Export Calendar Items to Outlook 2K3

Export Calendar Items to Outlook 2K3

One of the advantages to working with Microsoft development platforms is that there are often convenient integration tools available to leverage the functionality of other advanced Microsoft applications. The Microsoft Office suite of products is a widely known and used bundle of software that can give you access to advanced features without doing a ton of extra coding.

One of the products in this suite is Outlook 2003. Known of course as mainly an email reader it also has a myriad of features and support for tasks, calendars, notes, contacts, meetings and more. When developing your own applications it is sometimes advantageous to take advantage of these features instead of trying to develop them yourself.

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Working With Mobile ASP.NET Apps – Part 2

In part 1 of this tutorial we reviewed some basic concepts behind mobile development, we created a new mobile web application project and linked to a sample database and reviewed some of the principals behind mobile web forms.

In this second and final part of the series we’ll continue building upon our sample application and put an ObjectList control into practice using our sample data source.

We’ll also look at some of the mysteries behind this control that should help you avoid a lot of R&D and trial and error programming when it comes to rendering tabular data for mobile devices.

ObjectList Confusion

In part 1 we reviewed the properties list of the ObjectList control and found that there were a plethora of properties available to use, yet finding complete documentation on the items is sometimes difficult. Even with the MSDN library itself the examples and explanations sometimes provide little or no help.

To compound the problem, online support and newsgroup discussions on the subject are somewhat scarce. It seems that mobile development is a bit of a hidden art, and you often have no choice but to simply figure things out on your own.

In this section we’ll cover some of the peculiarities of the ObjectList control that should help you avoid a lot of the common exceptions and errors encountered.

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Working With Mobile ASP.NET Apps – Part 1

In the world of ASP.NET there’s a whole other breed of application that few developers ever have the need to work with: Mobile Web Applications. These are applications that are designed to run on mobile devices which can be anything from a pocket PC, to a BlackBerry, to a cell phone.

This realm of development is a very confusing one, due to the volume of disparate devices and their methods of implementation and visual capabilities. Often developers are left to focus on one particular style of device in order to bring out the best capabilities instead of taking a more generic one-size-fits-all implementation.

Because mobile development is so radically different in presentation the .NET framework has a dedicated set of assemblies for it residing in the System.Web.Mobile namespace. In this namespace is a dedicated set of interface components designed specifically to run on mobile devices, most of which duplicate the common components in regular web forms development such as labels, buttons, textboxes and so forth.

Although these components are fundamentally similar some of the principles behind mobile development are hidden and convoluted and developers are left spending many hours of trial and error getting certain basic features to work.

The goal of this two part tutorial is to review some of the not so obvious aspects of mobile development that often leave developers scratching theirs when finding solutions. We’ll implement a basic demonstration application that will take some of the common features performed in regular web development and see how they are implemented in a mobile development environment.

In part one we’ll setup a new mobile web application and connect it to a sample database so we have some data to work with and we’ll also review the DataGrid’s cousin in mobile development: The object list control. We’ll review some theory behind this control and some of its more confusing implementation designs and how best to use it and how not to use it.

In part two we’ll continue building on our demonstration application and implement a mobile form which uses the object list control and sub forms, and see how DataGrid style pages are developed in a mobile environment.

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Using the .NET DataView Object

Using the .NET DataView Object

When building database driven web applications, presentation of data becomes a key component in your web forms. The common problem that arises is that no two users want to view their data the same way. One user wants to see only certain data; another user wants the data sorted by date ascending while another may only want to see data from the past week. The possibilities are literally endless.

As a developer, how do you cover all the scenarios? The answer is you really can’t, what you can do however is offer enough flexibility in data filtering to allow the user to customize their presentation themselves. And depending on what components you are implementing in your application, the DataView object is a good solution to provide this type of filtering.

In this tutorial we’ll look at a basic ASP.NET application that implements data column filtering as well as row state filtering. We’ll use a DataGrid component to search a column for data that matches a search pattern, thus filtering the user’s view. And we’ll also see how we can use the DataView to show only newly added rows; a pattern which can also be applied to edited or deleted rows easily.

We’ll need a sample database to work with so we’ll use the Northwind database which comes with all versions of SQL server, including MSDE. If you do not have access to SQL server you can simply link the tutorial example to any database of your choice and skip the database configuration section.

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Securely Locking Down ASP.NET Web Services

Securely Locking Down ASP.NET Web Services

During this tutorial we will build 2 separate ASP.NET applications: One to implement the Web Service itself, and one to implement the consumer application which uses the Web Service. By having 2 applications we can effectively simulate the service/consumer pattern which would be found in a real world application, even though in our case both applications will be running on the same machine.

The demonstration Web Service will simply provide several test services which we can call from the consumer. The purpose behind these methods is not their functionality but rather to simply have something to execute. The focus of this tutorial is how to secure the service once it’s built.

We’ll then implement a consumer ASP.NET application and show how we can gain access to the Web Service even thought it’s been completely secured and locked down.

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