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U2U Articles and Tutors

U2U trainers share their knowledge by means of articles describing in a hands-on manner various topics covering .NET related technologies, Visual Basic and COM+ technologies. Most of these articles have been presented at various seminars and events around the world.

Select a category: ------------All------------ 1. Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 and Vista 2. Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 3. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 4. Microsoft Office and SharePoint 5. Visual Studio 2005 Team System 6. BizTalk 2006 7. BizTalk 2004 8. Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 9. COM+ 10. Azure Services Platform 11. Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0

Building Data-Driven Applications using ASP.NET AJAX 4.0

Author: Jurgen Postelmans One of the most important new features in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 is the possibility to client templates. Client Templates allow the browser to bind user interface components to various types of JavaScript objects. Read the full article...

CycleTracks: Building the TechDays Keynote

Author: Peter Himschoot In this article I will discuss how the keynote demo was built. You will learn about using the new Ribbon control and XCeed DataGrid control, how to interact with Live Maps and how to display data in a rich fashion using .NET 3.5 with WPF SP1, the WPF Toolkit and the Office Ribbon control. Read the full article...    CycleTracks

Share your applications data with Live Mesh and Live Framework

Author: Peter Himschoot, Lieven Iliano, Wim Uyttersprot In today’s digital lifestyle we all have several devices connected to the internet. Live Mesh is Microsoft’s solution to synchronize files and other data between all your devices and contacts. In this article you will learn how to use the Live Framework API to store and synchronize your data with Microsoft Mesh. Read the full article...

Creating a SharePoint Web Part that hosts a Silverlight application

Author: Karine Bosch In this tutorial I’m going to explain how you can host a Silverlight 2 beta 2 application from within a SharePoint Web Part. The Web Part will pass the URL of the SharePoint site together with the name of the list for which the Silverlight application will show the data. The retrieval of the data will be done by the Silverlight application using the HttpWebRequest technique for calling the SharePoint web services. As the SharePoint web services return a chunk of XML the XML will be handled by using LINQ for XML. The data will be bound to the Silverlight controls. Read the full article...    SilverlightAdventureWorks

Writing CAML Queries to retrieve List Items

Author: Karine Bosch The Collaborative Application Markup Language (better known as CAML) is an XML-based query language that helps you querying, building and customizing Web sites based on Windows SharePoint Services. The XML elements define various aspects of a WSS site. Read the full article...

Developing a Microsoft SharePoint 2007 custom field type for Microsoft CRM Dynamics 4.0

Author: Karine Bosch Authored by Karine Bosch and Patrick Tisseghem. Unlocking business data is a hot topic these days. Many organizations have come to the conclusion that a lot of the data that is stored in line-of-business systems such as Microsoft CRM, SAP, mainframes and others, is simply not generally accessible by the information workers. In this walkthrough you will learn how you can create a SharePoint custom field type that allows users to select an existing account from the CRM database. Read the full article...    CRMAccountCustomField

Development Tools and Techniques for Working with Code in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Part 2 of 2)

Author: Patrick Tisseghem Learn the skills you need to develop for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, about the differences from traditional ASP.NET development, about the required development environment, and the steps to build a Windows SharePoint Services solution with Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This article is part 2 of 2. (26 printed pages). Article published in MSDN International, June 2007 Read the full article...

Development Tools and Techniques for Working with Code in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Part 1 of 2)

Author: Patrick Tisseghem Learn the skills you need to develop for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, about the differences from traditional ASP.NET development, about the required development environment, and the steps to build a Windows SharePoint Services solution with Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This article is part 1 of 2. (33 printed pages). Article published in MSDN International, June 2007 Read the full article...

Enterprise Library 3 (Policy Injection Application Block)

Author: Serge Luca This walkthrough gives you an idea on how to work with the Policy Injecction Application Block Read the full article...

Automatically updating Reporting Services caches: Getting best of both worlds

Author: Nico Jacobs Automatically updating Reporting Services caches: Getting best of both worlds Read the full article...

