Book Review: ‘Programming Microsoft Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory’ by David S Platt (Microsoft Press)

I was looking forward to this book being published as there really isn’t very much documentation available for either the Composite UI Application Block or the Smart Client Software Factory. Microsoft’s own documentation is quite weak, and to use these technologies you find yourself repeatedly referring to the code itself or community blogs and websites. …

A Beginner’s Guide to calling a .NET Framework Library from Access

Introduction In an earlier blog article I described how to call a .NET Framework Library from Excel. I have subsequently received several requests for a similar article dealing with calling .NET from Microsoft Access. This article addresses those requests. In fact the process and issues are almost identical, which means the two articles overlap heavily. …

Dependency Injection and the Composite Application Block (Introduction to CAB/SCSF Part 5)

Introduction In part 1 of this series of articles I described a simple CAB application. This had three Windows Application C# projects with no references to each other. In spite of this, with some very simple code we could get all three to launch their individual screens. That very simple application didn’t have the projects …

Random Numbers Problem

Another problem doing the rounds relates to random numbers. Unlike my previous post, this one might make a (difficult) interview question: Given a function that generates a integer random number between 1 and 5, write another function that generates an integer random number between 1 and 7. Obviously you are intended to use the first …

An Aside on Inversion of Control, Dependency Inversion and Dependency Injection (Introduction to CAB/SCSF Part 4)

Introduction In part 3 of this series of articles I discussed dependency injection in general terms. To understand what the CAB is doing for you it’s important to have an understanding of dependency injection, and I will be talking more about it in part 5. This short article is something of an aside however, and …

Some Thoughts on SOA and Application Design using the CAB/SCSF

Introduction Working with Microsoft’s composite application block framework (CAB) has made me think about application design in a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) environment. This article is a few thoughts on how we might use the CAB to solve some of the problems associated with creating composite user interfaces in such a service oriented environment. Current …