Rick Strahl
Associate Publisher, CODE; Enterprise architect
Rick Strahl is the Big Kahuna and janitor at West Wind Technologies located on the beautiful island of Maui, Hawaii. Between windsurf sessions and spikey haired adventures, Rick has been a software developer for over 25 years, developing business and Web applications since the very early days of the Web when you needed a hand crank (or a pair of wire splicers) to get online. Today Rick builds client centric Web applications and services for customers with HTML5, JavaScript and mobile Web technologies, using AngularJS on the front end, and the ASP.NET stack on the back end. Rick’s company West Wind Technologies also produces a number of developer related tools including West Wind WebSurge, Web Monitor and Html Help Builder. He also maintains a host of open source libraries at http://github.com/RickStrahl and you can find Rick’s blog at weblog.west-wind.com or contact him directly at rstrahl@west-wind.com
Detailed Biography
Rick Strahl is the Big Kahuna and janitor at West Wind Technologies located on the beautiful island of Maui, Hawaii. Between windsurf sessions and spikey-haired adventures, Rick has been a software developer for over 25 years, developing business and Web applications since the very early days of the Web when you needed a hand crank or a pair of wire splicers to get online.
Today Rick builds client-centric Web applications and services for customers with HTML, JavaScript and mobile Web technologies, using Angular and VueJs on the front end, and the ASP.NET stack on the back end. He also spends his time around document solutions and technologies surrounding Markdown.
Rick’s company, West Wind Technologies, also produces several developer tools including Markdown Monster, West Wind WebSurge, Web Monitor and Html Help Builder. He also maintains a host of open source libraries at http://github.com/RickStrahl and you can find Rick’s popular Weblog at weblog.west-wind.com.
Articles Authored
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Using .NET Core Tools to Create Reusable and Shareable Tools and Apps
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2020 - November/December
Overview of .NET Core tools. Why use them? Where do you get them? Step-by-step walkthrough to build, publish and consume a .NET Core Tool package.
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.NET Core 3.0 for the Desktop
Last updated: Monday, March 29, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2019 - July/August
Rick examines what is—and isn’t—coming in .NET Core Runtime. You’ll get to put this knowledge to good use as you build a small app, too.
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Marking up the Web with ASP.NET Core and Markdown
Last updated: Friday, April 15, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - November/December
You’re probably already using Markdown for HTML text entry and formatting your README.md files. But Markdown is good for so much more—Rick shows you parsing, stable content in a website, embedding converted HTML into a Razor output, and more.
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Re-Assembling the Web with Web Assembly and Blazor
Last updated: Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - September/October
Just when JavaScript seemed aggravatingly ubiquitous, Rick bumped into Web Assembly and Blazor, and learned that there are choices when it comes to compiling code.
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Ready for Prime Time: .NET Core 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2.0 Have Arrived
Last updated: Thursday, April 29, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - March/April
Rick explores the new features in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core and shows you that the wait was worth it.
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Securing IIS Web Sites with Let’s Encrypt Certificates
Last updated: Thursday, May 6, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - January/February
If HTTPS or HTTP over TLS and registering certificates has got you down, you’ll want to read Rick’s take on this required technology. He’ll show you how to keep your website safe and introduce you to some useful new technologies.
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Building an Angular Front End for an ASP.NET Web API
Last updated: Friday, May 21, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2017 - May/June
Rick follows up on his server-side Angular back end for ASP.NET Core with this interesting look at the matching front end.
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Getting Down to Business Building an ASP.NET Core API Service
Last updated: Friday, May 28, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2017 - January/February
Building an API-based app doesn’t have to be daunting. Rick shows you how to use Angular 2.0 to build a small app that breaks out business logic, uses a repository class to consolidate data access code, and deals with complex relationships and data updates.
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Getting to the ASP.NET Core
Last updated: Wednesday, June 9, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - September/October
New releases ASP.NET Core and .NET Core have come up with some interesting high-level architecture that you’ll want to read about. You’ll definitely want to play with these tools after Rick shows you some cool new tricks.
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Flexing Your HTML Layout Muscles with Flexbox
Last updated: Thursday, June 24, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - March/April
When it comes to creating complex structured layouts in HTML, Flexbox, Rick tells us, is more capable than HTML tables were.
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Taming Mobile Apps with Cordova and Visual Studio
Last updated: Wednesday, July 28, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - March/April
Writing native mobile applications can be a pain because of all the different platforms. Rick uses two tools, Cordova and Visual Studio, to take the pain away.
