Monday, February 27, 2006

Make Your ASP.NET Applications Talk with Text-to-Speech

Text-to-Speech (TTS), also known as speech synthesis, is the process in which typed text is transformed into audible speech. This is preferable to pre-recorded text in which it must be known ahead of time exactly what must be said. With text-to-speech there are opportunities to introduce information that is dynamic. The dynamic information could be from a database or a case where text spoken by a user is repeated for confirmation. Read more...

Monday, February 20, 2006

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. Filters intercept content destined for the client and have an opportunity to modify that content prior to sending it out. Filters are unique in that they can access the raw byte stream that is going to be sent to the client. Read more...

Friday, February 17, 2006

DataGrid/GridView Paging and Sorting Using A DataReader - Introduction

Now, the Datareader is forward-only right? Hmm, but what about paging and sorting? Can we natively implement a DataReader to provide paging and sorting as one would typically with a DataSet? The answer unfortunately is no, and if you try doing this you receive this error message:

AllowCustomPaging must be true and VirtualItemCount must be set for a DataGrid with ID DataGridID when AllowPaging is set to true and the selected datasource does not implement ICollection.

Read more...

Roaming Web Applications in Visual Studio 2003

Visual Studio 2003 provides a nice development environment for creating ASP.NET web applications. However, it has significant shortcomings that create difficulties in a school lab environment: in order to debug ASP.NET applications, the user must

Run IIS on the local workstation

Have administrator-level privileges to the local workstation

Store project files on the c: drive

In a lab environment, it is usually not desirable for users to have administrative privileges on the workstations, and it is preferable for project files to be stored on a network server, rather than a local workstation drive. Read more...

Nine Options for Managing Persistent User State in Your ASP.NET Application

ASP.NET provides many different ways to persist data between user requests. You can use the Application object, cookies, hidden fields, the Session or Cache objects, and lots of other methods. Deciding when to use each of these can sometimes be difficult. Read more...

Don't Use Select *

Something you see in a lot of database access code is a select statement that looks something like this:

SELECT * FROM TableName WHERE ...

While there's technically nothing wrong with it, using the SELECT * syntax could be stealing away precious performance from your application, and even it it's not now, it might someday soon. Read more...

Saturday, February 04, 2006

A Developer's Introduction to VoIP

Voice over Internet Protocol applications aren't just for telecommunications programmers working on phone switches. Thanks to emerging technologies and standards, enterprise programmers and commercial developers can leverage voice technologies in traditional Web, desktop and server software. Not familiar with VoIP? You're not alone. This primer will help. Read more...

Google Maps and ASP.NET - Building a custom server control

I am sure that most of you have heard about or have had a chance to use Google Maps. It's a great service and I was really impressed by the responsiveness of the application and the ease with which users could drag and zoom maps from a Web browser. It has in many ways heralded the arrival of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which I am sure will revitalize Web development in the days to come. Read more...

GnuPG Encryption for Email, XML, and Others in a VB.NET Wrapper

For email there is only one security standard that is highly used--PGP or the public domain version GnuPG. Read more...

Sending Email with AJAX

AJAX has become ubiquitous, thanks to the fact that it gives web developers the ability to create applications that make http requests without reloading the page on which the application is running. It is also extremely versatile and powerful. Read more...

Read Part 2

Read Part 3

.NET CLR stored procedures within Oracle database: Another breaking revolution

In this article, Jagadish Chaterjee shall introduce you to developing, deploying and testing a .NET based CLR stored procedure with Oracle database using Visual Studio.NET. Read more...

VB and Voice Recognition, Part 3: The Voice Controls

In the previous articles we covered a few of the basic properties and methods of the Voice recognition controls. You now are going to look at each control's properties, methods, and events. Read more...

VB and Voice Recognition, Part 2

This part covers using the Microsoft Dictation Control, and adding it to your previous project to make a full speech-to-text application. Read more...

Friday, February 03, 2006

Use Video Captures in Your .NET Applications

Today, a webcam is a common peripheral, used most often for video conferencing, that most people can easily afford. But what can you do with your webcam besides video conferencing? If you are a developer, the answer is plenty; you will be glad to know that integrating a webcam with an application is not as difficult as you might imagine. Read more...

Getting Hardware Information using Visual Basic.NET and VBScript

The following article explains how to retrieve hardware information using both Visual Basic.NET and VBScript. Read more...