Developer Central

http://MCPmag.com/mcsdcentral/

July 10, 2002 -  Vol. 1 #10

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THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY:

- XML Web Services One Conference & Expo - Boston http://www.xmlconference.com/boston/index3.asp

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In this issue :

1) Editorial Chatter
2) Weblinks
3) Improving Software Development:   The Code Handyman
4) .NET Explorer: HTML Help 2.0
5) Briefing: Rational XDE Modeler
6) Briefing: Identify AppSight
7) Briefing: Codagen Architect
8) Briefing: Logidex
9) Review:SSW Code Auditor
10) Briefing: Precise/Indepth for SQL Server
11) Review: CodeWarrior
12) Review: C# for Developers
13) Review: Boxer
14) New and Notable
15) Book Notices
16) Reader Mail
17) Web Resources for Developers

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Editorial Chatter

Whoops! Last month's issue of DEVELOPER CENTRAL was properly labeled as

#9 at the top, but the subject line of the email claimed that it was #10. Blame it on my writing the subject line at oh-dark-thirty one morning. I really can count to ten (and I usually take the same route to getting there, too).

Later in this issue you'll see that I've divided my product coverage between "briefings" and "reviews". This is an area in which you deserve to understand how the industry works. Most writers who cover a computer beat spend an inordinate amount of time getting briefings. Usually this means that two or three people from the vendor call you on the phone to explain why their new product is the greatest thing since the invention of contour plowing. You'll hear all about their latest and greatest features and why every man, woman, child, and dog in the industry will want to buy their product. On good days, they'll actually answer questions and discuss things; on bad days, it's like having the press release read to you over the phone.

The best briefings are given by members of the development team, or by a closely-involved executive. Often there is someone from the company's PR agency on the phone as well, making sure that they express their opinion of the proper "spin" for your story. They'll do their best to make the journalist feel like they're getting inside information; briefings may come with embargo dates (before which we're asked not to print the news) or NDA information (little tidbits that they'd rather they hadn't said). As a practical matter, most writers (myself

included) respect embargoes and NDAs, because if you don't, it's tough to keep getting briefings.

Briefings may feature screenshots of the product or, increasingly, over-the-web demonstrations. But what they DON'T feature is any opportunity for the journalist to use the product on their own computer at their own pace, and off the beaten track of the carefully-scripted demo. And _that_, my friends, is the essential difference between a briefing and a review. From a briefing, all I can do is pass along what the company said along with my opinion of their ideas. In a review, I can actually use the software and report back on how well it worked for me. And you deserve to know which is which. Briefings are certainly still valuable, and I can get the news to you more quickly than I can from a review. But you should always remember that in briefings the company can generally gloss over any problems with their product, and the writer has no way of knowing this.

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether a particular piece in the computer press is based on a briefing or a review. Here's one rule of thumb: if every writer about a particular product says the same thing, then the stories were written from a press release or a briefing. An excellent example is the recent coverage of Microsoft's first hints about what's coming in Office 11. Every single story that I saw mentioned the new vertical orientation of the Outlook preview pane and the improved XML support (but wait - wasn't XML already supposed to be a "first-class file format" in Office 10?), and not much else. That means, almost certainly, that none of those writers actually got any hands-on time with the product.

And if the most significant thing to write about is the screen layout of the product, what does that say about how worthwhile this upgrade will be? But that's a topic for another column.

(And the perennial note: watch out for URLs that wrap later in this newsletter, especially ones that point to MSDN. Perhaps someone should introduce Microsoft to MakeAShorterLink.com)

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Weblinks: Fresh Developer Content on 101's websites

- Business Rules are Back: http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=6492

- Generation Gap: MS Exam 70-306, Visual Studio.NET: http://www.certcities.com/editorial/exams/story.asp?EditorialsID=59

- Office Web Components Under Security Investigation: http://www.entmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=5421

- Balancing Act: Component Load Balancing: http://www.mcpmag.com/Features/article.asp?EditorialsID=288

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Improving Software Development

The Code Handyman

 As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it  wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had  to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized  that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in  finding mistakes in my own programs.

 - Maurice Wilkes, developer of EDSAC, 1949

One of the great joys of software development is that you get to build things out of thin air and imagination (with a little help from a compiler). You start with a white board, design some elaborate data structures, and then code away, watching your masterwork form.

But much as we'd all like to spend our days writing exciting new code, the reality is a bit different. Most coding is maintenance programming. One brilliant programmer puts together the core of the system, and then 500 of us spend the rest of our careers maintaining it. But don't worry, there's still room for a lot of craft in the maintenance programming world. One interesting development in recent years is the rise of refactoring as an accepted part of that craft.

