidbey  One of the new features found in Visual Studio .NET Whidbey is Insert Snippets. The Insert Snippets feature allows you to insert commonly-used code blocks into your project, thereby improving the efficiency of your development process. Wei-Meng Lee shows you how to add your own snippets to Whidbey.   [ONDotnet.com]

Java vs. .NET Security, Part 1  Java and .NET address similar code security issues, but which one offers the best security implementation? Denis Piliptchouk's series starts with a side-by-side look at how each performs configuration, code verification, and memory isolation.   [ONJava.com]

WinFX in Detail
WinFX: An All-Managed API  In Longhorn, Win32 will no longer be the principal API. It will, of course, continue to be supported; 20-year-old DOS applications still run on the latest version of Windows, and likewise, Win32 applications will also continue to work for the foreseeable future. But just as DOS and 16-bit Windows applications were superseded by Win32 applications, so in Longhorn will Win32 become the "old way" of doing things. In the first edition of this new column by Ian Griffiths, he explains why an all-managed API is a good thing.   [ONDotnet.com]

Longhorn SDK Annotations  At last month's Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft unveiled the core features that will be added to the Windows platform, code-named Longhorn. Among the new features is a new experimental facility to the MSDN library: the Longhorn SDK. Working closely with Microsoft, O'Reilly has seized upon this new feature that allows third parties to use RSS feeds to enhance the Longhorn SDK docs. O'Reilly is the first to provide a Microsoft-recommended source of annotations for this new service. Ian Griffiths looks at the anatomy of the annotation source, as well as the inner workings of the client-side RSS component.   [ONDotnet.com]

Understanding Reflection, Part 2  In the first article of this series, Nick Harrison explored some of the basic objects used to make reflection work. In this second part, he shows you how to use custom attributes to define and reference metadata that the original .NET designers never imagined.   [ONDotnet.com]

Using the eBay SDK  Unless you've been living in a cave, you probably already know that eBay enables people and businesses to buy and sell items online. But you might not have known that you can write software applications that integrate with eBay through a handy set of .NET components. Jeffrey McManus gives you an overview of how to write apps using the eBay SDK for .NET.   [ONDotnet.com]

.NET Serialization, Part 2  In his last article, Wei-Meng Lee discussed how to serialize objects into a binary stream, as well as into a SOAP message. In this new article, he shows you how to serialize objects into an XML document.   [ONDotnet.com]

What Is Being Unveiled at the PDC this Year?  This week, Microsoft is holding their periodic developer conference, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. Much like most PDCs, this event is a time to unveil their new plans for software across their developer products. Hopefully, this article will help you associate the codenames with the content. In the coming weeks, you will hear, from every media outlet, these codenames being bandied about. Shawn Wildermuth gives you an overview of the codenames and their meanings to you, the working developer.   [ONDotnet.com]

Filtering HTTP Requests with .NET  ASP.NET has a number of extensibility points that developers can use. One such point is response filtering, accessible via the Filter property of the HttpResponse class. Ben Lowery shows you how to use HTTP filters in your own code.   [ONDotnet.com]

.NET Serialization, Part 1  Many a time, you may need to persist the value of an object to secondary storage. For example, you may wish to save the values of a couple of Point objects, representing the positioning of an item on screen, to secondary storage. The act of "flattening" an object into a serial form is known as serialization. Wei-Meng Lee discusses serialization as supported in the .NET framework -- Binary and SOAP serialization.  [ONDotnet.com]

Cooking with Active Directory, Part 2  Active Directory Cookbook offers Windows administrators hundreds of troubleshooting recipes for working with AD. This week we're showcasing two more recipes for you to sample: the first is from Chapter 6 ("Users") on modifying an attribute for several users at once; and the second is from Chapter 7 ("Groups") on viewing the nested members of a group.  [ONDotnet.com]

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