See how to make comments in your code more useful & effective for you and your fellow developers.

Learn how the Service Broker provides the “plumbing” to let you pass messages between applications, using SQL Server as the transport mechanism.

Software postmortems, performed consistently, are a key part of bringing a development organization from chaos to smooth, repeatable functioning.

Check out SSIS, the SQL Server 2005 replacement for the older Data Transformation Services. You might find SSIS to be a great solution for automating SQL Server.

Here is advice on what tooling should be truly pervasive in the current development universe.

SQL Server Everywhere you will have an extremely lightweight (under 2MB disk footprint), easy-to-redistribute, free database from Microsoft with a syntax that's a subset of full SQL Server Transact-SQL.

If you can keep the quality of your code high and the other risks to the project under control, you have a much better chance of delivering working software than the average developer using a random, chaotic process.

If you're having a problem with particular queries, there are a few things you can do with the information that the server collects about the distribution of data in columns and indexes.

Adding audio feedback to a .NET 2.0 application is easy using the System.Media namespace.

It's nice to have little amenities in your development tools. They make for easier development and can save you a little time. Synonyms is one of those tools.

The ASP.NET GridView is smart about automatically generating columns - but sometimes not smart enough. Mike Gunderloy shows you how to take matters into your own hands by building columns dynamically at runtime.

Creating efficient databases isn't easy. See how to use the Database Engine Tuning Advisor, an easy way to increase the performance of your SQL Server databases.

You're probably already storing your source code in a version control system. But if that's all you're doing, you're missing out. Discover five other uses for this critical piece of your infrastructure.

ASP.NET is such a huge and flexible development system that every team finds their own way of working with it. Gunderloy shares some of the mainstream and unique ways he has used the technology to deliver customer's requirements.

Debugger visualizers allow you to provide a custom user interface for the display of particular classes of data when your program is in debug mode. While there are some complex use cases for this, you can actually derive considerable benefit from very simple debugger visualizers - ones that take ten minutes or less to build.

You are probably still pumping data in and out of a database, just as we all did a decade or more ago. That makes it all the more surprising that mistakes are still being made that date back to the good old days of Windows 95 and before.

With Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 you can say goodbye to Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer. Fortunately, you can also say hello to the SQL Server Management Studio.

Explore how to implement URL mapping in an ASP.NET 2.0 site. See the limitations of this technique as well as alternatives to get around those limitations.

Here are details on the finalists and winner of the .NET Tool or Add-In of the Year.

If you did any work in ASP.NET 1.0, you're intimately familiar with grubbing around in the web.config file. The file is still there in 2.0, but now there are new tools to help you avoid the drudgery. In this article, you'll see how upgrading to ASP.NET 2.0 can take some of the pain out of maintaining an ASP.NET Web site.

For the first time, SQL Server 2005 offers a native XML data type. See how you can store and query XML documents as part of a SQL Server table, and how to use XML indexes to make queries against these columns more efficient.

Microsoft Windows Vista is shipping next year, and with it the rules of user interface design are changing in a multitude of ways, large and small. If you don't want your applications to look clunky and dated, it's time to start thinking about the changes that you'll need to make to fit into this new world.

Get up and running quickly with CruiseControl.NET so that your .NET projects "build themselves" whenever something changes in the source code.

ASP.NET 1.0 featured easy binding of user interface controls to ADO.NET data sources. ASP.NET 2.0 extends this concept to make it easy to bind XML files directly to the user interface. See how in this demonstration.

Discover how easy it will be to expose SQL Server 2005 data as a Web Service to any SOAP 1.2 client.

You've probably heard a lot about the big changes in ASP.NET 2.0, but Microsoft didn't neglect the small things either. See how the new Image Map control makes it easy to design functional graphical interfaces for your Web pages without writing HTML or excessive code.

Discover how templates can contain as much programming logic as you need, this opens up possibilities for transforming XML in ways that would be difficult or impossible using conventional XML tools.

SQL Server 2005 is the first version to include end user reporting capabilities. See how the new Report Builder makes it easy for analysts to generate reports while avoiding the performance pitfalls of completely ad hoc reporting.

What's New in SQL Server 2005? The new version of SQL Server has been in development for five years now. That's given Microsoft time to build in a lot of new features. Mike Gunderloy highlights the most significant enhancements to help you judge whether you should start evaluating a potential upgrade.

