.Net Questions

1. How many languages .NET is supporting now?
When .NET was introduced it came with several languages. VB.NET, C#, COBOL and Perl, etc. The site DotNetLanguages.Net says 44 languages are supported.
2. How is .NET able to support multiple languages?
A language should comply with the Common Language Runtime standard to become a .NET language. In .NET, code is compiled to Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL for short). This is called as Managed Code. This Managed code is run in .NET environment. So after compilation to this IL the language is not a barrier. A code can call or use a function written in another language.
3. How ASP .NET different from ASP?
Scripting is separated from the HTML, Code is compiled as a DLL, these DLLs can be executed on the server.
4. What is smart navigation?
The cursor position is maintained when the page gets refreshed due to the server side validation and the page gets refreshed.
5. What is view state?
The web is stateless. But in ASP.NET, the state of a page is maintained in the page itself automatically. How? The values are encrypted and saved in hidden controls. This is done automatically by the ASP.NET.

6. How do you validate the controls in an ASP .NET page?
We have Range Validator, Email Validator.
7. Can the validation be done in the server side? Or this can be done only in the Client side?
Client side is done by default. Server side validation is also possible. We can switch off the client side and server side can be done.
8. How to manage pagination in a page?
Using pagination option in DataGrid control. We have to set the number of records for a page, then it takes care of pagination by itself.

11. Advantages of migrating to VB.NET ?
Visual Basic .NET has many new and improved language features — such as inheritance, interfaces, and overloading that make it a powerful object-oriented programming language. As a Visual Basic developer, you can now create multithreaded, scalable applications using explicit multithreading. Other new language features in Visual Basic .NET include structured exception handling, custom attributes, and common language specification (CLS) compliance.

The CLS is a set of rules that standardizes such things as data types and how objects are exposed and interoperate. Visual Basic .NET adds several features that take advantage of the CLS. Any CLS-compliant language can use the classes, objects, and components you create in Visual Basic .NET. And you, as a Visual Basic user, can access classes, components, and objects from other CLS-compliant programming languages without worrying about language-specific differences such as data types.

These are the new features to be stated briefly:
Inheritance:
Visual Basic .NET supports inheritance by allowing you to define classes that serve as the basis for derived classes. Derived classes inherit and can extend the properties and methods of the base class. They can also override inherited methods with new implementations. All classes created with Visual Basic .NET are inheritable by default. Because the forms you design are really classes, you can use inheritance to define new forms based on existing ones.
Exception Handling:
Visual Basic .NET supports structured exception handling, using an enhanced version of the Try...Catch...Finally syntax supported by other languages such as C++.

Overloading:
Overloading is the ability to define properties, methods, or procedures that have the same name but use different data types. Overloaded procedures allow you to provide as many implementations as necessary to handle different kinds of data, while giving the appearance of a single, versatile procedure.

Overriding Properties and Methods:

The Overrides keyword allows derived objects to override characteristics inherited from parent objects. Overridden members have the same arguments as the members inherited from the base class.

Constructors and Destructors:
Constructors are procedures that control initialization of new instances of a class. Conversely, destructors are methods that free system resources when a class leaves scope or is set to Nothing. Visual Basic .NET supports constructors and destructors using the Sub New and Sub Finalize procedures.
Interfaces
Interfaces describe the properties and methods of classes. The Interface statement allows you to declare interfaces, while the Implements statement lets you write code that puts the items described in the interface into practice.
Shared Members
Shared members are properties, procedures, and fields that are shared by all instances of a class. Shared data members are useful when multiple objects need to use information that is common to all. Shared class methods can be used without first creating an object from a class.
References
References allow you to use objects defined in other assemblies. In Visual Basic .NET, references point to assemblies instead of type libraries. Namespaces Name spaces prevent naming conflicts by organizing classes, interfaces, and methods into hierarchies.
Assemblies
Assemblies replace and extend the capabilities of type libraries by, describing all the required files for a particular component or application. An assembly can contain one or more namespaces.
Attributes

Attributes enable you to provide additional information about program elements. For example, you can use an attribute to specify which methods in a class should be exposed when the class is used as a XML Web service.

Multithreading:
Visual Basic .NET allows you to write applications that can perform multiple tasks independently. A task that has the potential of holding up other tasks can execute on a separate thread, a process known as multithreading. By causing complicated tasks to run on threads that are separate from your user interface, multithreading makes your applications more responsive to user input.

Advantages of VB.NET
First of all, VB.NET provides managed code execution that runs under the Common Language Runtime (CLR), resulting in robust, stable and secure applications. All features of the .NET framework are readily available in VB.NET.
VB.NET is totally object oriented. This is a major addition that VB6 and other earlier releases didn't have.
The .NET framework comes with ADO.NET, which follows the disconnected paradigm, i.e. once the required records are fetched the connection no longer exists. It also retrieves the records that are expected to be accessed in the immediate future. This enhances Scalability of the application to a great extent.
VB.NET uses XML to transfer data between the various layers in the DNA Architecture i.e. data are passed as simple text strings.
Error handling by Try-Catch-Finally block has been introduced to handle errors and exceptions as a unit, allowing appropriate action to be taken at the place the error occurred. This again credits to the maintainability of the code.
Another great feature added to VB.NET is free threading against the VB single-threaded apartment feature. In many situations developers need spawning of a new thread to run as a background process and increase the usability of the application. VB.NET allows developers to spawn threads wherever they feel like, hence giving freedom and better control on the application.
Security has become more robust in VB.NET. In addition to the role-based security in VB6, VB.NET comes with a new security model, Code Access security.