Background Processing in Windows Forms Applications (Part 2)

Author: Peter Himschoot The second of two companion articles. In Part 1 of this article we discussed how to create and execute background processes in a WinForms application with .NET 1.x. Part 2 shows improvements made in the .NET Framework 2.0 with the BackgroundWorker class. Read the full article...

Background Processing in Windows Forms Applications (Part 1)

Author: Peter Himschoot The first of two companion articles. In Part 1 of this article we discussed how to create and execute background processes in a WinForms application with .NET 1.x. Part 2 shows improvements made in the .NET Framework 2.0 with the BackgroundWorker class. Read the full article...

Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites (Part 3 of 3): Creating and Configuring WCM-Enabled Sites

Author: Patrick Tisseghem This article examines the Web content management (WCM) features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 from an administrative perspective: creating a Publishing Portal site, configuring a site for anonymous access and forms authentication, and using site variations. (9 printed pages). Article published in MSDN International, November 2006 Read the full article...

Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites (Part 2 of 3): Extending WCM

Author: Patrick Tisseghem This article explains the structure of master pages, the steps to create a custom master page, the underlying mechanisms of navigation in WCM-enabled sites, the creation of custom field controls, and how to customize the Page Editing toolbar. (19 printed pages). Article published in MSDN International, October 2006 Read the full article...

Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites (Part 1 of 3): Understanding Web Content Management and the Default Features

Author: Patrick Tisseghem This article discusses topics that you should understand before you use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to create sites that support Web content management (WCM) and gives a general overview of the various artifacts that are available in the product. (11 printed pages). Article published in MSDN International, October 2006 Read the full article...

Creating Site Definitions for Windows SharePoint Services

Author: Patrick Tisseghem Learn how to create a custom site definition for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services sites. This article provides an understanding of how Windows SharePoint Services V2 site definitions work internally and how the Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) defines the structure of lists and views. (18 printed pages). Article published in MSDN International, March 2006 Read the full article...

Automatically updating Reporting Services caches: Getting best of both worlds

Author: Nico Jacobs Reporting services allows you to create advanced reports, based on data which comes from a diversity of data sources. Reports are usually build based on data which accesses many records in the underlying database: often you visualise in the report information that spans multiple days, products, departments,… and you aggregate all the data (sum, average, minimum,…) to get an easy to interpret report. As you know, business data is more about finding the haystack than it is about finding the needle. Because we are addressing a large amount of data when building a report, it is common to use a caching technique to make sure users are served cached reports, in that way avoiding unnecessary access to the database. Read the full article...

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

Author: Nico Jacobs Read the full article...

Analysis Services 2005

Author: Nico Jacobs Read the full article...

SQL Server 2005 Service Broker

Author: Nico Jacobs SQL Server 2005 makes it easy to set up asynchronous distribute applications by integrating a queueing mechanism into the database. It combines the ideas of MSMQ with the stability, reliability and functionality of a relational database server. In this code walkthrough we investigate how to set up a simple application on this service broker. Gradualy we introduce additional aspects of the service broker, complicating the initial simple setup. Read the full article...

Amazing XAML

Author: Peter Himschoot .NET 3.0, formerly known as WinFx, uses XAML for describing and building object graphs. Windows Presentation Foundation (aka Avalon), for example, uses XAML for building the next generation user interfaces. In this article we will look at the XAML syntax (which is a lot more than simply XML) by building a maze sample, such as can be found in old-fashioned adventure games like Zork, etc... Please note that this article is not about Windows Presentation Foundation, it is all about XAML and how you can use it for your own applications. Some examples will use WPF when appropriate, but only to explain some of the concepts. Read the full article...