It's easy to collect an immense amount of business data these days, but then what? Tableau offers a new answer to that question by using visual analysis to help spot patterns in data through interactive graphics.

There's one step in deploying an application that uses SQL Server that sometimes gets neglected until the last moment: buying the licenses! Review the confusing array of editions and licensing options now, before you have to write that multi-thousand dollar check.

Learn about the new security feature Microsoft is focusing on with SQL Server 2005.

SQL Profiler is a vital tool for diagnosing SQL Server issues of all types. When you're trying to figure out what the heck is going on, especially with a heavily-loaded server, a well-chosen trace can help you pick out just the key events that you need to diagnose a problem.

Developer.com's readers named Firefox as the Development Utility of the Year.

See which product won and how this year's nominees bring out three important trends in .NET development (or, indeed, in development in general).

Looking for a troubleshooting tool to view the actual SQL that's being sent during code executions? SQL Profiler is a great tool for peering under the hood of your SQL Server installation. Learn how to use it and you're sure to save debugging time in the future.

Between the idea for a new application and the actual coding, you need to flesh out the features and requirements that you're aiming for. For times when full-blown requirements management tools are overkill, try a mind map instead.

When to allow and when to avoid making it possible for users to customize your applications.

Discover how to make unit testing and test-driven development easier with TestDriven.NET.

Discover how to work with SQL Server to perform sophisticated searches using word roots, proximity, and fuzzy matches.

Imagine this request: allow users to upload images to a SQL Server database. Oh, and limit the files to a certain size, to keep traffic and database sizes reasonable. Oh, and show a friendly error message if the file was too large. See how it's done.

You've probably used SQL Query Analyzer as a tool to execute ad hoc queries against Microsoft SQL Server. But there's much more than that in the Query Analyzer package.

Having more tools at hand gives you a better chance of coming up with an optimum solution, and that's what this business is all about.

See how you can quickly get your data to the web using part of the new wave of 'Express' products that Microsoft is introducing for the Visual Studio 2005 product cycle.

Distribute your .NET class libraries with professional-looking documentation for consumption by other developers by adding XML comments.

Have you ever thought of customizing the metadata associated with your data? You can do just that with SQL Server data by using extended properties.

Performance is critical in today's business world. Take advantage of the easy to use performance counters available in .NET.

Take a look at the bridges that SQLXML provides between SQL Server 2000 and the .NET Framework.

As a developer, you should already be using a source code control system. But are you using it as well as you could be? These four rules will help you get the most out of source code control.

Microsoft has finally released their own Web-based reporting engine for SQL Server, after years of depending on third-party solutions for reporting. Learn what's included and how to fit it into your own SQL Server plans.

Take advantage of what the Windows Installer Service has to offer.

Preview Microsoft's plans for Yukon's Data Transformation Services (DTS).

Take a peek into the future... With the next version of SQL Server, code-named 'Yukon' (currently in beta), XML becomes a core part of SQL Server itself.

See into the future of Yukon... When you load CLR code into Yukon, the in-process managed provider lets you connect directly to the server that's hosting your code.

Excited about the .NET code coming to SQL Server? Discover how to call a Whidbey function from Yukon and see where this capability might come in handy.

Windows applications can be complex, but because they use documented file formats and APIs, they're easy to explore. In this article, Mike Gunderloy presents quick looks at half a dozen tools that you can use to peer inside of any Windows program.

Want a practical example of using Web Services? Learn how to unlock Windows SharePoint Services data by using the new SharePoint Web services interfaces.

Jump into document workspaces and programmable collaboration with Microsoft SharePoint.

To generate code... or not to generate code... that is the question! (At least for many developers!)

You have probably heard of Microsoft SharePoint or Windows SharePoint Services but are not sure what advantage it will be to developers. Here is your chance to find out what it is and if it can help you.

Have you found that the transition from ADO to ADO.NET was more involved than you originally expected? Mike Gunderloy guides you in how to remain productive while working your way up that learning curve.

Are you still a bit shakey on the mechanics of building persistent programs? Here you will work through a simple persistence example in C#, showing how you can leverage the power of the .NET Framework to store information safely and flexibly.

Imagine that every time you turned the computer on, it reverted to its original settings. Not a very happy thought, is it? Yet, there are applications that ignore user preferences and go back to defaults all the time. Learn about persistence: what it is, when you should use it, and some of the practical techniques for implementing it in your applications.