Dr. GUI
MSDN Librarian
April 2000
. . . but are you as tired of reading about lawns and crocuses every year as Dr. GUI is tired of writing about them? (Dr. GUI’s looked through the last couple of years’ worth of Espresso Stands and decided not to do THAT again—especially since Espresso Stand is written well in advance of spring!)
So what should the good doctor write about? Windows 2000 is indeed wonderful, but Dr. GUI’s “been there, done that” with respect to writing good things about it. Y2K is, thankfully, over. Web apps are the wave of the future and they’re still too hard to write and debug. It’s still way too risky to make any comment about the stock market, especially Internet stocks.
So maybe the crocuses don’t look so bad after all . . . or maybe the good doctor should just tell you what’s new . . .
If you’re lucky (like Dr. GUI), you’re using Windows 2000 already. If not, the good doctor prescribes a switch for you soon.
Are you wondering how to build Web applications using Windows DNA? For an excellent start on this, check out A Blueprint for Building Web Sites Using the Microsoft Windows DNA Platform. And you’ll want to read Beyond the Browser: Building Windows DNA 2000 Components. You’ll also want to read Beyond the Browser: Windows DNA Then and Now.
While you’re at it, check out the logo requirements for Windows 2000 Server applications in Application Specification for Microsoft Windows 2000 Server.
Have you ever had DLL conflicts? They sure were fun to diagnose and fix, weren’t they? Well, they’re easier to solve now: Not only does Windows 2000 make “DLL Hell” less common, but we’ve got new tools to help find and fix DLL conflicts. For the full story, read The End of DLL Hell.
You can also use Windows NT/Windows 2000 data logs to manage your performance data—Rick Anderson shows you how in Design Your Application to Manage Performance Data Logs Using the PDH Library.
Windows 2000 also introduces Active Directory—you can read about it in Active Directory Doesn’t Just Manage Network Resources, It Can Manage Your Data Too and Working with Objects in the Active Directory.
Another new feature in Windows 2000 is built-in Kerberos security—check out the interoperability story in Interoperability with Microsoft Windows 2000 Active Directory and Kerberos Services and SSPI/Kerberos Interoperability with GSSAPI.
Windows 2000 even includes some improvements to the standard Window graphics interface—see Layered Windows for details on one improvement. And Windows 2000 supports roving profiles (so your desktop and data can appear on any computer in your enterprise). Find out more in Reducing Your Workload with Roving Profiles.
Here’s a fun one: By just changing a few settings (and perhaps adding an inexpensive second network interface card), you can use a Windows 2000 Professional machine as a gateway between a LAN and the Internet, allowing all the machines on your LAN to access the Internet through a single connection. This is especially handy for small businesses—or at home. Find out how easy it is by reading Enabling Shared Access on Windows 2000 Professional.
And if you want to talk about it, you can always Host a Discussion Forum with the Windows 2000 NNTP Service and Manage Your Company’s E-mail with the Windows 2000 SMTP Service.
Last, but certainly not least, this release of the Library contains the Windows 2000 Resource Kit.
We’ve got a bunch of articles on COM and COM+, including one from Don Box and one from some guy who calls himself “Dr. GUI.”
If you’re using Windows 2000, you’ll want to be sure to check out queued components—an easy way to get message queue functionality without the hassles of message queue programming. Take a look at Trading Up to Queued Components. If you’re writing COM components that run in an NT or Windows 2000 service, be sure to check out Creating and Registering COM Components with LocalService.
We’ve got a couple of articles on DCOM, too: Inside Distributed COM: Type Libraries and Language Integration and Borrow the D from DCOM—Remote Execution of Any Old EXE.
If you’re doing COM objects in your MFC applications, you’ll want to read More Reusable MFC Goodies: Simplify Your (Programming) Life with the COMToys Library.
Do you write ATL controls that contain other controls? If so, you’ll want to check out Extending ATL 3.0 Control Containment to Help You Write Real-world Containers.