Using SQL Server 2005 to store and query serialized objects

Author: Nico Jacobs .NET offers the possibility to serialize and deserialize objects into a binary or XML representation. Serializing into XML is a requirement in order to create and consume webservices, binary serialization can be used for remoting. But besides moving objects between different applications, can serialization also be used to ‘materialize’ objects, and give them a persistent storage. This can be done to file, but databases offer a more robust storage (transactional consistency, backup,…). But there is more to it. Since Sql Server 2005 offers XML querying functionality (XPath as well as XQuery), this allows us to query the materialized objects, and even alter them. In this article, we demonstrate this idea by building a small application in which we store persons in a listbox. We then store the state of our listbox items (including the Person objects) serialized as XML in the SQL Server 2005 database, and deserialize this. Since we can store multiple serialized listboxes, we extend our load method so that we can query our database. In our case, we allow the user to enter the name of a person, and when we then click load, the first materialized listbox in which a person with this name occurs is loaded. Read the full article...

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

Author: Nico Jacobs Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services Read the full article...

A Gentle Introduction to Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 Correlation

Author: Peter Himschoot Imagine it is your birthday and you send an invitation letter to a friend. You kindly ask him to respond to your letter so you know if he will be there. When you receive this letter you know it came from your friend and you can start planning the party. Now imagine you getting married and instead of one friend you invite everyone you know plus everyone from your future spouse’s family and friends. When you receive hundreds of letters you will have to match up these responses to the letters you sent. This is known as correlation. Read the full article...

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services smaakt naar meer

Author: Nico Jacobs Microsoft vaart al enige tijd onder de vlag ‘innovatie door integratie’. De nieuwste editie van hun ETL-tool (Extract, Transform, Load) bewijst dit nog eens door de naam Integration Services te dragen. In dit artikel nemen we deze opvolger van SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) onder de loupe. Read the full article...

ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts - Walkthrough

Author: Peter Himschoot At TechEd 2005 in Amsterdam, Peter Himschoot (U2U trainer and MSDN Regional Director) gave a session together with Andres Sanabria (who is a program manager on Microsoft's .Net Framework team) on building ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts. This walkthrough explains the demo Peter gave during his session. It is not meant as a full description of everything available for web parts, but it will give you a nice overview. After going through this, you should understand how you can work with web parts, and how you can build custom web parts. Read the full article...    Start

Enterprise Source Control with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Author: Peter Himschoot This article focuses on source configuration management (SCM) features of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), and shows what features are important for developers in day to day development. Some features are compared to Visual Source Safe and included is a hands-on lab. Read the full article...

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services: van gegevens- naar informatiebeheer

Author: Nico Jacobs Databases zijn een vast onderdeel in zowat elk IT-project. Naar mate de hoeveelheid opgeslagen data toeneemt, worden taken als rapportage en analyse alsmaar belangrijker. Vandaar dat Microsoft in de nieuwe versie van Microsoft SQL Server ook veel aandacht heeft besteed aan de OLAP-component Analysis Services. In dit artikel beschrijven de auteurs de belangrijkste kenmerken van Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, met de nadruk op de nieuwe aspecten. Read the full article...

Building Web Parts the Smart Way

Author: Jan Tielens This article describes another approach to building SharePoint web parts. The approach consists of making use of ASP.NET user controls to make up the body of the SharePoint web part. The technique leads to a dramatic increase in the productivity of anybody creating web parts. The article ‘Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services - Part II : Web Parts and User Controls’ published here on the Belux MSDN site last year describes the basic steps. The idea of using ASP.NET user controls in web part development received a lot of adoption in the SharePoint community and has evolved in a generic framework called the SmartPart. In this article we will highlight what the SmartPart is and how to use it when involved in SharePoint web part development. Read the full article...

Solving Concurrent Updates With the AutoResolver

Author: Peter Himschoot When you update data in a database with ADO.NET you might run into the problem that some other user has updated the data you want to update too. In this case the DataAdapter will throw the DbConcurrencyException. In this article we will discuss the various ways in which we can solve this problem with concurrent updates. Read the full article...    DataTier

Consuming Web Services in SQL Server 2005

Author: Nico Jacobs Sql Server 2005 offers the functionality of writing functions, stored procedures, aggregates, triggers and types in .NET. In this way, we can ‘wrap’ .NET functionality in a database function, procedure or type. In an earlier article, we demonstrated this principle by wrapping regular expression functionality in a CLR function. In this article, we illustrate the same principle, but this time by consuming a web service. Read the full article...

