New Stuff
Resources for Your Developer Toolbox
Marnie Hutcheson
Contents
Plug-ins for Visual Studio .NET
UI Tools for Visual Studio .NET
Let Your App Create and Manage Images
Manage and Monitor Non-Windows Clients
Partition Backup and Recovery
Microsoft Reporting Services in Action
Plug-ins for Visual Studio .NET
Spices.VSIP.NET (Visual Studio Integration Pack), released by 9rays, is a set of plug-ins for Visual Studio® .NET that let you to add obfuscation, verification, modeling, and debugging to your assemblies built within the Microsoft® .NET Framework. And you can do all of this without even leaving Visual Studio.
When your .NET assemblies are decompiled to Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL), your code can be disassembled, studied, and altered by third parties. An obfuscator is an essential tool for protecting your code from someone infringing on your intellectual property rights.
Spices.Obfuscator also reduces your assembly size and optimizes the performance of your application. It lets you change your obfuscation properties, generate debuggable assemblies, and view the results of your obfuscation.
Your Spices.VSIP.NET project is updated automatically whenever configuration changes are made to a Visual Studio project. You can perform auto-obfuscation immediately after compilation is complete so that the assemblies can be deployed to devices being tested or directly to CAB files.
You can verify your assemblies with the Spices.Investigator which lets you view metadata and PE files for newly generated assemblies, and you can browse your assemblies with the Spices.Informer. Spices.Modeler offers model building features and provides a wide range of live diagrams that can be stored to file. Documents generated by Spices.NET (diagrams, decompiler outputs, and so on) are fully integrated into the Visual Studio environment.
If you have to reverse engineer a project, the Spices.Decompiler decompiles in six languages: IL (same functionality as the Microsoft ILDASM utility), C#, C++, Visual Basic® .NET, J#, and Delphi.Net.
Price: Free demo version is available online. Spices.VSIP.NET Obfuscator (includes Obfuscator, Investigator, Modeler, and Informer plug-ins) is $292.95.
UI Tools for Visual Studio .NET
Mercury-UI Enterprise Suite and Mercury-UI for ASP.NET, released by Coalesys, is a collection of DLLs and tools that let you create menus and collapsible panels for Web user interfaces that behave much like their Windows counterparts.
The two main tools are WebMenu and Panelbar. These tools produce dynamically resizable layouts with generated source code that you can extend and render as either server-side DLLs or client-side JS files.
WebMenu lets you create DHTML hierarchical menus. PanelBar lets you create a versatile DHTML navigator with expandable/collapsible groups. Both controls automatically detect and render a tailored DHTML menu for Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 and above, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, and other Gecko-based browsers running on Windows®, Macintosh, and Linux.
The Mercury-UI Enterprise Suite is a multi-platform UI toolkit that includes each server control for ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, and standalone HTML development. The Mercury-UI for ASP.NET toolkit has only the components that are specific to .NET: WebMenu for ASP.NET and PanelBar for ASP.NET, and their related tools.
Mercury-UI Enterprise Suite includes server controls for creating menus and sidebars, as well as standalone applications for managing state or compiling static JavaScript versions of each configured control. You can save the state files or compile a control's DHTML into external JS files that can be used on any Web server or HTML project. The Studio programs also generate server-side ASP.NET code that can be pasted into your page.
Once you add the JavaScript code to your page, the component automatically detects the browser type at run time and downloads only the browser-based JS file for that specific browser. Thus, you get the best possible bandwidth savings, and the JS file will be cached at the browser and reused.
Mercury-UI Enterprise Suite includes both client-side and server-side technologies. If a project is best suited for client-side development, then use the included Studio design-time applications for creating and compiling JS files. If a project is best suited for server-side programming, use the included runtime objects for the supported platforms, natively built as .NET Assembly DLLs, COM DLLs, or JavaBeans.
Price: $499 for a single developer license.