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A First Look at ASP.NET vNext
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - January/February
In this article, Rick plays with the beta version of ASP.NET vNext. You’ll get to see what’s (probably) coming so you can start making plans.
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ASP.NET vNext: The Next Generation
Last updated: Thursday, July 29, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - January/February
ASP.NET has been Microsoft’s hallmark product for more than a dozen years. In vNext, it’s getting more readily adaptable to the way users—especially mobile users—interact with their data, and Rick shows us how to take advantage of these radical changes.
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Rendering ASP.NET MVC Razor Views to String
Last updated: Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2013 - November/December
The Razor View Engine (usually used in ASP.NET MVC to render HTML views) is useful beyond standard ASP.NET MVC scenarios. In this article, Rick shows how it is done and why it is useful.
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An Introduction to ASP.NET Web API
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2012 - May/June
Microsoft recently released the ASP.NET MVC 4.0 beta and along with it, the brand spanking new ASP.NET Web API. Web API is an exciting new addition to the ASP.NET stack that provides a new, well-designed HTTP framework for creating REST and AJAX APIs (API is Microsoft’s new jargon for a service, in case you’re wondering). Although Web API currently ships and installs with ASP.NET MVC 4, you can use Web API functionality in any ASP.NET project, including WebForms, WebPages and MVC or none of the above. You can also self-host Web API in your own applications.
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Using jQuery with ASP.NET Part 2: Making an AJAX Callback to ASP.NET
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2009 - May/June
This time around I’ll expand on these concepts and show you how you can use jQuery in combination with ASP.NET as an AJAX backend to retrieve data. I’ll also discuss how you can create ASP.NET controls and otherwise interact with jQuery content from ASP.NET pages in Web Forms.
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An Introduction to jQuery, Part 1
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2009 - January/February
jQuery is a small JavaScript library that makes development of HTML-based client JavaScript drastically easier. With client logic getting ever more complex and browsers still diverging in features and implementation of features, jQuery and other client libraries provide much needed normalization when working with JavaScript and the HTML DOM.
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Setting Up and Running Subversion and Tortoise SVN with Visual Studio and .NET
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2008 - July/August
It can help you manage your application more efficiently and make sure that your project is backed up and can be rolled back to any revision on the file or project level. I recently got acquainted with the open source Subversion and Tortoise SVN tools and, for the first time, feel that this is source control that I can live with comfortably. This article describes all you need to know to get started with Subversion and Tortoise SVN for Visual Studio projects.
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A Look at Windows Vista from a Developer Perspective
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick Strahl discusses Windows Vista for developers.
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A New Foundation: Taking a Look at WCF
Last updated: Thursday, February 21, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick discusses WCF
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Are You Ready for IIS 7?
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
In this article, Rick discusses the new features of IIS 7.
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ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005: You win some, you lose some
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick Strahl discusses Visual Studio 2005.
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ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 is here
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick Strahl discusses the newly released ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 (MS AJAX)
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ASP.NET Orcas: Quiet Revolution
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick Strahl discusses the new ASP.NET Orcas beta release.
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ATLAS Grows Up
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick Strahl discusses ATLAS, Microsoft's ASP.NET implementation of AJAX.
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Atlas to Carry the Web World
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick Strahl talks about the new Atlas framework for ASP.NET.
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Beyond HTML: Rich Internet Applications
Last updated: Friday, October 28, 2022
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick Strahl discusses building rich internet applications
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Get Excited About IIS 7.0
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
RIck Strahl discusses IIS 7.0
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jQuery Puts the Fun Back into Browser Scripting
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick Strahl discuss scripting with jQuery.
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The AJAX Hype - Some Things to Think About
Last updated: Thursday, February 21, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick Strahl discusses AJAX technology.
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The Client-Side JavaScript Dilemma
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick Strahl discusses considerations when writing JavaScript
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Web Application Projects Are Here
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: The Web View, VFP Conversion Papers, West Wind
Rick Strahl discusses Web Application Projects
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Web Standards: Standards or Stasis
Last updated: Friday, February 22, 2019
Published in: The Web View, West Wind
Rick Strahl discusses the current status of the Web.
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Building a PreserveProperty Control in ASP.NET 2.0
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2007 - March/April
ASP.NET provides a couple of page-level state persistence mechanisms in ViewState and the new ControlState.While both mechanisms work, they both have some limitations in that they are not deterministic for the application developer-ViewState can be turned off and can be very bulky, and ControlState can only be set from within a control implementation. In this article I’ll show another, more flexible state mechanism using a PreservePropertyControl that allows automatic persistence and restoration of field values automatically without requiring ViewState.