It Doesn't Rust, But

Joel Spolsky (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/) has pointed out the general insanity involved in throwing away working code and starting from scratch when you need to change something. He argues that this is the main reason why Microsoft managed to eat Netscape's lunch in the browser wars -- that Netscape wasted years on replacing their Navigator code with a whole new version. Yeah, Mozilla is shaping up to be a nice product in some ways. But there aren't a whole lot of people left who care any more. Joel points out that source code doesn't rust.

But although source code doesn't rust (in the sense that code which works today is still going to work tomorrow), requirements do. We could debate for a while whether most requirement changes are the result of business changes or just the equivalent of bigger tail fins on this year's cars (is the Windows XP look & feel technology or marketing?), but the fact is that developers are constantly called upon to fix, tweak, and otherwise change working code.

It's precisely because code doesn't rust that these changes take up so much of our development energies. Having paid us tons of money to develop software in the first place, the people who own it understandably would like to maximize their investments. So they ask, not for a rewrite, but for more characters in the country name field (who knew they were going to start doing business in Bashkortostan?) or a different color on the web page (because the new CEO doesn't like pastels).

Surely there must be a way to respond to these demands and still keep from going mad with boredom.

Enter Refactoring

That's where refactoring comes in. Martin Fowler, who wrote the standard reference on the subject (titled simply Refactoring) defines the term this

way:

    Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a

      way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet

      improves its internal structure. It is a disciplined way to clean

      up code that minimizes the changes of introducing bugs. In essence

      when you refactor you are improving the design of the code after it

      has been written.

If that sounds intriguing, you really ought to read Fowler's book (or check out his web site http://www.refactoring.com for an introduction and some links). The book explains and justifies refactoring in some depth, and then presents a catalog of refactorings. Historically, refactoring originated with Smalltalk. These days the concepts are most advanced in Java, and Fowler uses Java for his examples. That can make the book a bit hard-going in spots if you don't know the language, but the principles apply to any object-oriented language.

To give you some flavor for the book, here's one of the simplest of

refactorings: if you find a public field, make it private and provide accessors. In Java, that's a change from

    public String _name

to

private String _name;

public String getName() {return _name;}

public void setName(String arg) {_name = arg;}

The real benefit to the catalog of refactorings is not in identifying them but in recording knowledge about them. Fowler justifies each one as it's introduced (in this case, discussing the benefits of private data to

modularity) and then provides a "mechanics" section that discusses how to safely make the change. In the case of taking a field private, this includes finding and replacing all uses of the public field, then making the field private -- and doing a full compile-and-test cycle after each change (which points out, by the way, one of the ways in which refactoring fits naturally into an Extreme Programming environment). For all but the simplest refactorings he also provides fully-worked examples.

Explorers Need Not Apply

One of the key points to refactoring is that the changes you make when refactoring should be provably correct. That's where the part about not changing the external behavior of the code comes in. Remember, you're starting with code that works. You want to end up with code that works, regardless of the changes that you're making. This means that it's OK to make very structured changes, one at a time. Things like extracting a superclass from the common features of two similar classes don't change the interface of the existing classes at all. They just rearrange the internal implementation.

Refactoring isn't exploration. Though there is a place in software development for experiments along the lines of "what would happen if we ripped out this section here and replaced it with new objects written in C#, and then changed the interfaces to match," that place is not in the refactoring process. (In fact, the place for such radical changes is in a new branch of our source code control system, one that you can throw away if you realize that you've reached the point where the map says Here There By

Tygers.) Refactoring is more like maintaining a

garden: you take what's already there and make it neater, while still preserving the original design.

Key to this process is testing. You absolutely need a good set of unit tests that exercises any code that you intend to refactor. Even if you can prove to your own satisfaction that the refactoring changes don't change the behavior of the code, run the tests! Otherwise, the time will come when you're woken up at three in the morning because you neglected to think about some special case or other that you refactored out of existence.

Bait and Switch?

But wait a minute! I started out by talking about maintenance programming in response to changing requirements, and now I'm talking about refactoring that doesn't change anything. Why do all this work if it's not going to change anything? The answer is that refactoring doesn't change anything externally, but it certainly changes things internally. Take the example of deriving a superclass from two existing classes. Perhaps you have Customers and Suppliers who share many pieces of information, such as address, phone number, and fax number. So in refactoring you might create an Entity class containing the common fields, and derive the two existing classes from Entity. That's an internal change that makes the code significantly cleaner.

Of course, clean code doesn't excite the business folks the way it does the development folks. But think about the effect of this refactoring on future requirements changes: the next time the business folks come to you with a new piece of common information ("oh, can we add a web site address to Customers? And to Suppliers, while we're at it?"), your job is much easier as a result of the refactoring. Now what looks like two changes to your customers is one to your code, thanks to the clever refactoring.