We’ve also acquired several new columns. In Dr. GUI and COM Events, Part 2, the good doctor tells you how to fire events from an ATL COM object. In Don Box’s House of COM, Don discusses using XML with component technologies. An upcoming implementation of XML-based component technology is described in SOAP: The Simple Object Access Protocol.
Finally, you can check out Use AppCenter Server or COM and MTS for Load Balancing Your Component Servers to see ways of doing load balancing, including the upcoming AppCenter Server.
For the April Library, we present a dozen or so new articles about DirectX technologies, including:
Microsoft DirectX Developer FAQ
DirectMusic API: Frequently Asked Questions
DirectMusic Producer Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions About Microsoft DirectX Licensing
And a grab-bag of others: Microsoft DirectX for Visual Basic in DirectX 7.0, Overview of Network Gaming, Sound Cards, Voice Management, and Driver Models, and The Future of Microsoft Telephony API (TAPI) in Advanced Media Processing and Control.
We’ve got another couple of articles on the Access Workflow Designer, a part of the Office Developer’s Kit that can use either Access or SQL Server: Microsoft Access Workflow Designer Call-Tracking Sample Team Solution and Microsoft Access Workflow Designer Document-Library Sample Template. We’ve also got Access 2000 Revamps Relationship Management.
And we present a collection of new ADO topics: Convert ADO Recordsets to XML with our WSC Component, Avoid ADO Find Frustration, and Learn the ABCs of ADO—and two articles on data shaping: Advanced Data Shaping and Data Shaping: Handling Non-Relational Data.
Next, we’ve got a collection of articles from the SQL Web site that appear in the Library for the first time. These are not necessarily new, but they’re “new to us”:
Finally, we’ve got a nice set of new articles for you:
This time around, we’re publishing the following new FoxPro articles:
We’ve got some articles on Exchange development, including: Using the Sample Gateway, Providing Web-Based Mail Through Exchange Server, and Exchange Server 2000 Brings Solutions to Outlook Web Access.
As usual, we’ve lots of articles on developing for Web clients. Users of FrontPage and/or Office for Web development will want to read Web Solutions Resources, Working with Office HTML, Changing Theme Properties Programmatically in Microsoft FrontPage 2000, FrontPage Resources, and Visual InterDev 6.0 versus FrontPage 2000: Your Choice.
If your Web site needs to contain content in more than one language, you’ll find much useful information in Multilingual Web Site Development.
We’ve also got a great selection of other articles about Web development, including:
MSDN is pleased to be publishing the documentation and sample code for the Fitch & Mather Stocks demo—this is the one you may have seen at TechEd or Comdex. The first Fitch & Mather sample suite was targeted at Windows NT. F&M Stocks 2000 describes the benefits that Microsoft Windows 2000 and COM+ bring to Internet applications. Here is the sequence of titles:
The Duwamish Books sample has taken on a life of its own—folks besides MSDN have even started modifying it in interesting ways. Duwamish Books, Phase 3.5: VBA adds VBA functionality to the business rules (middle) tier to allow quick and easy customization and modification of business rules. The following list of topics demonstrates the scope of subjects covered:
Do you use Visual Basic for Applications to automate one of your apps as part of a solution? You might want to take a look at Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications and Windows DNA 2000, Beyond .Doc, and/or MapPoint 2000: Navigating Microsoft’s Mapping Software.
You’ll also want to be sure to check out the Duwamish 3.5: VBA sample (above).
We’ve also got a nice set of VB articles this time:
If you use C++, you’ll want to check out:
You know how valuable the Knowledge Base is—it’s created by product support engineers, based on actual customer issues. Click here to go to the Knowledge Base start page.
As usual, we’ve got some articles for you that are hard to categorize. For instance, there’s Amitabh Srivastava on the New Microsoft Research Center and Dr. GUI Does Comdex.
Victor Stone’s articles about software development and working in a certain large corporation are truly in a category of their own. This time around, we have The New Guy and Do You Trust Authority?.
And there are a few more things that are hard to categorize:
The good doctor hopes you both enjoy the new content on this CD (or DVD) and find it useful.