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A first look at SignalR
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: The Web View, Book Excerpts
SignalR is the latest in a long string of new technologies pouring out from the ASP.NET team recently, when Microsoft rolled out version 1.0 of SignalR when Visual Studio Update 2 was announced. In a nutshell, SignalR is technology for .NET that allows you to build real time, connected Web applications. Connected in the sense that you can build Web applications that can send and receive and broadcast data in real time. The canonical example of a 'connected' application is a chat application where a client can broadcast messages to all other connected clients. While that's pretty cool in and of itself, that only begins to scratch the surface of what's possible with SignalR as you can communicate in a wide variety of ways between client and server and between all clients to push data around.
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Visual FoxPro Web Services Revisited
Last updated: Wednesday, August 10, 2022
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2007 - Vol. 4 - Issue 1 - Sedna: Beyond Visual FoxPro 9, VFP Conversion Papers
Web services with Visual FoxPro (VFP) have never been easy. The most common Web service tool for FoxPro is the SOAP Toolkit, which has been discontinued and which had a host of problems when dealing with complex types passed over Web Services. In this article I’ll show how you can leverage the powerful Web service features of .NET and the new Windows Communication Foundation in your FoxPro application through COM Interop.
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.NET Standard 2.0 - Making Sense of .NET Again
Last updated: Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Published in: The Web View
In this post I look at what .NET Standard is, how it works and what some of the surrounding issues and impacts are for the .NET eco system.
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Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix
Last updated: Thursday, February 21, 2019
Published in: The Web View
Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix (http://www.asp.net/webmatrix.WebMatrix), which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers.
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Native JSON Parsing: What Does it Mean for Your AJAX Applications?
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: The Web View
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) has become the de facto data transfer standard for client-side Web applications that use JavaScript. JSON is a JavaScript-based object/value encoding format that looks very close to raw JavaScript and can be very easily parsed by JavaScript code because JavaScript can effectively evaluate a JSON string and re-materialize an object from it. Unlike XML there’s no parsing involved in the process, so it’s easy to work with and also relatively quick because the actual parsing (or rather evaluating) of a JSON string is done internally in the JavaScript engine rather than through manual code. The format and data types are also well defined so it’s easy to generate JSON strings in other languages like .NET (although parsing is a bit more complex).
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REST-Based Ajax Services with WCF in .NET 3.5
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: The Web View
Rick Strahl discusses Rest-Based Ajax Services.
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Unwrapping LINQ to SQL
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: The Web View
Rick Strahl discusses LINQ to SQL features.
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Web Code is a Solved Problem: How about Fixing Web UI Next?
Last updated: Thursday, February 21, 2019
Published in: The Web View
Originally published as a blog post - Fixing Web UI
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What’s Ailing ASP.NET Web Forms?
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: The Web View
Rick Strahl discusses ASP.NET Web Forms
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What’s New in ASP.NET 4.0, Part One: Core Engine Features
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: The Web View
Microsoft released the .NET Runtime 4.0 and with it comes a brand spanking new version of ASP.NET - version 4.0 - which provides an incremental set of improvements to an already powerful platform. .NET 4.0 is a full release of the .NET Framework, unlike version 3.5, which was merely a set of library updates on top of the .NET Framework version 2.0. Because of this full framework revision, there has been a welcome bit of consolidation of assemblies and configuration settings. The full runtime version change to 4.0 also means that you have to explicitly pick version 4.0 of the runtime when you create a new Application Pool in IIS, unlike .NET 3.5, which actually requires version 2.0 of the runtime.
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What’s New in ASP.NET 4.0, Part Two: WebForms and Visual Studio Enhancements
Last updated: Saturday, January 18, 2020
Published in: The Web View
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Compilation and Deployment in ASP.NET 2.0
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - September/October
It’s crucial to understand how your ASP.NET code compiles in order to debug your Web applications effectively. ASP.NET 2.0 has changed the way compilation and deployment works, and in this article I’ll dig in and show you how compilation works now and what has changed from ASP.NET 1.x.
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Creating a Generic Message Display Page for ASP.NET
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - March/April
Creating messages in your Web application should be quick, easy, and most importantly, consistent.They should look like they belong with the rest of the application even if an error occurs. How often have you created a new page to display simple text or a notification message to your users? Wouldn’t it be better if you could reuse an existing template and simply pass in a few parameters to tell it to render an application-specific message? In this article I will show you how to create a reusable Message Display class that reduces displaying messages generically in your application to a single line of code.