And that's where the benefits of this approach to come in. If you're maintaining code, think about refactoring it at the same time. As you find ways to improve the internal structure so that it's more maintainable, take the time to make the improvements. If the code is in bad shape (perhaps your predecessor was not as brilliant as you are), you might need to keep a list of refactorings that you'd like to make. Then you can pull things off the list as you find time to work on them. Each refactoring is a tiny investment in future maintainability for your code. And, just like making tiny investments in a money market fund, these can really add up over time.

State of the Art

You might have already made this leap, but just in case: refactoring is an obvious candidate for tool support. After all, if there's a provably-correct transformation (like turning public fields into private ones with accessors) and a recipe for executing the transformation, why can't the whole process be automated? The answer is that it can, and that there are many tools (almost all in the Java or Smalltalk arena) that can perform specified refactorings on your code.

But why should the Java developers have all the fun? Visual Studio .NET has all of the elements that it could possibly need to support a good refactoring tool: complete code introspection and creation via System.Reflection, an add-in model that lets third parties integrate their work, and object-oriented languages to edit. So where are the NET refactoring tools? Are you going to write the first one? If so, write and tell me about it!

Comments may be used in a future issue of Developer Central, unless you ask me to keep them confidential.

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NET Explorer: HTML Help 2.0

I recently took the time to play with HTML Help 2.0 in the .NET Framework. Actually, I had to take the time - I was working on a book chapter about user assistance in .NET, and my technical editor convinced me that I should include the new version, even if it's still in beta. But if you're writing Windows applications with help files, this stuff is in your future, beta or not - so here are a few notes.

If you've worked with Visual Studio .NET at all you've already got an idea of what HTML Help 2.0 features; the help for .NET itself is all HTML Help 2.0. This doesn't mean you'll see the exact same eye candy when you ship a 2.0 file with your applications, as Microsoft apparently hasn't decided yet whether to ship the viewer you see in VS .NET or another program for displaying help. But help itself supports such things as flexible filters, links to Internet sites, embedded code samples, and merging multiple help files in a single viewer. So whatever the shell looks like, the functionality will be there.

The development environment for Help 2.0 is light-years ahead of the HTML Help Workshop that ships with the Help 1.3 SDK. That's because you now conduct the entire design and build process directly within Visual Studio .NET, with all the benefits you'd expect from an integrated tool. That's a big win. Of course, you can still compose your individual HTML topic files in any HTML tool you like.

For this release, Microsoft has documented how you can integrate your own help files directly with Visual Studio .NET as well. You can merge your own help files with the main .NET help files, or add to the help shown in the Dynamic Help pane inside of the VS .NET shell.

So what's the downside? Two things. First, the help for help itself is not all that comprehensible yet. If you're trying to work with this stuff, you should immediately bookmark the Helpware web site page at http://www.helpware.net/mshelp2/h20.htm , where there are a whole raft of useful tools and write-ups.

Second, you can't yet use HTML Help 2.0 from your own VB .NET or C# applications! The plumbing just isn't there. Presumably Microsoft will release a new version of the HelpProvider control, or some alternative means of calling Help 2.0, when the thing officially ships some time in 2003. But until then, there isn't any documented way to get F1 help in this format. So for most developers, this is a technology to keep an eye on, but not one to leap into yet.

If you do want to get some sandbox time with HTML Help 2.0, you can download everything you need from the Visual Studio Help Integration Kit web site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?

url=/library/en-us/htmlhelp/html/hwmscExtendingNETHelp.asp .

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Briefing: Rational XDE Modeler

Rational is out with a new member of their XDE (Extended Development

Experience) family of products, Rational XDE Modeler. Like XDE Professional, which I discussed a few issues back, Modeler runs inside the Visual Studio .NET or IBM WebSphere IDEs. The new product is directed specifically at architects and designers: people who need to lay out the shape of a solution without actually writing the code to implement it.

As you can guess from the name, the point of Modeler is modeling. This includes everything from completely free-form diagrams to a complete set of UML diagrams. Of course the diagrams can then be seamlessly shared with XDE Pro users who do the actual implementation. Modeler can also publish its diagrams and reports in HTML, so you can communicate with other project participants (like your manager) who don't have a full-blown development environment installed.

Modeler includes a lot of features designed to make architects more productive; it's not just a simple drawing program. For example, there is explicit support for patterns, both industry-standard and harvested from your own previous work. This means you can get started on new projects quickly by using a pattern-driven approach. It also includes UML compliance tools to keep you from straying too far from the accepted way of representing things (unless, of course, you want to - remember, there's that whole free-form diagramming layer as well). Models can also be put under source code control for easier tracking of changes and to allow multiple designers to work on the same project.

Rational XDE Modeler lists for $2314 (quantity 1, direct from Rational). More information at http://www.rational.com/Products/xde/modeler/index.jsp .