From Client-Server to Web-Service based applications with Microsoft.NET

Author: Wim Uyttersprot This article shows how the .NET framework, including the ADO.NET and the XML.NET Framework, enables us to switch from the client-server programming paradigm to the web service-based paradigm, all of this being achieved by means of the new Microsoft Visual Studio.NET development environment. Read the full article...

Programming with delegates and events in .NET - Part 1: Introducting Delegates

Author: Wim Uyttersprot Delegates are introduced in .NET as key entities that are not only used in event handling, but also in asynchronous programming and multithreading. Therefore, it is important to study the delegate syntax and grammar independently from the event handling mechanism. Read the full article...

Programming with delegates and events in .NET - Part 2: Defining your own Delegate class

Author: Wim Uyttersprot Delegates are introduced in .NET as key entities that are not only used in event handling, but also in asynchronous programming and multithreading. Therefore, it is important to study the delegate syntax and grammar independently from the event handling mechanism. Read the full article...

Programming with delegates and events in .NET - Part 3: Delegates Example: The Programmable Robot

Author: Wim Uyttersprot In this code walktrough you will study the delegate mechanism: you will learn how to define your own delegate type and use it in the example to program a robot. Read the full article...

Programming with delegates and events in .NET - Part 4: Introducing Events

Author: Wim Uyttersprot Learn how the event mechanism is implemented in .NET by means of delegates. Read the full article...

Programming with delegates and events in .NET - Part 5: .NET Events Example: The Programmable Robot (2)

Author: Wim Uyttersprot In this chapter, we will extend our Programmable Robot example so that the robot will raise events while stepping; the Stepping event before each step, the Stepped event after each step. Furthermore, we will define event handlers in the control center and bind those to the robot events. Read the full article...

ASP.NET hands-on Tutor

Author: Gert Servranckx Microsoft and U2U created a one-day training on Microsoft's web development platform and an hands-on experience that is not an high-level marketing fluff! This hands-on workshop delivers the technical knowledge you need to start developing secure, next generation web applications with ASP.NET and Visual Studio .NET. Read the full article...    U2U - ASP.NET hands-on tutor

Developing embedded applications with het .NET Compact Framework 1.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2003

Author: Wim Uyttersprot For the development of embedded applications targeting Pocket PC or Windows CE devices, we can use the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 1.0. This framework is a subset of the standard .NET Framework and is integrated in the new Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. Developers do not depend anymore on the Embedded Visual C++ tools when programming standard embedded business applications. The programming languages C# and VB.NET are making the .NET Compact Framework highly accessible. Read the full article...

Visual Studio 2005 Walkthrough: ASP.NET 2.0 Web Services and ADO.NET 2.0

Author: Wim Uyttersprot In this walkthrough you will how to create an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Services that returns and updates an ADO.NET 2.0 DataSet. The dataset is consumed in Windows Form and bound to a DataGridView instance, using the new asynchronous patterns of .NET 2.0. The dataset is serialized in XML. Using a XSD schema, a typed dataset is created. Read the full article...

Generics in .NET 2.0: How to write generalized but still strongly typed code.

Author: Wim Uyttersprot The idea behind .NET Generics is to code with parameterized types instead of with concrete types. This article shows how to use generic types in order to create constructed types. Read the full article...

Regular Expressions in SQL Server 2005

Author: Nico Jacobs SQL Server 2005 offers the possibility to write functions, stored procedures, aggregate functions, triggers and user defined types in a .NET language such as Visual Basic .NET or C#. One of the great advantages of this functionality, is that we can ‘pull’ functionality that is available in the .NET class libraries into the database. In this article, we illustrate this idea by ‘pulling’ the .NET support for regular expressions into SQL Server 2005. Read the full article...