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A Low Level Look at ASP.NET Architecture
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2005 - November/December
ASP.NET is a powerful platform for building Web applications, that provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and power for building just about any kind of Web application. Most people are familiar only with the high level frameworks like WebForms and WebServices which sit at the very top level of the ASP.NET hierarchy. In this article I’ll describe the lower level aspects of ASP.NET and explain how requests move from Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime and then through the ASP.NET HTTP pipeline to process requests.ASP.NET is a powerful platform for building Web applications, that provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and power for building just about any kind of Web application. Most people are familiar only with the high level frameworks like WebForms and WebServices which sit at the very top level of the ASP.NET hierarchy. In this article I’ll describe the lower level aspects of ASP.NET and explain how requests move from Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime and then through the ASP.NET HTTP pipeline to process requests.
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Integrating PayPal into E-Commerce Applications with ASP.NET
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2005 - September/October
E-commerce applications require user-friendly mechanisms for payment.Although e-commerce sites usually use full credit card processing gateways, offering PayPal for payment provides an option for those who don't want to send credit card information across the Internet. If you run a Web shop that uses direct credit card processing and you want to integrate PayPal, you'll find that using PayPal as a processing service is not as straightforward as using a payment gateway. In this article, I'll describe how you can minimize the external PayPal interaction and work the PayPal payment into your order processing workflow to provide a seamless interface using ASP.NET and C#.
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Building a Better Configuration Settings Class
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2004 - July/August
Configuration settings make it possible for users and administrators to configure an application before it is run for the first time and while it runs..NET provides a good rudimentary mechanism for storing and retrieving configuration settings in the application's .config file with the ConfigurationSettings class, but this mechanism is missing a number of essential features. This article describes how to improve on the base functionality using a class that provides strong typing, allows for writing of keys, and provides optional encryption of keys.
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.NET Interop for Visual FoxPro Applications
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: VFP Conversion Papers
Now that .NET is here you've undoubtedly had the urge to use or at least play with the new functionality that the platform provides. Unfortunately migrating to .NET from Visual FoxPro (or most other development languages) is a big step that requires a steep learning curve. Integration between the old and the new will be crucial as a first step to provide for the ramp up time that's needed to get up to speed on the new platform as well as providing vital links between old and new applications. In this article Rick looks at the most common ways that you can use to integrate logic and data between Visual FoxPro and .NET.
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Calling VFP COM components from .Net and ASP.Net
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: VFP Conversion Papers
Now that .NET is here you've undoubtedly have the urge to use or at least play with the new functionality that the platform provides. Unfortunately migrating to .NET from Visual FoxPro (or most other development languages) is a big step that requires a steep learning curve. Integration between the old and the new will be crucial as a first step to provide for the ramp up time that's needed to get up to speed on the new platform as well as providing vital links between old and new applications. In this article, which is part of a series of .Net Interop articles, Rick looks at how to integrate Visual FoxPro COM components from .Net, specifically ASP.Net.
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Creating Multi-threaded .NET componentsfor COM Interop with Visual FoxPro
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: VFP Conversion Papers
Multithreading is a powerful feature that allows you to asynchronously execute code while continuing to work or provide a responsive user interface to your application..NET makes multithreading very easy and in this installment you’ll see how to create and execute multithreaded components and communicate with them via events.Multithreading is a powerful feature that allows you to asynchronously execute code while continuing to work or provide a responsive user interface to your application..NET makes multithreading very easy and in this installment you’ll see how to create and execute multithreaded components and communicate with them via events.
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Handling .NET Events in Visual FoxPro via COM Interop
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: VFP Conversion Papers
Last month I started a series of articles that are looking at a few advanced topics in using .NET COM Interop with Visual FoxPro. This month, I look at handling .NET events through COM Interop and briefly introduce creating and interacting with multi-threaded .NET components from your Visual FoxPro applicationsEvent Handling is an important feature both in Visual FoxPro and .NET.But both .NET COM objects and Visual FoxPro require special handling in order to deal with hooking up to COM events. In this article, Rick takes a close look at how events work in Visual FoxPro and .NET and how they can be used together across the COM Interop boundary.