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Briefing: Identify AppSight

I had a chance to chat with some of the folks from Identify (formerly

Mutek) about their new AppSight 4.0 product. AppSight is the home of their "Black Box Flight Recorder" technology. The basic idea is that you can deploy Black Boxes to all the machines running components of a distributed application, and they will keep an eye on the running application. When a bug crops up, they provide a tremendous amount of information about just what was happening, correlated across all tiers of the application. A centralized management console lets you deploy Black Boxes and see the data that they collect.

And it's a tremendous amount of information: web sessions and users, DLL loads, database transactions, COM object creation, registry operations, and right down into running code. Identify claims all this happens with minimal performance impact on applications. Everything is logged and can be played back later, so developers can see precisely what was going on when an application failed. Identify has some pretty impressive customer success stories of elusive bugs being captured on production systems that couldn't be recreated in a lab setting.

You'll find more information about AppSight at http://www.identify.com/Products/appsightsuite.html, where there are also links to download more information or a demo version. If you're chasing bugs on distributed applications on Windows systems, and have a serious budget (pricing starts at $10,000), then this looks like a premiere tool to have.

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Briefing: Codagen Architect

Codagen Architect is another tool for the serious application architect that's recently been ported to the .NET environment. Codagen itself is not a modeling tool; it starts with a UML diagram from a tool such as Rational Rose or Visio Enterprise Architect (the latter, of course, ships with the high-end Visual Studio .NET package). Codagen then lets you define code templates that tell it how to translate the UML into actual code. Unlike other code-generation techniques, which give you classes and methods with a bunch of "fill in here" placeholders, Codagen can get you all or most of the final code directly from the UML.

Codagen is extremely flexible. You define templates through the Codagen UI (which stores everything in XML) and define a sequence for them to be applied. You also define the mapping between templates and architecture. Want to have a persistence layer that takes every property and stores it in a database via ADO.NET? No problem. Want to apply certain code only to classes that derive from a certain superclass? Easy. Want to derive HTML documentation along with the actual classes? You can do that too.

I got to see an online demo of Codagen, and it lived up to its billing as a very flexible system. Tweaking things based on my suggestions was simple, and the template approach lets you easily enforce your own coding style. Aimed at medium to large organizations, pricing starts at $80,000 per year on an annual basis for 11 seats, or $220,000 for a perpetual license for the same number. With developers still making reasonable salaries, the ROI on this should be pretty good for any application large enough to actually need a complex UML model. http://www.codagen.com/Products/architect/index_e.shtml

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Briefing: Logidex

I had a chance to talk to the folks from LogicLibrary about the latest changes in the Logidex software asset management product, which now integrates with Visual Studio .NET. The idea behind Logidex is that those responsible for defining the overall architecture of your enterprise's applications can configure a library of assets for developers (everything from WSDL definitions to actual classes to help files to standards

specifications) which everyone can then use. There's a modeling capability built right into Logidex that gives you a graphical view of how things fit together, as well as searching via query and ad-hoc searching by drilling into models. The tools that Logidex delivers for finding useful content are quite flexible; if you need a component that implements a set of interfaces, for example, you can assign weights to the various interfaces and get a list of matches ranked by how well they fit your needs. The goal, of course, is to encourage re-use across the enterprise by making it easier to find useful components.

One very interesting model they have is a view of the .NET Framework base class library that makes it easier to find the classes you need by drilling into ever more specific groups of code. They're working to ship additional content, including working with Microsoft to identify useful content for .NET developers.

The integration of the new version with Visual Studio is so far pretty

loose: their add-in lets you launch the existing browser-based client in a separate window when you need a new aset for your project. But they have plans for much tighter integration and rehosting into the VS NET shell in the future. Pricing for this enterprise-ready tool starts around $200 per user. http://www.logiclibrary.com/

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Briefing: Precise/Indepth for SQL Server

Precise Software solutions have announced the availability of Precise/Indept for SQL Server, a new performance monitoring and optimization solution. I chatted with them before the launch, and it sounds like a very useful product indeed for DBAs running complex and heavily-loaded servers.

Precise worked with Microsoft to hook up a new high-speed, low-impact sampling technology to the SQL Server engine. This allows the new product to collect and analyze very detailed performance information in the short term and over time, to identify both immediate problems and long-term issues. The Precise screen can show you which statements are being executed, which ones take the longest to execute, and how tables and other objects are bring used. You can summarize resource fonsumption by program, user, or type of application for a business-centric rollup view.

Precise is also developing plug-ins that go one step past the database into actualy business applications. For example, if you're using SQL Server as a backend to SAP, you can see views based on SAP's activities rather than the raw SQL Server data. Other planned plug-ins will address areas such as J2EE, .NET, and other major business applications.

With an entry level around $3000, the target for this product is the Fortune 2000. The ability to track a baseline performance over time looks very strong, along with the business-centric reporting. I expect to be able to bring you a review based on an actual test-drive of the product in a future issue of Developer Central. Meanwhile, you can get some details at http://www.precise.com/Products/indepthSQL.asp.

