Code purists will be horrified, but dynamic types have arrived in C# 4.0. In languages such as PHP and JavaScript, variables are loosely typed; there’s no need to declare what type of data a variable will hold, so there are no constraints on the operators or methods you can use, for example: // JavaScript code var myvar = “Hello”; myvar += 1; alert(myvar); // outputs “Hello1″ C# and VisualBasic.NET are strongly... 

This latest lesson in our ASP.NET from Scratch series delves into Master Pages – ASP.NET’s built-in templating engine. You’ll learn what Master Pages are, and how to use Master and Content pages to provide a consistent look and feel to your web application. The Complete Series Lesson 1: Getting Started Lesson 2: Improving an Email Form Lesson 3: Class Inheritance Lesson 4: SQL Server Lesson 5: Master Pages Lesson 5: Master... 

Optional parameters are default values used when a function or method is called without specific arguments. They can be used in PHP… // PHP optional parameters function DoSomething($num = 1, $str = “optional”) { // code } as well as VisualBasic.NET: ‘ VB.NET optional parameters Public Sub DoSomething( Optional ByVal num As Integer = 1, Optional ByVal str As String = “optional” ) ‘ code End Sub and similar... 

In this tutorial, I’ll be walking you through how to a write a Twitter widget for ASP.NET in the form of a reusable server control complete with nice things such as automatically turning URLs into links, and caching to speed up page load times. Step 1 Getting Started To follow this tutorial, all you need is Visual Studio (You can use MonoDevelop if you’re not on Windows, although there’s no guarantees there.) If you don’t... 

Over the course of this tutorial we’ll look at how to create a simple image organizer that lets users reorder a series of images; this functionality could be useful on any kind of image-based site where users have a collection of images that they have uploaded or otherwise added to their profile or account. We’ll use .net to retrieve and store the order of images in a SQL database on the server, and jQuery UI to handle the reordering... 

Part four of this series changes the lesson plan again! This lesson introduces you to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and SQL Management Studio. Youíll learn how to create a database, add tables to it, and populate it with data. You’ll then use that data and bind it to a template control. The Complete Series Lesson 1: Getting Started Lesson 2: Improving an Email Form Lesson 3: Class Inheritance Lesson 4: SQL Server Lesson 4: SQL Server Sell... 

Since its release, ASP.NET applications and components have looked to the web.config file to load any settings they need to function. However, adding custom settings to add flexibility and robustness to an application or component isn’t as straight forward as most would like. This article teaches you how to write the necessary classes to handle XML configuration elements and use the settings they contain within your code. Tutorial Details... 

As software developers, we spend a lot of time extracting and displaying data from many different data sources. Whether it’s a XML webservice of some sort, or a full featured relational database, we have been forced to learn different methods of data access. Wouldn’t it be great if the method of access was the same for all data sources? Well, we are in luck because, as of the release of C# 3.0 and the .NET 3.5 Framework, LINQ has...