How to Customize Your Search Using SharePoint Portal Server 2003

Author: Patrick Tisseghem Explore three ways to incorporate Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server Search (service) into custom Web pages, SharePoint Web Parts, Microsoft Windows applications, and other smart-client front-end applications such as those in the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions. Article published in MSDN International, October 2004 Read the full article...

Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - Part 2: NET Integration and the SqlServer Data Provider

Author: Jurgen Postelmans Learn how you can access database objects from within stored procedures or functions using managed code and the SqlServer Data Provider in SQL Server 2005. Read the full article...

Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - Part 1: .NET Integration

Author: Jurgen Postelmans This article will give you an overview how you can write stored procedures, triggers and user-defined functions in SQL Server "Yukon" using C# as a programming language. Read the full article...

Processing InfoPath Data in SharePoint Libraries

Author: Patrick Tisseghem This article provides an overview of how to process incoming InfoPath XML Data in SharePoint Libraries</strong> . In addition, it shows you how you can avoid complex XPath statements within your .NET code by generating an object model out of your InfoPath form and de-serialize the incoming XML to an object created from the root class. Read the full article...

Information Bridge Framework 1.0 in 5 steps Your first Information Bridge Framework tutor

Author: Patrick Tisseghem The objective of this tutor is to show how enterprise data can be consumed from within an Office application by means of the Information Bridge Framework technology. As example of a business case we consider an information worker using Microsoft Word 2003 and being confronted with a customer code in the Word document. By means of smart tags and web services developed according to Information Bridge guidelines, the customer code is looked up and the corresponding business data about the customer is shown in the Information Bridge Framework task pane. Read the full article...

Het Information Bridge Framework 1.0 De brug van MS Office 2003 naar Line-Of-Business (LOB) toepasssingen (Dutch)

Author: Patrick Tisseghem Traditioneel is er een diepe kloof tussen de Line-Of-Business (LOB) systemen waarin operationele gegevens worden beheerd en de desktopomgeving met Microsoft Office die gebruikt wordt door de informatiewerkers. Beide omgevingen hebben een gezamelijk doel, met name het ondersteunen van de bedrijfsprocessen, maar hun invalshoek is verschillend. Het Microsoft Information Bridge Framework (IBF) laat ons toe om beide werelden te verbinden. IBF is een nieuw framework speciaal ontwikkeld voor de informatiewerker die gebruik maakt van een of meerdere Line-Of-Business-toepassingen maar gelijktijdig met Microsoft Office 2003 wil werken. IBF is vooral inzetbaar bij organisaties waar er een nood is om informatiewerkers meer productief te maken, door bedrijfstoepassingen en -processen toegankelijk te maken vanuit Microsoft Office smart-clients. Read the full article...

Building Custom Alert Result Channels in SharePoint Portal Server 2003

Author: Patrick Tisseghem Understand how .NET developers can extend Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with custom alert result channels. Learn about offering users extra channels on which to receive alert results. This article works through the Quick Alerts alert result channel as an example. Article published in MSDN International, June 2004 Read the full article...

Building Web Parts for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies - Part 1: Basic Steps

Author: Patrick Tisseghem This article is part one of a series of articles demonstrating in a hands-on manner the different techniques of building, packaging, deploying and using Web Parts in both Windows SharePoint Services sites and SharePoint Portal pages. The focus of this first article is on the basics. You will learn how to create a Web Part in Visual Studio .NET 2003, package and deploy it, and some of the debugging techniques. The Web Part built will allow a user to enter the name of an author in a text box and access the Amazon Web Service to retrieve all the books written by this author. Read the full article...

Building Web Parts for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies - Part 2: WebParts and User Controls

Author: Patrick Tisseghem Several people mentioned the possible usage of user controls in the development process of Web Parts for SharePoint pages in the newsgroups available on the Web. This article summarizes all these ideas and describes a framework for building Web Parts making use of ASP.NET user controls. Read the full article...

