Hilton Giesenow

Prior to .NET, DCOM existed as Microsoft's solution to remote object access. This technology leveraged the successful COM architecture to provide an infrastructure for remote communication. However, DCOM suffered from a variety of drawbacks and difficulties, and it ultimately led to Microsoft's spirited drive to develop Web services and their associated standards. Unfortunately, in the pre-.NET age even these could be cumbersome and time consuming to develop, deploy, and access. The Remoting framework that .NET has brought (of which Web services can technically be seen as a subset, but will hereafter be dealt with separately) represents a tremendous leap forward in terms of customizability, availability, development speed, and ease of use for distributed communication. XML Web Services and .NET Remoting are able to provide a solution to most of what one could ask of... (more)

Whodunit?

In many business systems, especially those in an enterprise context, it is at the very least good practice to implement some sort of audit trail. We need to keep track of who has performed what operations and when they occurred. In addition, we may require information not only on the underlying database table affected, but also on the individual field changes themselves. This article will look at implementing an audit table in an SQL Server database that automatically tracks the changes made to a dataset when its updates are sent back to the data store. Trigger Happy Triggers ar... (more)