SSW Code Auditor 1.22, $199
SSW
Sydney, Australia
+ 61 2 9953 3000
http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/Default.aspx

We all like to write perfect code. But being overworked developers, we don't always manage to do so. That's where SSW Code Auditor comes in. Designed to inspect web sites, it can review ASP, ASPX, and HTML pages for consistency with standards. Whose standards? Well, SSW includes a few suggested rules (<TITLE> tags required, <FONT> tags disallowed, and so on), but it's up to you to define what your own standards for web pages are. This is done through specifying regular expressions that are either required or forbidden on the pages in your site. SSW Code Auditor makes this much easier for novices by including a wizard to build and test regular expressions for you

-- that alone is worth the price of the tool if you're struggling with regex's.

You can also define exceptions to the rules (pages that you know should be

ignored) and even (be careful!) replacement expressions, making this a fix-up tool as well as an auditing one. It'll also run HTML Tidy on your pages, turning up even more nitpicky errors, if you want.

I gave the tool a spin on a couple of web sites, including one with nearly 10,000 files. The latter took it a few minutes, but it didn't choke, and at the end I had more errors on my pages than I could shake a stick at (I'm a pretty sloppy web coder).

SSW Code Auditor stores jobs in a database, so you can re-run them at any time; that's useful for a web site under development. Reports are HTML. You can get more information and a trial version at http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/CodeAuditor/ , or purchase the full version for $199.

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Review:  CodeWarrior

CodeWarrior Development Tools for Windows Version 8, $599 Metrowerks Austin, Texas 512-873-4700 http://www.metrowerks.com

Sometimes Microsoft-centric developers think the world ends at Visual Studio, but that's still not quite true. Metrowerks has been shipping development tools for years, and CodeWarrior is a full-featured IDE, compiler, linker, and debugger for C, C++, or Java code. The company also has versions for other platforms ranging from Mac to Linux to Solaris to Palm (among others), making this an interesting tool for people doing cross-platform development.

What you'll find in the CodeWarrior box is a couple of CDs: one includes the development environment and tools, the other is packed with documentation. Indeed, the documentation can be overwhelming; you get a pile of stuff about how the IDE works, and then tons of platform-specific information and tutorials. It's all in there somewhere, but I found myself missing some of the advanced features of the more recent Visual Studio help.

There wasn't anything missing in the development environment, though. It manages projects consisting of multiple files well, and jumps back and forth between files, headers, and symbols easily. There's supportr for MFC 6 and ATL 3.0 on the C++ side, and JDK 1.3 and 1.4 on the Java side. The graphical diff and merge tool is fast and well-designed. You get Metrowerk's own thread-safe standard libraries, an open API for tool integration, and of course CVS/VSS support.

I don't push the C++ envelope myself; everything I tried to do with CodeWarrior worked fine. Metrowerks claims a "best in class" optimizing ANSI/ISO compiler; I can't evaluate that, but I can say that everything worked. It seems to me that if you're planning a project that needs strong cross-platform support with a consistent IDE, this would be a great way to write it.

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Review: C# for Developers

C# For Developers, $725

LearnKey, Inc.

St. George, Utah

(800) 865-0165

http://www.learnkey.com

Jesse Liberty knows his stuff when it comes to C#. He's the author of O'Reilly's PROGRAMMING C#, which is consistently the first C# book I grab off the shelf (and it's a pretty extensive shelf these days) when I have a C# programming question. This 24-hour CD-ROM lecture set lets him share that knowledge with you.

The course starts out with an introduction to the .NET platfor, but then quickly gets into C# language issues. As befits a strong object-oriented language, there's a lot of material here about building classes in C#, and Liberty gets into all of the fine details. He also covers a lot of the important interfaces that help your classes work better with the rest of the .NET Framework.

You'll also learn the basics of ADO.NET and ASP.NET programming, XML and other I/O methods, event-driven programming, and other core C# skill. 24 hours isn't enough to make anyone an expert in C#, but at the end of this course you should be prepared to write useful programs in the language and be ready to do your own digging into more expert material.

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Review: Boxer

Boxer 9.0, $59

Boxer Software

Scottsdale, Arizona

(602) 485-1635

http://www.boxersoftware.com/

This text editor has been around for quite a long time - I can remember using it way back in its DOS incarnation (and they even had -- and still have! -- an extended DOS version). Now it's a Windows text editor and a darned good one.

I am especially taken with Boxer's nice little touches when it comes to HTML editing. For example, you can open a file from an FTP site and then forget about the FTP part; saves just do the right thing. The spell-checker can ignore HTML tags, but the parser color-codes them nicely. If you hover your mouse over a color hex value, you'll get a tiny popup hint window showing the specified color. There's a template set (a set of canned text strings) just for inserting HTML tags.