Building Web Parts for Microsoft SharePoint - Part 3: Connectable Web Parts

Author: Patrick Tisseghem Part 3of the SharePoint series discusses the basic steps of creating connectable Web Parts. We are going through the basic steps of creating two Web parts that are able to interchange data with each other. Developers of Web parts can implement standard WSS interfaces (provider and/or consumer) that are recognized by the WSS Web part framework and as a result allow users of the Web parts to make a connection between the two. Read the full article...

East meets West

Author: Wim Uyttersprot This article explains how a class written in a non-Western source code script can be used in a Western script. Microsoft .NET supports the use of translating interfaces: we do not need to translate the code written in the non-Western script. What about non-Western source code in .NET? Article published in: Developer Network Journal, Issue 28, Jan / Feb 2002 Read the full article...

Met Microsoft .NET van Client/Server naar Web Service gebaseerde toepassingen

Author: Wim Uyttersprot In dit artikel tonen we hoe het .NET Framework, met daarin het ADO.NET en het XML.NET Framework, ons toelaat om over te stappen van het client-server programmatie-paradigma naar het webservice-gebaseerde paradigma. Dit alles verwezenlijken we met behulp van de nieuwe Microsoft Visual Studio.NET developer’s omgeving. Read the full article...

Introducing the Microsoft .NET Framework

Author: Wim Uyttersprot In this article you will find an overview of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Explained is also the evolution from NT with COM+ and Win32API to .NET. You will also find no-nonsense definitions for the terms: .NET assembly, the .NET application, the VS.NET solution and project. Read the full article...

.NET and COM interop, in all its simplicity

Author: Patrick Tisseghem This article accompanied the presentation Patrick Tisseghem and Jurgen Postelmans gave at the Microsoft Developer Days 2001. It explains and demonstrates in a handson manner how both the managed (that is the .NET) and the unmanaged (that is the COM) world can interoperate with each other. Read the full article...

Exception-Handling in VB.NET

Author: Wim Uyttersprot In VB.NET beschikken we over ingebouwde support voor de behandeling van exceptions. Een exception is letterlijk vertaald een uitzondering, een uitzondering op de normaal te volgen instructie-weg. Exceptions dienen behandeld te worden in een try-catch blok of een try-catch-finally blok. Daarnaast kan een exception expliciet veroorzaakt worden m.b.v. de throw-statement. Read the full article...

Exception Handling in C#

Author: Wim Uyttersprot In C#, we have a built-in support for exception handling at our disposal, which is used for exceptions to the usual instruction route. Exceptions should be handled in a try-catch block or a try-catch-finally block. Furthermore, an exception can be caused explicitly by means of the throw statement. Read the full article...

COM+ in alle eenvoud (Dutch)

Author: Wim Uyttersprot Met dit document willen we de geïnteresseerde developer laten kennismaken met de COM+ concepten en technologieën. We willen aantonen dat een developer, die beroep doet op COM+, op een zeer eenvoudige manier een geDistribueerde interNetwerk Architecture (DNA)  applicatie kan ontwikkelen. En dit via programmeertechnieken die hij of zij kent vanuit de client/server omgeving. Read the full article...

Simple COM+

Author: Wim Uyttersprot This document aims to inform the interested developer about the COM+ concepts and technologies. The tutor shows that a developer who appeals to COM+ may very easily develop a Distributed interNetwork Architecture (DNA) application  through programming techniques he or she is familiar with from the client/server environment. Read the full article...

COM+ en toute simplicité (French)

Author: Wim Uyttersprot Par la présente, nous tenons à informer le développeur intéressé des concepts et technologies COM+. Nous voulons démontrer qu'un développeur faisant appel à COM+ pourra développer d'une manière très simple une Application Distribuée Inter-réseau (DNA). Et ce en partant de techniques de programmation qu'il connaît de l'environnement client/serveur. Read the full article...