This Wrox Blox is a value-packed resource to help experienced .NET developers learn the new .NET release. It is excerpted from the Wrox books: Professional C# 4 and .NET 4, Professional ASP.NET 4, and WPF Programmer’s Reference by Christian Nagel, Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman, and Rod Stephens, and includes more than 100 print book pages drawn from these three key titles. It is an excellent resource to help .NET developers get up to speed fast on . ... Read More

This Wrox Blox demonstrates how standards compliance in Internet Explorer 8 will impact your Web sites.  It will teach you how to immediately ensure visitors to your sites have a positive experience using IE 8, while also giving you time to test your site or make any necessary changes.   The IE 8 browser will undoubtedly cause many current web sites to render or behave incorrectly, since so many web sites were either developed prior to modern web ... Read More

This Wrox Blox shows you how to perform a complete upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 for a simple but non-trivial Drupal site involving the Drupal core itself, and several indispensable modules.  The author gives step-by-step instructions for carrying out this upgrade, outlining the best practices to be followed. These include the recommendation of using a test site in conjunction with a subversion repository for version control and deployment to ... Read More

This Wrox Blox aims to provide an ASP.NET developer who is ready to begin his or her learning in Silverlight 2 with some familiar context, while focusing on key areas that a developer needs to be productive: layout, state, consuming and binding to data, and developing reusable controls. While there is massive depth within Silverlight 2 in its entirety, we cover some essential elements to prepare the developer for enhancing future learning or moving ... Read More

This Wrox Blox teaches you how to create animations using Microsoft's new platform for building rich Internet applications — Silverlight. This Wrox Blox introduces animation concepts and answers questions such as when and why you want to use animation in your Web development. The core classes that make up the Silverlight animation subsystem are also introduced, providing you with a solid foundation to take away and build on. The author takes you step-by-step ... Read More

This Wrox Blox walks you through building a desktop application using your favorite text editor and the Flex 3 command-line tools, leveraging the Flex Framework to browse and manipulate images found on your local system using the Adobe AIR API included in the Flex 3 SDK. Adobe AIR is a cross-platform runtime that gives you the ability to bring the rich Internet application experience to the desktop. Building a photo gallery is an excellent place to ... Read More

This Wrox Blox illustrates a CD Player application built with WPF and DirectSound using C# and Visual Studio 2008, and is targeted at the intermediate-level programmer who is familiar with C#, WPF, and .NET interoperability with native Windows APIs, and the Visual Studio development environment. This application provides basic control capabilities such as Play, Pause, Stop, and Eject, and also displays the duration of the disk and each track as well ... Read More

In this Wrox Blox, you will learn how to build a QuickStart blogging tool with CodeIgniter. The blogging tool will include an administrative dashboard that will allow users to create and manage posts and categories. If you’re a PHP developer, CodeIgniter will help you build Rails-like applications without learning a new language. Use MVC and agile technologies, model and schema for products, helpers and libraries, Ajax and Scriptaculous, to create ... Read More

This Wrox Blox shows you best-practice scenarios for knowledge worker information management using SharePoint Lists and Document Libraries. It demonstrates features that are common to both Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0 (WSS v3) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007). Starting with examples of traditional filing systems using folder hierarchies, it progresses to the introduction of custom metadata columns to make storing, ... Read More

This Wrox Blox shows how to communicate with SQL Server using SQL Management Objects instantiated on-the-fly in Windows PowerShell scripts. Topics include how to create Windows PowerShell scripts that use SQL Management Objects (SMO) to manage and program SQL Server. In addition, you will learn about areas of potential difficulty and see how to avoid them—for example, the use of '$' in instance name, quote nesting rules, connection pooling, and schemata ... Read More

In this Wrox Blox, you’ll learn how to program using industry-standard best practices, coving code organization, indention, file structure, and organization. You’ll be introduced to the base2 JavaScript framework, which provides a stable backbone for rapid JavaScript application development by bridging and patching cross-browser inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies. This Wrox Blox describes how base2’s developer Dean Edwards has made base2’s event API ... Read More

This Wrox Blox demonstrates various LINQ to SQL techniques to use in upgrading the “Articles” portion of TheBeerHouse application. The first step is migrating TheBeerHouse project from an ASP.NET 2.0 to an ASP.NET 3.5 application. Next, create a LINQ to SQL class (DBML) mapping file that will encapsulate the entire Data Access Layer for this project. Readers will become comfortable working with Entities ... Read More

In this Wrox Blox, you'll see the code and layers used to add an ASP.NET blog to your site. After working through the blog design and installation, you'll also get a chance to modify the blog application further using a three-layer n-tier design. The three layers are the presentation layer, business layer, and data access layer. A blog is a great addition to any ASP.NET content site. Thanks to ASP.NET 2.0, it’s easy to make the data access layer work ... Read More