Reusable Application blocks for .NET

I often used to write some utility classes that would simplify the coding of most used tasks.
For e.g. accessing a DataReader for binding to a grid, we have to write all the database plumbing code again and again.
Hence MS has released some utility wrapper classes that can be used to simplify such routine tasks. A good article explaining this is at http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/070203-1.aspx

The application blocks can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads

How to implement Role authorization after Forms authentication

After authenticating a user using forms authentication, we may want to restict access to certain parts of the website to certain users - i.e. Authorize users.

To implement Role based authorization we would need to set up a database containing info about which role a user belongs to. Then we need to construct a Principal object specifying which role the user belongs to and assign it to the HttpContext user property.

An excellent article discussing this concept is at:
http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/082703-1.aspx

Advantages of using netmodules in .NET

I often wondered what was the advantage of compiling files into .net modules and linking them together using the Al.exe tool. I also noticed that al.exe actually only creates a stub dll, the netmodule files really have to be physically deployed too.

I guess the advantage of compiling to netmodules are:

• Each module may be independently developed by a separate set of developers.
• Each module may be written in any .net language.
• A multimodule assembly does have memory advantages: if you put rarely-usedtypes in one module, that module will only be loaded when one of its types is referenced, when the type is first used. If the rarely-used types are never used in an execution of the assembly, the module is not loaded.

GAC folder in Windows

When we go the default GAC folder in Windows located at : "C:\WINNT\assembly" we see the dlls that are registered in the GAC. But what if we have different versions of the same DLL registered in the GAC? How can a single Windows folder allow 2 files with the same name to exist?

To understand this, go to the DOS prompt and navigate to "C:\WINNT\assembly". Do a 'dir' command and see the contents. There would be a 'GAC' folder and inside the folder, there is a folder for each Assembly. Each assembly folder has a folder for each version. Inside this version folder there is the actual DLL. Try this out :)

XML databinding in Java using Castor

Often in my applications, I needed to persist some Java data objects as XML. For this I used to use JDOM which was quite cool to use bcoz of its Java-like API.
But there is one more XML data binding framework known as "Castor" which can handle all the marshalling and unmarshalling of object to XML for you automatically or with the help of a mapping file. Castor is indeed a cool XML data binding framework.

Furthur reading:
OnJava tutorial
http://www.castor.org/

XML parsing APIs in .NET

The .NET API has quite a few classes to help us manipulate XML data.
We have the 'XMLReader' class and its subclasses like 'XMLTextReader', 'XMLValidatingReader' ect that provide a forward-only, non-cached, read-only cursor to XML data. An interesting point is that XMLReader uses a 'pull model' unlike SAX push event model.

Then we have XPathDocument that provides a fast, read-only cache for XML document processing using XSLT. Quite good if U need to use XPath to query the XML data.

We have a special class for loading a DataSet directly into a XML form for manipultion. This class is the XMLDataDocument class that can load either relational data or XML data and manipulate that data using the W3C Document Object Model (DOM).

Diff btw Java and C#.NET

I came across this comprehensive document stating all the minute differences between Java and C#.NET. A good read :)

http://www.25hoursaday.com/CsharpVsJava.html

I still love Struts...

I have been a strong advocate of Struts right from the start. I often see developers getting confused over making a choice between struts, velocity, tiles etc.

The point is that "Struts" is a "controller-centric" MVC solution. The "View" and the "Model" parts are pluggable thanks to the plug-in architecture of Struts1.1
Hence is possible to use "Tiles" or Velocity templates inplace of plain JSP for the View in Struts.
Similarly the Model can be used to interact with EJB, JDO, Hibernate...etc.

The various choices available in Server-side Java may seem daunting to a new developer,but with experience we come to realize and appreciate the value of each solution and where it fits best :)

Diff btw 'package' access specifier in Java and 'internal' access specifier in .NET

At first I thought that the "package" access-specifier in Java is equivalent to the "internal" access-specifier in .NET. But actually there is a subtle difference.

The 'package' access-specifier in Java limits the access to a particular package/namespace, where as the 'internal' access-specifier in .NET limits the access to the containing assembly. Now a .NET assembly can contain more than one 'namespace' or package.
So is there any way to restrict the scope of a member of a class to the same namespace?

Suprisingly NO, there is none in .NET..So if we were designing by 'separation of concerns', maybe it would make sense to map one namespace to one physical assembly.