Let Your App Create and Manage Images
ImageGear for .NET, from Accusoft, includes an impressive number of editing and correction features that let your application read, write, and convert images in 23 of the most popular image file formats, and it supports a variety of color spaces and image processing options. In addition, your app has full access to image file format metadata.
The toolset supports all TWAIN versions (including, version 1.9, the latest) and as a result can be used to develop applications that acquire images from scanners, cameras, or frame-grabbers that support the TWAIN interface.
ImageGear for .NET has an add-on PDF module that lets you read and write PDF documents using Adobe PDF libraries. There is also an optional module for reading and writing JPEG2000 format images.
ImageGear for .NET comes with a context-sensitive help menu and documentation that is fully integrated with Visual Studio .NET so you can learn details on each function while you are working. There are samples for Windows Forms (C# or Visual Basic .NET) and ASP.NET Web Forms, PDF reading and writing, and TWAIN scanning. There are also samples of the core functions and formats, image processing, thumbnail creation, and display operations.
Built with 100 percent .NET managed code, there are no outside code dependencies so you don't need to include extra DLLs or ActiveX® controls that have to be registered before you can deploy your app.
Price: Available online for $1,495 per license.
Manage and Monitor Non-Windows Clients
VMX 1.0, released by Vintela, is a Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 administration console snap-in and client that provides an extensible framework for managing and monitoring non-Windows clients natively from within SMS 2003. VMX extends Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 capabilities to manage UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS X environments.
VMX uses a WBEM/CIM-based architecture, which allows the client to perform like an SMS Advanced Client extended to non-Windows resources. VMX uses the same datastores, classes, objects, and attributes that SMS 2003 uses, so non-Windows systems integrate seamlessly within the SMS administration console.
VMX will extend non-Windows system management capabilities to SMS 2003 for system discovery, software distribution, hardware and software inventory, collections and queries, and reports.
For Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers, first-level product support for VMX is provided directly by Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS). This single point of contact means that Microsoft EA customers using SMS 2003 will receive product support for VMX directly from Microsoft.
Price: An initial base pack is $1,995.
Partition Backup and Recovery
Partition Table Doctor 2.0, available from the PTDD Group, is a PC partition backup and recovery tool for when you need more than the standard disk scan. When you experience a drive error (other than hardware failure) this versatile tool automatically checks and repairs the Master Boot Record, partition table, and the boot sector of the partition with an error, to recover the bad partition. It can create an emergency floppy disk or a bootable CD to recover the bad partition.
Price: $35.
Microsoft Reporting Services in Action
A Guide to Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services by Teo Lachev (Manning Publications) explores SQL Server™ 2000 Reporting Services, the new server-based reporting solution for authoring, managing, and distributing reports.
It can create and manage both paper-oriented and interactive Web-based reports. Until now, it has languished as an enigmatic add-on to SQL Server, its capabilities largely untapped due to the dearth of documentation on how to make it work.
This book shines a bright light on the subject. It not only fills in lots of blanks in the existing product documentation, it presents you with a best-practice approach to report writing that will help you develop valuable reporting solutions, not just simple reports.
The "how to" sections of the book are clearly written with many diagrams and screen shots to provide a solid foundation for using the built-in tools to create reports. And there are lots of real-world examples.
The roadmap that the book follows will probably take you as far as you want to go in tapping the very powerful features of this heretofore overlooked product—from creating simple reports to creating and exporting dynamic interactive Web-based reports and Web services.
In addition to the nuts and bolts of reports, there are chapters dealing with security topics, testing and debugging your reports, data mining, performance, and scalability.
Price: $49.95, softbound, 656 pages.
All prices were confirmed at press time and are subject to change.
Send your New Stuff to newstuff@microsoft.com.
Marnie Hutchesonis president of Internet Development Associates (Ideva), a firm in Ocala, Florida, that specializes in Internet and intranet Web application design and development. She has published technical papers and books on various computing topics. You can reach her at marnie@ideva.com.