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Passing objects between FoxPro and .NET COM Components
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: VFP Conversion Papers
COM Interop between Visual FoxPro and .NET seems trivial at first, but the devil is in the details.Simple COM calls using methods and properties with simple parameters are easily accomplished. However, once you start dealing with complex objects - objects with hierarchies or specific object types required by .NET as parameters or properties, you start running into problems. This article looks at some of the issues that you need to look out for when dealing with objects in applications that call .NET COM objects from Visual FoxPro.COM Interop between Visual FoxPro and .NET seems trivial at first, but the devil is in the details.Simple COM calls using methods and properties with simple parameters are easily accomplished. However, once you start dealing with complex objects - objects with hierarchies or specific object types required by .NET as parameters or properties, you start running into problems. This article looks at some of the issues that you need to look out for when dealing with objects in applications that call .NET COM objects from Visual FoxPro.
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Using Visual FoxPro to call.Net Web Services for Data Access
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: VFP Conversion Papers
Using Web Services from Visual FoxPro is not difficult, but dealing with Data or Complex objects is not quite as straightforward as it could be.In this article, I'll describe how you can work with .Net Web Services and pass complex data between VFP and .Net and handle updating scenarios for Data between the two.
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Implementing Two-Way Control Binding for Web Forms
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - November/December, VFP Conversion Papers
ASP.NET has considerably raised the bar for Web development with very rich developer functionality built into a flexible and highly extensible object model.If you have a background of hand-coding ASP or other scripting or CGI-style technology, .NET's redundant code reduction and development process simplification seems almost too good to be true. But data binding for controls leaves a lot to be desired in terms of ease-of-use and reading the data back into the data source. This article examines what's wrong with simple data binding and provides a set of subclasses, making data binding a lot quicker and requiring much less manual code.
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Creating a Statusbar Control with VFP 8
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2003 - Vol. 1 - Issue 1 - Visual FoxPro 8.0, VFP Conversion Papers
Visual FoxPro 8 offers many new features and opportunities to make life easier.In this article Rick describes how to build a native VFP-based status bar that fixes some of the problems found in the Windows Common Control OCX version (MSCOMCTL.OCX) that ships with VFP and other development tools. This article introduces several new VFP 8 features: Collections, the Empty object, AddProperty() and BindEvents(), and shows how to integrate these new features into a useful component.
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The Two Faces of .NET
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - March/April, VFP Conversion Papers
Rick Strahl takes a frank look at the "Good", "Bad", "Obnoxious" and "Unknown" qualities of .NET.
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The Web at your service
Last updated: Friday, August 12, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2000 - Fall, Markus Egger Talks Tech
Fall 2000 Editorial Markus Egger and Rick Strahl
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Editorial - Thinking about .NET
Last updated: Thursday, December 9, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2000 - Summer, Markus Egger Talks Tech
Summer 2000 Editorial Article
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Welcome to Code Magazine!
Last updated: Wednesday, December 1, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2000 - Spring, Markus Egger Talks Tech
Spring 2000 Editorial
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Using the ASP.NET Runtime to Extend Desktop Applications with HTML Scripts
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - March/April
People often think of HTML as the sole domain for Web applications.But HTML's versatile display attributes are also very useful for handling data display of all sorts in desktop applications. The Visual Studio .NET start page is a good example. Coupled with a scripting/template mechanism you can build highly extendable applications that would be very difficult to build using standard Windows controls. In this article, Rick introduces how to host the ASP.NET runtime in desktop applications and utilize this technology in a completely client-side application using the Web Browser control.
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Dynamically Executing Code in .NET
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - November/December
This article demonstrates the techniques for compiling dynamic code in your .NET applications.
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The diminishing importance of HTML
Last updated: Friday, October 28, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - July/August
HTML-based Web development has dominated application development for the last six years or so and there are no signs of that changing.However, things are changing as the .NET initiative takes hold. Although Microsoft has put a lot of effort into its Web-based interfaces, which include the powerful new ASP.NET Web Forms framework, I am guessing that there will actually be a push back to desktop-driven, forms-based applications once .NET takes hold.
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Retrieving HTTP content in .NET
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - May/June
HTTP content retrieval is an important component for applications these days.Although .NET reduces the need to explicitly retrieve content from the Web through built-in mechanisms in the Web Services framework, ADO.NET and the XML classes, there are still many needs to retrieve Web content directly and manipulate it as text or data downloaded into files. In this article, I will describe the functionality of the HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse classes and provide an easy to use wrapper class. The class simplifies the HTTP access and provides most of the common features in a single interface while still providing full access to the base functionality of the HttpWebRequest class. In the process, I will describe some sticky issues like string encoding and Cookie handling and some related topics like implementing events and running multiple threads to service Web requests.
