It is a relational database management system for building business applications with increased data protection. The SQL server acts like an 'engine' providing enhanced performance for data access and delivery of data from your server

Email serves as a ubiquitous, asynchronous notification and information distribution system. Not surprisingly, there are many web development scenarios where server-side code needs to generate an email and scuttle it off to the intended recipient. Previous articles here on 4Guys have examined programmatically sending email messages in ASP.NET 1.x...   Read Article.

Over the past several years web developers have started using JavaScript to make asynchronous postbacks to the web server that only transmit and receive the necessary data; these techniques are commonly referred to as AJAX. When properly implemented, AJAX-enabled web applications offer a highly interactive user interface whose responsiveness rivals...   Read Article.

Many independent developers and small companies building Internet-accessible web applications turn to web hosting companies to host their website. Web hosting companies offer a variety of plans, from dedicated servers to shared plans. Shared plans, which are the most economical and practical for low-traffic websites, can have anywhere from 25 to 150...   Read Article.

The .NET Framework makes creating and consuming Web Services a walk in the park. Creating a Web Service is as easy as marking a class with the WebService attribute; Web Services can be easily consumed because the .NET Framework includes tools to build proxy classes given a Web Service's WSDL file. All of the examples we have seen in previous installments...   Read Article.

As web developers, we most often focus on backend web developer, buring our noses in defining and implementing the business logic, building CRUDs, and designing reports. Rarely are we concerned about maintaining the appearance and style of the website. For developers working in medium- to large-sized companies, this poses no problem as there are graphic...   Read Article.

ASP.NET 2.0's Membership, Roles, and Profile systems were designed using the provider model, which enables these systems to seamlessly use different implementations. ASP.NET ships with a provider for managing members and roles through SQL Server and another for using Active Directory. It is also possible to plug in other implementations that...   Read Article.

The polling User Control examined in the first two installments (Design Decisions and the Data Model and Building the Polling User Control) is functionally complete at this point. A page developer can add, edit, or delete new polls and poll answers by manually inserting, updating, or deleting records into or from the corresponding database tables;...   Read Article.

Welcome to the second article in a three-part series on building a polling User Control. In the first installment, Design Decisions and the Data Model, we looked at the design decisions made prior to creating the control as well as the poll's data model, which consisted of three tables in a SQL Server 2005 database. We are now ready to start building...   Read Article.

Many websites include some sort of polling user interface through which visitors can cast their vote on the topic du jour. The typical polling user interface includes some question text, like "What is your favorite programming language?", along with a series of radio buttons listing possible answers, like "C#", "Visual Basic", "Pascal", and so forth....   Read Article.

Many data-driven applications have date/time values that are automatically populated with the current date and time. For example, in an online messageboard, whenever a user makes a post the current date and time is recorded and saved with that post. Another example is in applications that track created on or last modified dates. For these types of applications, whenever...   Read Article.

A Multipart Series on ASP.NET 2.0's Data Source Controls ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a number of new Web controls designed for accessing and modifying data. These controls allow page developers to declaratively access and modify data without writing any code to perform the data access. This article is one in a series of articles on ASP.NET 2.0's...   Read Article.

A Multipart Series on ASP.NET 2.0's Data Source Controls ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a number of new Web controls designed for accessing and modifying data. These controls allow page developers to declaratively access and modify data without writing any code to perform the data access. This article is one in a series of articles on ASP.NET 2.0's...   Read Article.

SQL Sentry Event Manager was named the platinum award winner of the Editor's Choice Awards in the Database Management Tools category by Penton Media's SQL Server Magazine....   Read Article.

Three years ago I wrote an article here on 4Guys titled ASP.NET Charting Using Office Web Components (OWC) that examined how to use OWC as a charting engine in ASP.NET applications. OWC is still a very powerful charting engine, but unfortunately it carries with it some serious drawbacks: OWC is a COM library, which needs to be installed on the ASP.NET...   Read Article.

The Internet is best described as a "network of networks," and every device which is connected to the Internet is uniquely identified by its Internet Protocol (IP) address. When client browsers connect to websites, they pass along a collection of information which the website can use for various purposes - these are known as the Request Headers, and...   Read Article.

This two-part article series examines how to use Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX to add a pop-up control to a GridView in order to display drill-down detail information in a responsive and clean manner. In Part 1 we looked at displaying the list of employees from the Northwind database in a GridView. This involved building an application architecture consisting of...   Read Article.

Microsoft SQL Server Upgrade Advisor tool helps the user with the process of upgrading SQL Server 2000 (or 7.0) instances to SQL Server 2005. It analyzes the configuration of installed SQL Server 2000 (or 7.0) components and generates reports. The reports give an idea of the issues that will hinder the upgrade process. By S. Srivathsani....   Read Article.

As web developers we are often tasked with building online reports. For ASP.NET 2.0 web applications, the GridView control is commonly used to display report data. A common challenge in building reports is achieving the right balance between readability and information. Users want to have all of the pertinent information available on one screen, but...   Read Article.

One of the main things coming from our look at SQL Server 2008 Integration Services is that you are not going to see a lot of change visually. What you are going to see is things going on underneath the covers that make Integrations services perform better along with better informational messages from the components. Just such a change is seen in the...   Read Article.

A Multipart Series on ASP.NET 2.0's Health Monitoring System The Health Monitoring system in ASP.NET 2.0 is designed to monitor the health of a running ASP.NET application in a production environment. This article is one of an ongoing series on the Health Monitoring system. Health Monitoring Basics - explores the concepts and advantages of the Health...   Read Article.