For example you can set the security to a component such that the component cannot access the database. This type of security is important because it allows building components that can be trusted to various degrees.
The CLR takes care of garbage collection i.e. the CLR releases resources as soon as an object is no more in use.

Using ActiveX Control in .Net
ActiveX control is a special type of COM component that supports a User Interface. Using ActiveX Control in your .Net Project is even easier than using COM component. They are bundled usually in .ocx files. Again a proxy assembly is made by .Net utility AxImp.exe which your application (or client) uses as if it is a .Net control or assembly.
To add a reference of ActiveX Proxy Assembly in our Project :
o Select ProjectàAdd Reference (Select Add Reference from Project Menu).
o This will show you a dialog box, select .Net tab from the top of window.
o Click Browse button on the top right of window.
o Select the dll file for your ActiveX Proxy Assembly and click OK.

o Your selected component is now shown in the ‘Selected Component’ List Box. Click OK again.

.Net only provides wrapper class or proxy assembly for COM or activeX control. In the background, it is actually delegating the tasks to the original COM, so it does not convert your COM/activeX but just imports them.
when .Net imports a component, it also imports the components that are publically referenced by that component. So, if your component, say MyDataAcsess.dll references ADODB.dll then .Net will automatically import that COM component too!
U can also import COM component through command prompt.

U can also use your .Net components in COM components.

What is Machine.config?
Machine configuration file: The machine.config file contains settings that apply to the entire computer. There is only one machine.config file on a computer. The machine.config specifies configuration options for the machine. This file contains many other XML elements. Inside this element there are a number of other elements that specify parse rules for the various User-Agents.

What is Web.config?
In classic ASP all Web site related information was stored in the metadata of IIS. This had the disadvantage that remote Web developers couldn't easily make Web-site configuration changes. With ASP.NET, these settings are moved into an XML-formatted text file (Web.config) that resides in the Web site's root directory. Through Web.config you can specify settings like authentication and authorization settings for the ASP.NET Web pages.
The Web.config file is an XML-formatted file. At the root level is there is a tag - system.web. Inside this tag you can add a number of other tags, the most common and useful one being the system.web tag, where you will specify most of the Web site configuration parameters.

What is the difference between ADO and ADO.NET?
ADO uses Recordsets and cursors to access and modify data. In addition, COM marshalling - an expensive data conversion process - is needed to transmit a Recordset. ADO.NET addresses three important needs that ADO doesn't address:
1. Providing a comprehensive disconnected data-access model, which is crucial to the Web environment.
2. Providing tight integration with XML, and
3. Providing seamless integration with the .NET Framework. From an ADO.NET implementation perspective, the Recordset object in ADO is eliminated in the .NET architecture. In its place, ADO.NET has several dedicated objects led by the DataSet object and including the DataAdapter, and DataReader objects to perform specific tasks. In addition, ADO.NET DataSets operate in disconnected state whereas the ADO RecordSet objects operated in a fully connected state.
In ADO, the in-memory representation of data is the recordset. In ADO.NET, it is the dataset. A recordset looks like a single table. If a recordset is to contain data from multiple database tables, it must use a JOIN query, which assembles the data from the various database tables into a single result table. In contrast, a dataset is a collection of one or more tables. The tables within a dataset are called data tables; specifically, they are DataTable objects. If a dataset contains data from multiple database tables, it will typically contain multiple DataTable objects. That is, each DataTable object typically corresponds to a single database table or view. In ADO you can sequentially scan the rows of the recordset using the ADO MoveNext method. In ADO.NET, rows are represented as collections, so you can loop through a table as you would through any collection, or access a particular row via primary key index. A cursor is a database element that controls record navigation, the ability to update data, and the visibility of changes made to the database by other users.

There is one significant difference between disconnected processing in ADO and ADO.NET. In ADO you communicate with the database by making calls to an OLE DB provider. In ADO.NET you communicate with the database through a data adapter (an OleDbDataAdapter, SqlDataAdapter, OdbcDataAdapter, or OracleDataAdapter object), which makes calls to an OLE DB provider or the APIs provided by the underlying data source.

What is the difference between VB and VB.NET?
Now VB.NET is object-oriented language. The .NET platform provides Common Type System to all the supported languages. This means that all the languages must support the same data types as enforced by common language runtime. This eliminates data type incompatibilities between various languages. For example on the 32-bit Windows platform, the integer data type takes 4 bytes in languages like C++ whereas in VB it takes 2 bytes. In VB6 we used the Type keyword to declare our user-defined structures. VB.NET introduces the structure keyword for the same purpose.

What is a Manifest?
An assembly manifest contains all the metadata needed to specify the assembly's version requirements and security identity. The assembly manifest can be stored in either a PE (Portable Executable) file (an .exe or .dll) with Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL) code or in a standalone PE (Portable Executable) file that contains only assembly manifest information. The first four items:

1)the assembly name, 2)version number,

3) culture, and 4)strong name information

make up the assembly's identity.

1)Assembly name: A text string specifying the assembly's name.

2)Version number: The common language runtime uses these numbers to enforce version policy.
3)Culture: Information on the culture or language the assembly supports. This information should be used only to designate an assembly as a satellite assembly containing culture- or language-specific information. (An assembly with culture information is automatically assumed to be a satellite assembly.)

4)Strong name information: The public key from the publisher if the assembly has been given a strong name.

Type reference information: Information used by the runtime to map a type reference to the file that contains its declaration and implementation.

Information on referenced assemblies: A list of other assemblies that are statically referenced by the assembly. Each reference includes the dependent assembly's name, assembly metadata (version, culture, operating system, and so on), and public key, if the assembly is strong named.