Boxer also excels at basic text editing operations. Nice functions include columnar support, swapping lines, case manipulation, swapping words, duplicate line, and multiple clipboard support. And that's just a random selection. Also notable is the configurability; there are many options you can tweak to make Boxer work the way you want (although the out of the box defaults are pretty good themselves).

If you're looking for something midway between a freeware editor with few functions and a full-blown IDE, Boxer might be just the tool you were after.

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New and Notable

Plenty of new software gets released every month, some to great fanfare (can you say "Windows XP"?) and some that only gets noticed by adoring fans. You don't need me to tell you about the big PR-fests, but here are a few of the other interesting new (or updated) products I've run across in the past

month:

- Curl is shipping their Surge runtime environment and IDE, which they tout as the first "client/web" programming environment, enabling fat clients with web connectivity. Though they make much noise about being revolutionary, using XML over HTTP to pass messages from a server to a fat client sounds a lot like Web services to me. Anyhow, you can read more on their site, or download their IDE and runtime (free for non-commercial use). Start at http://www.curl.com/html/index.jsp .

- dbPal is a multifaceted database administration and development tool. It features schema change and version management, the ability to move schemas and data between multiple database types, DDL script generation, data synchronization, integrated data modeling and reporting tools -- among other things. I'll be bringing you a review in a future issue of Developer Central, but you can check it out (including 15-day free trial downloads) at http://www.it-map.com/Pages_Products/1_dbPAL/P1_database_tools.htm .

- eDatCat has released version 3.0 of their Shopping Cart System for web sites. It includes a batch of features, a new administrative interface, and integration with DreamWeaver. 10-day trial download, $449 to purchase. http://www.edatcat.com/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/edatcat/EDCstore.pl

- Active+ Software has upgraded their eMill mailing list management application to verion 2.0.11. New features include import from Outlook contacts and ACT! 2000 lists, blacklist addresses to prevent unwanted mailings, XML interoperability, and performance improvements. http://www.emill.net/

- Microsoft has released version 1.1 of Producer, their free add-on for creating rich-media presentations with PowerPoint. Producer synchronizes audio, video, slides, and images for turnkey presentations. 1.1 appears to be mainly a bug-fix release with improved support for complex PowerPoint slides. http://www.microsoft.com/office/powerpoint/producer/

- Austin Sierra Technologies is the home of Query Studio, an alternative set of data access components for Visual Studio .NET. They're designed to let you access data just by dragging things and setting properties, even if you don't know SQL. A desktop edition runs as a standalone data retrieval tool. More info and trial download at http://www.querystudio.com/austinsierratechnologies/ .

- SQL Scribe 2.1 is a documentation utility for SQL Server. Point it at a database and it goes through the schema and documents everything, storing the results in an Access database. The results can be viewed as an IIS web or as an HTML Help file. It's all nicely formatted and cross-referenced, including properties and build scripts. Because it also includes custom properties you can add your own notes to objects as well. Pricing starts at $150. http://www.ag-software.com/ags_scribe_index.asp

- Incepto is shipping SQL-UP!, a distributed clustering layer for Microsoft SQL Server. Their software layers on top of SQL Server's transactional replication to provide clustering over LAN or WAN with full preservation of ACID properties, and a console application to manage the cluster. More information and a trial download at http://www.incepto.com/index.htm .

- AutomatedQA has released TestComplete 2.0, the successor to their AQTest 1.5 testing product. Changes include support for testing HTML pages via the DOM, Java and .NET support, a new "test suite" concept that lets you flexibly organize multiple tests, a command-line utility that can launch tests on remote computers that do not have TestComplete installed, and many scripting improvements. This remains one of the most flexible and programmable testing environments that I've had the chance to test-drive, and it will fit the testing needs of many developers. http://www.automatedqa.com/Products/tc.asp

- Web Matrix is a free IDE for ASP.NET applications from Microsoft's own ASP.NET web site. In addition to a WYSIWYG page designer, there are a bunch of other features here: hooks to MSDE and SQL Server, templates and tools for building data-bound pages, XML Web Service support, and more. There's even a whole "Community" window that can get you into the ASP.NET forums or chat to help you get answers from other community members. It even comes with its own web server, which runs on the local machine only to avoid any security issues. And it's able to handle FTP deployments easily. All in all, a nice tool for free. There are some nuisances (why oh why aren't they generating DOCTYPE tags for HTML pages? Is it so very hard to be standards compliant?), but overall it does a good job of what it tries to do, and provides an intermediate level between writing ASP.NET pages in a text editor and buying the full Visual Studio .NET application. http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/Default.aspx?tabindex=4&tabid=46

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Book Notices

Lots of software books cross my desk these days. In this section, I'm going to pick out a few to mention that look interesting. Think of these not as full reviews, but as pointers to books that you might like to investigate further, depending on your own development needs.