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Passing Data Over .NET Web Services
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - January/February
Web Services is a powerful technology, even in its basic form.However, with .NET, you can easily couple Web Services with .NET's new data services to provide a powerful data delivery mechanism that works over the Web, making it possible to build distributed applications that work easily without a local data store. In this article, Rick describes various ways you can use Web Services and ADO.NET DataSets to pass data between client and server applications to build truly disconnected applications.
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The slippery slope of Web Services hype
Last updated: Friday, October 28, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - January/February
Rick Strahl Commentary JanFeb2002
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Handling long Web Requests with Asynchronous Request Processing
Last updated: Saturday, September 26, 2020
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2001 - Issue 2
Web Applications tend to be stateless, and running long requests can be problematic for Web backends. Long-running requests can tie up valuable Web server connections and resources. In this article, Rick describes one approach that can be used to handle lengthy requests. A polling mechanism and an Event manager class can be used to pass messages between a Web application and a processing server running the actual long task.
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Building and using a SOAP Web Service with West Wind Web Connection
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2001 - Issue 1
Imagine that you need some specific information in your application, such as a shipping rate. You now go to a special "service" search engine and look up the type of service you need over the Web.Now, imagine that you can get this information easily from the service and simply plug it directly into your application. Sound too good to be true? Believe it or not, the technologies to make this possible are available today. Web Services provide this functionality by bringing to application development the same interlinked mechanisms that have made the Web so popular for Web browsing. By sharing data over the Web in standard formats, "Web Services" is becoming the new industry buzzword. Microsoft is talking about Web Services as the second life of the Internet. Web Services will tie together applications, just as the Web Browser and URL links have tied together Web pages. "The Web At Your Service" is the new mantra. In this article, Rick discusses SOAP and Web Services, then creates a sample Web Service and integrates it into an application.
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Configuring IIS via code
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2001 - Issue 1
In this day and age, Web applications have become the norm. We've even come to the point where many development projects involve Web applications that must be installed on multiple servers.But even if you don't build vertical Web applications, it's useful to have a configuration utility that can recreate a configuration via code. This might be for backup purposes, or for high volume environments like load balancing, where multiple servers need to be configured.
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Scaling Web Applications with Windows 2000 Advanced Server's Network Load Balancing
Last updated: Wednesday, November 30, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2000 - Fall
With ever-larger Web applications being built to service very large numbers of simultaneous users pounding away at Web sites, the issue of scaling applications beyond a single machine is important for Web application developers and network administrators.While hardware capabilities seem to be increasing to the point that high-powered single machines can handle tremendous loads, there will always be those apps that push beyond a single machine. In addition, for many administrators and IT planners, it's often not good enough to say that a server can handle x number of users. They want redundancy, backup and overflow support, so a Web server or hardware failure or an unexpected surge of visitors doesn't cripple the corporate Web site. In this article, Rick discusses the issues of scalability and how load balancing services can help provide redundancy and extra horsepower to large Web sites.
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Double Impact Mega Event 2000 Waikiki, Honolulu, Hawaii
Last updated: Thursday, December 9, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2000 - Summer
How we spent our family winter vacation: at a Visual FoxPro Conference in Hawaii!
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Using XML For Messaging In Distributed Applications (Part 2)
Last updated: Thursday, December 9, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2000 - Summer
XML is becoming the messaging standard of choice, and one of the key issues in this architecture is the conversion and transfer of data between client and server sides.In this article, Rick looks at a tool that easily converts Visual FoxPro tables and objects to and from XML, and demonstrates the concepts of XML messaging in a live e-Commerce application.
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Load Testing Web Applications using Microsoft's Web Application Stress Tool
Last updated: Thursday, December 9, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2000 - Spring
Microsoft's Web Application Stress Tool provides an easy way to simulate large numbers of users against your Web application.This tool makes it possible to make intelligent decisions about hardware and software load incurred by your application and how much traffic a given machine or group of machines can handle. In this article Rick shows how the tool works and how to properly interpret the performance data it generates.
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Using XML for Messaging in Distributed Applications (Part 1)
Last updated: Wednesday, December 8, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2000 - Spring
XML is one of the key technologies that is driving Enterprise Web development today.XML promises a standard data format that can be shared easily by different organizations. In this installation of this two part series, Rick reviews XML's key features and problems as a data representation format for relational data and objects. He'll also introduce some free tools to provide easy translation between XML and traditional data structures and shows how to use them with quick examples sharing data over the Web. Next issue Rick delves into some practical examples of how to implement flexible solutions that utilize these XML tools.