I just added a bunch of new articles on localizing your ASP.NET website. You should go have a look right now, if you’re in the process of, or at least considering, localizing your website:
Enjoy 
In case you haven’t noticed it yet, Microsoft has just released a set of Chart controls to be used with both ASP.NET and WinForms applications. They support both 2D and 3D charts, and has a bunch of cool features, which should cover most of your charting needs . They can be downloaded from this page and Scott Guthrie from Microsoft has a more detailed post about the ASP.NET aspects of it here. Enjoy
Just a small note to let you know that a set of chapters about Reflection has been added to the C# tutorial. You can find the introduction right here. I simply love using Reflection, so I’m probably going to write some more on it in the near future – anything specific you would like me to look into? I’m all ears
In case you haven’t noticed, testing your applications on several machines is a very good idea, especially in that pre-beta phase, where you want to get rid of the most obvious bugs before showing your work for the first time. Especially with the .NET framework, testing your work on other machines than the one it’s being developed on is recommendable. You could easily have forgotten to include a specific assembly, or include an older version than the one you are currently using. Another common pitfall is to develop on Windows XP, and not testing on Windows Vista. A lot of things have changed, and some of them may break your application. And it goes the other way too – in my experience, several things which will work just fine on XP, will not work as well on a Windows 2000 machine.
Now, don’t go out and buy 2-3 new computers, with different OS’ on them. This scenario is perfect for the Virtual Machine. Many people swear by vmware, which is supposed to be really good, but personally I just use Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. With version 2007, it can now be downloaded and used for free, and in my experience, it’s very stable and extremely easy to use.
The absolute top feature of a virtual machine for software developers, is the undo disk feature. It allows you to boot the VPC, work on it, and then delete all changes. This gives you the possibility to test your application on a clean machine each time. Once you have installed a version of Windows in your Virtual PC, select it from the list and click Settings. Now, from the list of options, select Undo Disks and make sure that it has been enabled. Now, boot the OS, make it comfortable for you to work with (for instance, I always enable the display of file extensions, because I hate not being able to see them) and visit Windows Update and make sure that it’s fully updated. Once you close the system, make sure that you commit the changes to disk. You now have a fully functional test OS, and whenever you use it for testing purposes, just make sure that the “Commit changes to disk” is not checked, and the changes you have made will not be persisted. You may still choose to save changes from session to session, but it will be stored separately, and only committed to your VPC if you want it to – if not, simply select the delete option upon closing the OS.
With a setup like this, you have clean and mean testing environment for your applications
One of my biggest concerns when starting to build .NET applications, was the lack of framework installations around the world. Microsoft were promising to push it through Windows Update and Windows XP SP2, but that part didn’t really work for them until Windows Vista was released, which included both .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0. However, since there are still quite a few Windows XP machines out there, and even worse, Windows 98 and Windows Me machines, you really can’t expect everyone to have the required version of the .NET framework installed.
One alternative is to use an expensive product which will bundle your application together with at least parts of the framework, but it usually IS very expensive, and it will result in a pretty big file, which you have to distribute. That might be good enough in your scenario, but for me, I wanted to be able to distribute only my own files.
If you’re using a very fancy installer, it might support the installation of the .NET framework from the beginning, but personally, I use the very neat and very lightweight Inno Setup. It’s free, easy to use, it supports command line operations, has a lot of options and a scripting language for you to extend your setups with, and it produces fast and very well compressed EXE setup files. I really do recommend it.
Since Inno Setup supports scripting, this guy Andrew made a very cool extension, which will automatically download and install the .NET framework to the clients computer, if it’s not already present. You can read more about it here and find the mentioned script here. I think that it’s a very elegant solution to a problem that a lot of .NET developers will face, while we still wait for the framework to be present on every computer in the world
Welcome to the blog here at net-tutorials.com. We hope to provide you with some insightful posts in the near future. My initial thoughts are to use this space for tips & tricks, news and just pretty much everything .NET related I can come up with. If you wish to contribute, please leave a comment
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