ASP.NET TIPS & TECHNIQUES, by Greg Buczek (Osborne, 2002): Somewhat over 300 individual ASP.NET tips. These range from very simple stuff (like how to code an HTMLButton control) to rather complex (retrieving database values or adding a function to a Web service). Not the sort of structured introduction that's good for learning ASP.NET, but handy to have around when you're in the intermediate stages and can't quite remember how to do things.

BEGINNING ASP.NET DATABASES USING VB.NET, by John Kauffman et al (Wrox,

2002): A relatively slim (450 page) introduction to the subject that does a pretty good job. It concentrates on the plumbing necessary to move Access or SQL Server data to web pages using the latest Microsoft bits and pieces. Starting with an introduction to data-driven web sites and an introduction to SQL, it works up to a full-featured example.

DISTRIBUTED .NET PROGRAMMING IN C#, by Tom Barnaby (Apress, 2002): Although this book concentrates on no-fat coverage of its subject, Tom Barnaby has an excellent eye for what distributed application developers need to know. So he covers everything from remoting to garbage collection to SOAP in enough detail to show where it fits in, without duplicating the documentation. This book also has the best material on using COM+ and MSMQ with .NET that I've seen anywhere. Definitely worthwhile for the enterprise .NET developer.

ESSENTIAL ADO.NET, by Bob Beauchemin (Addison-Wesley, 2002): Bob Beauchemin knows data inside and out. This gives him a unique perspective on using and optimizing ADO.NET, as well as in relating it to other data access technologies. If you want to go beyond the mechanics to understanding how to choose between alternatives (DataSet or DataReader? Relational model or XML?), this book will get you there. Bob even tackles the notion of writing your own data provider for those situations where the built-in .NET stuff doesn't quite do the job. An excellent addition to the data access literature.

FRAMEWORK PROCESS PATTERNS: LESSONS LEARNED DEVELOPING APPLICATION FRAMEWORKS, by James Carey and Brent Carlson (Addison-Wesley, 2002): There's always another level of software development to aspire to. After you've mastered object-oriented development and written a few class libraries, perhaps an application framework is the next step. This pair of seasoned developers has put together this guide to design patterns that will help you take this step, leavened with a good deal of humor and much practical experience. If you're about to embark on a framework and not sure what you're getting into, this is one to check out soon.

A PROGRAMMER'S GUIDE TO ADO.NET IN C#, by Mahesh Chand (Apress, 2002): An intermediate-level all-in-on ADO.NET book. It's got a couple of introductory chapters on C# applications and then walks through the ADO.NET objects and their uses. There's a good section on XML and a nice variety of examples using different database types.

PROGRAMMING MICROSOFT SQL SERVER WITH MICROSOFT VISUAL BASIC .NET, by Rick Dobson (Microsoft Press, 2002): The title of this one is a bit misleading. While there are core chapters that directly address using SQL Server and VB.NET together, well over half of the book is introductory material on ASP.NET, T-SQL, SQL Server XML, SQL Server Security, and so on. A developer in this area does need all these topics, so this can serve as a reasonable all-in-one reference, but the end result is a book that lacks focus.

REQUIREMENTS BY COLLABORATION, by Ellen Gottesdiener (Addison-Wesley,

2002): This one may strike many developers as too soft a subject to bother with. That would be a mistake, because without good requirements a project is just a morass. Written by an experienced facilitator, this book digs into a methodology for holding "requirements workshops" to help groups quickly come to agreement on what a project is meant to accomplish. Next time you're ready to wrestle with the opening stages of a new project, check this one out, especially if you're working in the business software arena.

UNDERSTANDING WEB SERVICES: XML, WSDL, SOAP, AND UDDI, by Eric Newcomer (Addison-Wesley, 2002): Unlike most of the other Web services books I've looked at, this one is largely vendor-independent. Newcomer does bring in products from his employer, Iona, where they're pertinent, but much of this book is focused on investigating a whole batch of standards and how they fit together, from the perspective of someone active in the standardization process. As such, it's an excellent roadmap to where the potholes are as well as the success stories that vendors prefer to emphasize. Closes with a survey of who's shipping software in the field; there's a lot more out there than .NET and SunONE.

VB.NET LANGUAGE IN A NUTSHELL, by Steve Roman, Ron Petrusha & Paul Lomax (O'Reilly, 2002): As I've commented before, O'Reilly is cracking some mighty large nuts these days. This one weighs in at 662 pages, and covers just the VB.NET language itself (well, with a few of the most pertinent framework classes thrown in). The authors do a good job of explaining the syntax and semantics of all the VB.NET language constructs, but the real gem here is the included CD-ROM. The setup program on the CD integrates the book's contents directly with the Visual Studio .NET Help, including the dynamic help and the main documentation. This instantly gives you access to all the authors' hard work while writing VB.NET code, and nicely supplements Microsoft's own help files. It would be nice to see this trend continue.

