Contents Overview 1 Visual Studio.NET 2 Resources on .NET 8 Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft .NET Information in this document is subject to change without notice. The names of companies, products, people, characters, and/or data mentioned herein are fictitious and are in no way intended to represent any real individual, company, product, or event, unless otherwise noted. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation. If, however, your only means of access is electronic, permission to print one copy is hereby granted. Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property.  2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Active Directory, ActiveX, BizTalk Server, FoxPro, FrontPage, Hotmail, Jscript, Outlook, PowerPoint, Visio, Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual Studio, Windows, and Windows NT are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S.A. and/or other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft .NET 1 Overview  Visual Studio.NET  Resources on .NET *****************************I LLEGAL FOR N ON -T RAINER U SE ***************************** Many of the servers and tools that are part of the Microsoft ® .NET Framework were still in development at the time this course was developed. This appendix serves as a reference section that can be used after attending the course to help you locate the latest news and information about the products that are part of the .NET Framework. If time permits, you can teach this appendix, similar to a module, by using the Microsoft PowerPoint ® file 2260A_XA.ppt. 2 Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft .NET    Visual Studio.NET  Visual Basic.NET  Visual C++.NET  Visual C# *****************************I LLEGAL FOR N ON -T RAINER U SE ***************************** The Microsoft Visual Studio.NET suite of products represents a significant step forward in the domain of Web-development tools. The tools integrate with the .NET Framework components and support features, such as the creation of Web forms from within the Integrated Design Environment (IDE) and easy Web Service development. This section focuses on the following languages that are part of Visual Studio.NET:  Microsoft Visual Basic.NET  Microsoft Visual C++.NET  Microsoft Visual C# ™ Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft .NET 3 Visual Basic.NET  Web Forms  Can be created from within Visual Basic.NET’s IDE  Consist of an HTML file that represents the Web page and a source file that handles the page’s events  Web Services  Any procedure in your Visual Basic project can be implemented as a Web Service  Language Improvements  Support for inheritance, polymorphism, and overloading  Additional Language Features  Free-threading models  Centralized error handling *****************************I LLEGAL FOR N ON -T RAINER U SE ***************************** Visual Basic.NET is the next step in the evolution of Microsoft Visual Basic ® , a popular application development tool. Visual Basic.NET incorporates many new language features and IDE capabilities. Web Forms You can use Visual Basic.NET to develop a new type of project item—the Web form. You can design Web forms from within Visual Basic.NET's IDE. Web forms consist of two parts:  A Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) file that represents the page when viewed in a Web browser.  A source file that handles the page's events. The result of this development is a Web form that runs on the Web server and passes only the HTML form down to the Web browser. Because the code runs on the server, Web forms are truly browser independent. Unlike Active Server Pages (ASP), the code that runs on the server is compiled, rather than interpreted, when needed, thereby increasing the speed of the server-side processing. Web Services Visual Basic.NET allows you to quickly and easily implement any existing function in your Visual Basic project as a Web Service. A new level of scope (in addition to Public and Private) for your functions and sub-procedures allows procedures to be exposed as a Web Service, rather than limiting that functionality to the Component Object Model (COM) interface. The result is that any Web application can call the procedure by using a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). In addition, you will be able to add a reference to the function from your development tools by using the URL rather than the COM interfaces. 4 Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft .NET Language Improvements Visual Basic.NET now allows you to use true object-oriented language features in your applications. Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier versions did not support the true object-oriented programming (OOP) features of inheritance, polymorphism, and overloading. Visual Basic.NET includes all three of these key OOP capabilities. Additional Language Features Visual Basic.NET addresses the key requirements of scalability and re-use with powerful new programming features that go beyond the OOP features that were previously introduced. The new features include new threading models and centralized, structured error handling. Threading models Visual Basic.NET gives you the ability to use a free-threading model rather than restricting you to the apartment-threaded model of Visual Basic 6.0. New language constructs allow you to spawn new threads in your code. In addition, there is an AddressOf operator that can return the address of a function, thereby allowing you to use application programming interface (API) calls that need a function pointer. Error handling Visual Basic.NET provides a traditional "Try…Catch…" style of centralized error handling. This structure will allow you to collect all run-time errors into a controlling subroutine in your application. This style of error handling allows different types of run-time errors to be handled at different levels in your application. Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft .NET 5 Visual C++.NET  Managed Extensions  Allows you to write managed or .NET classes in Visual C++ that run under the .NET Framework  Improved Memory Management  Provides access to a garbage-collected memory heap  Automatically manages objects allocated from this heap *****************************I LLEGAL FOR N ON -T RAINER U SE ***************************** Visual C++.NET is the next step in the evolution of Microsoft Visual C++ ® and includes two major new features:  Managed (.NET) extensions  Improved memory management Managed Extensions The extensions allow you to write managed or .NET classes in Visual C++ that run under the control of the .NET Framework rather than in the traditional Microsoft Windows ® -based environment. You will not lose any of the benefits of Visual C++, such as custom memory allocation, direct access to the Windows APIs, or efficient manipulation of low-level machine resources. Improved Memory Management Managed extensions provide access to a garbage-collected memory heap and automatically manage objects allocated from this heap. This results in an automatic performance increase for most applications and allows the developer to focus on more important aspects of the application than the management of pointers and objects. Topic Objective To introduces the new features included with Visual C++ .NET. Lead-in Visual C++ .NET is the next step in the evolution of Microsoft Visual C++ ® and includes two major new features. 