Chapter 14: Adding Value to Your Interface

Learning to Exploit the .NET Framework Controls and Web Services

Have you ever developed an application that satisfied your end user 's business requirements and at the same time was devoid of " bells and whistles"? Perhaps your end user was less than subtle when he or she criticized your application and showed dissatisfaction for the completed product. There you were, explaining the beauties of the under-the-hood .NET technology you used to build the application. Meanwhile, your end user was more concerned about why you had not used a flashy multicolored drop-down selection box instead of a boring free-form text box for data entry.

As you know, the "bells and whistles," the "icing on the cake," and the "nice-to-haves" are sometimes mistakenly regarded as being "not important" by developers and are overlooked. Obviously, the so-called extras should never take precedence over the actual business needs (including performance, reliability, and maintainability). Nevertheless, it is often these "extras" that will set your application apart from an otherwise dry, no-frills application. The challenge then is to seek out those extras that truly represent "value-added" features for your end user.

In this chapter, I discuss various ways that you can use the .NET Framework tools available to you to add value to your Windows and ASP.NET applications. This chapter's discussion will take you from the System.Windows.Forms.Control class (for Windows Forms) to the System.Web.UI.Control class (for Web Forms). In each case, you will drill down a bit beyond the respective Form and Page classes. The last portion of the chapter is devoted to XML Web services. There I present some of the most recent prospects and developments surrounding XML Web services.

Note  

Although this chapter is structured into three sections (i.e., a Windows applications section, an ASP.NET applications section, and an XML Web services section), please keep in mind that there is some overlap between the sections. For example, the first section emphasizes the importance of including design consideration for end-user communication. To illustrate the point, I have chosen to use Windows applications. Nevertheless, this need for effective end-user communication also exists in ASP.NET applications. The same could be said for the second and third sections of this chapter, as several of the points mentioned there (using ASP.NET) could loosely apply to Windows applications. I felt that the uniqueness in each platform's implementation (separate namespaces and so forth) justified the segregation into respective sections. Perhaps you will agree.