VISUAL BASIC .NET AND SQL SERVER 2000: BUILDING AN EFFECTIVE DATA LAYER, by Tony Bain, Denise Gosnell, and Janathon A. Walsh (Wrox,

2002): SQL Server and VB-centric introduction to using ADO.NET. The focus helps this book out a good deal, because the authors can focus on one namspace and its use. Includes good sections on SQL Server XML and SQL Server administration for developers. Another nice touch is the concluding case study that fleshes out a lot of the book's concepts.

VISUAL BASIC .NET XML WEB SERVICES DEVELOPER'S GUIDE, by Roger Jennings (Osborne, 2002): I don't know how the heck Roger Jennings does it. While the rest of us are writing tiny "Hello Web Services" examples, he's delivering production-quality code to browse the entire Code of Federal Regulations via his Web services site. There's an incredible amount of cutting-edge detail here, along with diagrams that make some of the plumbing clear, trenchant commentary on standards, and solid code for using databases with Web services. This is one of the best technical books I've read in years, and essential for anyone looking at writing Web services. Buy it.

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Reader Mail

Ranganath writes:

    "Thanks for the nice info. on MCSD.NET. I'm wondering, why there is

      no room for VC++.NET ?

    "Nobody, nowhere is mentioning abt VC++.NET, but, everywhere, the

      talk is abt C# and VB.NET. I think, it is because, both these are

      MS Products (C++ is not from Microsoft, okay.)"

Indeed, Microsoft has not yet announced its plans. The MCAD FAQ page says "Microsoft will announce the objectives of the Microsoft Visual

C++(r) .NET exams and how they fit into the MCAD for Microsoft .NET

certification later in 2002." I suspect there are (at least) two things going on here. First, the resources of the certification team are not infinite; they can only do so many exams at one time. Clearly targeting the masses of VB developers to get them to upgrade to VB .NET was one priority, and promoting the new C# language was another. Moving C++ developers forward to the new platform must not have been quite as important. Second, VB .NET and C# are first-class .NET citizens in a way that C++ is not. When you develop in the latest VB or in C#, you're automatically working within the .NET world. When you develop with the latest VC++, you're not working in .NET unless you go with the Managed Extensions. This means that the C++ exams need to cover a lot more ground than the VB .NET and C# exams, and will take correspondingly longer to develop.

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Web Resources for Developers

Finally, a few web sites that I think you might enjoy:

- ConTEXT is a nifty little programmer's editor that's freeware. I like the integrated Explorer-like browser pane, favorites, and history in the file panel. Other features you don't often find in free editors include macro recording and playback, parsing of compiler output, and the ability to hook up your own custom user commands. Comes with a batch of different language highlighting options and a way to write your own. http://fixedsys.com/context/

- Yes, Virginia, there's still a dBase, and you can find them at http://www.dbase.com/mainpage.htm these days. Apparently this is a small company that bought the rights to the name from Borland a few years back. They're promising dBase Plus this summer, with an impressive list of features; at the moment it's vaporware (they'll still be happy to take your money in advance, though).

- dbPAL looks like an interesting cross-product (Access, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and more) tool for database design and development.It offers data modeling, schema design, the ability to quickly port schemas from one database product to another, and more. http://www.it-map.com/Pages_Products/1_dbPAL/P1_database_tools.htm

- Nogoop Software is working on some tools to help you learn about new components more easily: the .NET Component Inspector and the ActiveX/COM Inspector. The idea is to give you a sort of universal debugging container that can host components and give you transparent access to their methods and properties. Trial versions available for download. http://www.nogoop.com/index.html

- SmartBoard XP is a clipboard extender that captures everything you cut or copy and stores it for future use. You can categorize things, store things across Windows sessions, edit them before pasting...the list of features is pretty extensive. Free trial version available, $22 to register. http://www.smartboardxp.com/index.htm

- The TechNet Script Center is home to several hundred WMI scripts for Win2K, WinXP, and Win .NET. Apparently this is early content for the Windows .NET Server Resource Kit, but that doesn't stop it from being useful now. All neatly categorized, these scripts can give you ideas of WMI's use or just do useful work without worrying about the internals. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?

url=/technet/scriptcenter/default.asp

- And on the "this is just silly" end of the spectrum: someone has recompiled the Apache web server to run on the version of Linux that Sony has made available for the PS2 game console. Get it at http://www.phi-web.co.uk/ps2-apache/ , if you can come up with the slightest good reason to install such a thing.

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News in this newsletter is written and compiled by Mike Gunderloy, Mike.Gunderloy@mcpmag.com. I'd love to hear from you. Or for between-issue rants and reviews, visit me at http://www.larkware.com .

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Henry Allain at mailto:hallain@101com.com.

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