6 Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft .NET Visual C#  Productivity and Safety  Web programming standards  Garbage collection  Initialized and type-safe variables  Power and Flexibility  Mapping business-processes to implementation  Extensive interoperability *****************************I LLEGAL FOR N ON -T RAINER U SE ***************************** C#, a new OOP language, is included in Visual Studio.NET as Visual C#. C# combines the flexibility of Visual C++ with the rapid application development (RAD) features of Visual Basic. C# allows developers to quickly build applications for the .NET platform. C# incorporates productivity, safety, power, and flexibility, thereby making all of these features available from one language. Productivity and Safety C# has the following features that can be used to enable productivity and safety. Web programming standards Modern applications require the use of Web standards, such as HTML, Extensible Markup Language (XML) and XML Protocol [XMLP, the new name for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)]. C# programmers can use an existing framework for building applications on the .NET platform. C# includes inbuilt support for turning any component into a Web service. Garbage collection C# incorporates the garbage collection techniques of Visual C++ managed extensions. Garbage collection relieves the programmer of the burden of manual memory management for objects and pointers. Initialized and type-safe variables Variables in C# are automatically initialized by the environment and are type- safe. Topic Objective To introduce the key features in Visual C#. Lead-in C#, a new OOP language, is included in Visual Studio.NET as Visual C#. Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft .NET 7 Power and Flexibility C# has power and flexibility built into the language and environment. Mapping business process to implementation A challenge facing most enterprise developers is connecting the abstract business entities with the actual code that they are developing. The C# language allows for strongly typed, extensible metadata that can be applied to any object. The project architect will typically define this metadata and apply it to the element classes and interfaces. The developer can then examine this metadata programmatically. Extensive interoperability Although C# is a RAD tool, it does includes native support for COM and the Windows-based APIs. When required, C# also allows the use of pointers, manually managed memory, and pointer arithmetic. 8 Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft .NET    Resources on .NET  The .NET Server Resources  The .NET Development Resources *****************************I LLEGAL FOR N ON -T RAINER U SE ***************************** This section provides you with links to key locations of interest to developers:  The Microsoft .NET Enterprise Server resources  The Microsoft .NET development resources The section includes links to Web sites and other resources. [...]... http://www .microsoft. com/biztalk Information about the BizTalk Framework can be found at http://www.biztalk.org For information about Microsoft Application Center 2000, visit http://www .microsoft. com/applicationcenter For information about Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, visit http://www .microsoft. com/sql For information about Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server, visit http://www .microsoft. com/exchange For information... information about Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2000, visit http://www .microsoft. com/isaserver For information about Microsoft Host Integration Server 2000, visit http://www .microsoft. com/hiserver Note Additional information for all of the Microsoft products is available through the Microsoft newsgroups at http://msnews .microsoft. com 10 Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft NET The.. .Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft NET 9 The NET Enterprise Server Resources http://www .microsoft. com/commerceserver http://www .microsoft. com/biztalk http://www .microsoft. com/applicationcenter http://www .microsoft. com/sql http://www .microsoft. com/exchange http://www .microsoft. com/isaserver http://www .microsoft. com/hiserver *****************************ILLEGAL FOR NON-TRAINER USE*****************************... http://www .microsoft. com/net http://msdn .microsoft. com/net Articles on NET *****************************ILLEGAL FOR NON-TRAINER USE***************************** Information about developing solutions for the NET Framework is available from Microsoft s Web site This includes information about ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and the new C# programming language The following Web sites contain much of this information:... USE***************************** Valuable information about each of the NET Enterprise Servers can be found at the following links For information about Microsoft Commerce Server 2000, visit http://www .microsoft. com/commerceserver Use the download links at the Commerce Server Web site to get the latest solution sites and support files for the tutorials that are documented in the Help files For information about Microsoft BizTalk™... http://www .microsoft. com/net/ http://msdn .microsoft. com/net/ The following articles provide further insight into the NET Framework and related technologies Microsoft NET: Realizing the Next Generation Internet” at http://www .microsoft. com/business/vision/netwhitepaper.asp Microsoft NET Framework FAQ” at http://msdn .microsoft. com/library/techart/faq111700.htm “The NET Framework and COM” at http://www .microsoft. com/net/developer/framework_com.asp... http://www .microsoft. com/net/developer/framework_xml.asp “ADO+ Guides the Evolution of the Data Species” at http://msdn .microsoft. com/library/techart/adoplus.htm Tip ADO+ and ASP+ were the working titles for what are now ADO.NET and ASP.NET “C# Language Specification” at http://msdn .microsoft. com/vstudio/nextgen/technology/csharpdownload.asp “C# Introduction and Overview” at http://msdn .microsoft. com/vstudio/nextgen/technology/csharpintro.asp . Studio .NET:  Microsoft Visual Basic .NET  Microsoft Visual C++ .NET  Microsoft Visual C# ™ Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft .NET 3 Visual Basic .NET . PowerPoint ® file 2260A_XA .ppt. 2 Appendix A: Planning for Microsoft .NET    Visual Studio .NET  Visual Basic .NET  Visual C++ .NET  Visual C# *****************************I