OReilly eBooks Page 136

This is your guide to building Internet applications and user interfaces with the Mozilla component framework, which is best known for the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client. Programming Firefox demonstrates how to use the XML User Interface Language (XUL) with open source tools in the framework's Cross-Platform Component (XPCOM) library to develop a variety of projects, such as commercial web applications and Firefox extensions. This book serves as both a programmer's reference and an in-depth tutorial, so not only do you get a comprehensive look at XUL's capabilities--from simple interface design to complex, multitier applications with real-time operations--but you also learn how to build a complete working application with XUL. If yo...

Why program Excel? For solving complex calculations and presenting results, Excel is amazingly complete with every imaginable feature already in place. But programming Excel isn't about adding new features as much as it's about combining existing features to solve particular problems. With a few modifications, you can transform Excel into a task-specific piece of software that will quickly and precisely serve your needs. In other words, Excel is an ideal platform for probably millions of small spreadsheet-based software solutions. The best part is, you can program Excel with no additional tools. A variant of the Visual Basic programming language, VB for Applications (VBA) is built into Excel to facilitate its use as a platform. With VBA, you can crea...

Embedded software is in almost every electronic device designed today. There is software hidden away inside our watches, microwaves, VCRs, cellular telephones, and pagers; the military uses embedded software to guide smart missiles and detect enemy aircraft; communications satellites, space probes, and modern medicine would be nearly impossible without it. Of course, someone has to write all that software, and there are thousands of computer scientists, electrical engineers, and other professionals who actually do. Each embedded system is unique and highly customized to the application at hand. As a result, embedded systems programming is a widely varying field that can take years to master. However, if you have some programming experience and are fa...

For those of you who develop standalone Windows applications for PCs and other devices, Microsoft's .NET Windows Forms provide a much better way to get it done. This new technology gives you more power and flexibility for a fraction of the effort compared to classic Win32 development, with a streamlined programming model that deals automatically with many tedious details that once plagued developers.As with most things .NET, the only hitch is the learning curve. But that's where acclaimed author Jesse Liberty makes the difference with Programming .NET Windows Applications. With this tutorial, you will explore all aspects of using .NET Windows Forms class libraries and the associated programming tools in Visual Studio .NET, enabling you to build appli...

The introduction of the Microsoft .NET framework not only brings developers a powerful, cohesive toolset for the development of new Windows and Web applications -- it also replaces COM as the technology of choice for building components on Windows platforms. Components are the fundamental building blocks of .NET applications; they can both simplify and add flexibility to complex applications. Applied properly, component-oriented programming enable reuse, allow for long-term maintenance, application extensibility and scalability.Component technology is nothing new, but the .NET Framework offers developers a new way to develop binary components rapidly, without the hurdles that many COM developers have had to deal with prior to .NET. While retaining al...